Research On Teacher Talk In College English Classrooms

Since the 1970s, some western scholars have devoted themselves to the research of teacher talk, the important manifestation of teacher behavior. Teachers play a leading role in language teaching, and teacher talk is the most important, direct means to implement teaching. The importance of teacher talk is embodied not only in the classroom organization but also in the student's language learning process, and its quantity and quality will affect or even determine the success of classroom teaching.With the reform of college English in China, the importance of teacher talk has become increasingly prominent, but the domestic empirical research on teacher talk in college English classrooms has relatively lagged behind. The author of this dissertation wants to explore the effective use of teacher talk in real English classrooms from the empirical perspective so as to provide some references to college English teaching.This paper consists of six parts. The first chapter describes the present condition of college English teaching and the purpose and significance of the study. The second chapter states the concepts, characteristics and functions of teacher talk while it also reviews the related researches on teacher talk at home and abroad. The third chapter lists the theoretical support of this study: Krashen's Input Hypothesis and Affective Filter Hypothesis, Bandura's Self-efficacy Theory and Samovar and others'nonverbal behavior theory. The fourth chapter presents the research purpose and questions, and the author selects 20 teachers'classroom videos of 20 universities in different provinces and takes data statistics on the verbal behavior and nonverbal behavior of teacher talk by means of observing, word recording and statistics processing. Based on the questionnaire of Zhou Xing and Zhou Yun (2002), the author has made some adaption, classification and addition and conducted investigation among 161 students majoring Architectural Art, Computer Science and Machinery of Xihua University. The questionnaire is mainly used to investigate the students'requirements for teacher talk in the aspects of amount, speed, waiting time, question, feedback, facial expression, eye contact and position. According to the videos, the author finds some points in common on teacher talk which is consistent with those of student questionnaire. The fifth chapter presents the principles of choosing teacher talk and puts forward several suggestions for improving college English teaching based on the analyzed data. The sixth chapter shows that since a limited number of teacher videos are applied and the investigated students are from the same university, the data analysis results can not be completely accurate. What's more, since the extensive use of multimedia has changed the traditional classrooms, the author notes that how to flexibly use multimedia to improve teacher talk to reach better teaching results will become an inevitable research trend.