An Analysis Of The Features Of Teacher Talk Between Expert Teachers And Novice Teachers From The Interactional Perspective

Teacher talk is the language teachers use to organize and manage the L2/FL classrooms and implement their teaching plans (Nunan,1991).A great number of scholars (e.g. Chaudron,1983; Gaise,1977,1979; Henzl,1979; Long,1981,1983) have made a lot of empirical research on it. Focus of studies has been on the features of teacher talk for language input purpose. The results from these studies show that teacher talk and classroom interaction are closely related to learners'target language acquisition process.The relevant studies abroad on teacher talk mainly focus on the amount and type of teacher talk, its effect on language comprehension, teacher questions, teacher feedback and error correction. Most studies and surveys carried out at home in recent years have laid more emphasis in the quantity of teacher talk, input features, types of questions and teacher feedback, etc. Few articles systematically did a research on the interactional features of teacher talk in the Chinese context. (e..g Zhao Xiaohong,1998; Wang Yinquan, 1999; Zhou & Zhou,2002), and all the studies were conducted in colleges or universities instead of in secondary schools. Moreover, nearly all researches study the talk of expert EFL teachers, with few on that of EFL novice teachers. For such lack of study, the present study made a descriptive investigation on the two aspects to investigate the features of teacher talk and classroom interaction in the EFL classroom of senior high school, to say it in detail, teacher talk is described in terms of four areas, namely, turn-taking, teachers' question, modification of teachers talk and teachers'feedback。Based on the objectives mentioned above and within the framework of qualitative research, the discourse analysis, video recording method as well as one coding scheme is employed along with an empirical quantitative analysis to demonstrate the variations of teacher talk among the six participants from one key high school in the city of Hohhot city in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, also on the basis of theoretical foundations of Swain's Output Hypothesis, Long's Interaction Hypothesis, all the statistics are taken from the transcriptions of the video recordings of six classes presented by the participants involved in the study. After encoding and analyzing the transcriptions, some major findings are demonstrated as follows:(1) Concerning turn-taking, the turns of the novice teachers are significantly more than the turn of the expert teachers o(2) In regard to questioning types, the expert teachers, raise exceedingly more referential question than display question in language instruction.(3) In response to interactional modification, confirmation checks are more frequent employed than comprehension checks and clarification requests in the expert teachers'classroom. On the other hand, the novice teachers use more comprehension checks than the expert teacher.(4) In terms of teachers'feedback, discourse feedback is employed more than evaluation feedback in the classrooms of the expert teachers. While the novice teachers use evaluation feedback more.In summary, the purpose of the present study is to help English teachers to know the present situation of teacher talk in senior high school and to make foreign language teaching circles pay more attention to the implementation of the interaction in senior high school English classes. At the same time, the present study can make foreign teachers know more about the real situation of interaction in the English classroom, and it also has some implication to foreign language teaching and the training of English teachers.