A Case Study Of Grammatical Errors In Chinese University English Teacher Speech

China pays great attention to English education. English is an important compulsory course in elementary education, secondary education and tertiary education. To Chinese students, the most common way to learn English is studying in classrooms. Thus, English teachers'classroom speech is a crucial language input to Chinese English learners. It reflects, to a certain degree, the basic professional quality of teachers, as well as their teaching ideas and professional development. In addition, teacher speech shall be a qualified target language that is worth being studied and followed by students. This paper is dedicated to the research of grammatical errors in classroom speech made by English teachers of Chinese universities. Though they are slips of the tongue, these errors indicate cognitive problems of Chinese English learners.The data from this paper come from 30 clips of online national-level quality classes and 15 regular classes. The author transferred the teacher speech in these 45 clips of videos or recordings into transcripts. The author then linguistically judged and classified grammatical errors, and did research on the internal relations among the quantity, types and different variants (these teachers'career lengths, professional titles, class types, and the types and locations of their colleges), based on Corder's procedures of error analysis. Contrastive analysis is adopted to analyse the causes of these errors.The research has shown that:1. Plenty of grammatical errors occur in English teachers'classroom speech in Chinese university. Some of which occur repeatedly, thus affect students'cognition to the target language.2. These grammatical errors mainly include four categories: verb tense, article, singular and plural forms of countable nouns, and word order. Some of these errors are interlingual errors, whose reoccurrence is mainly due to the differences between the native and the target languages. The negative transfer of mother tongue occurs. Some other errors are intralingual errors, which are expressed through the incomplete application of rules, overgeneralisation, and over-simplification.3. In regard to quantity of errors, teachers from foreign language colleges make the least grammatical errors in classroom talk, followed by normal universities, while teachers from comprehensive universities make the most grammatical errors. In regard to locations, teachers from East China make fewer errors, while their counterparts in West China make more errors. As for the teaching experiences, errors from teacher speech reduce along with the increase of teachers'career lengths. In regard to class types, teachers from regular classes make more errors than those who from online national-level quality classes and teachers in College English courses make more errors than teachers in English major courses.The findings of this research are not only capable of providing practical reference for the English teaching in Chinese universities, but also helping teachers to analyse their own classroom speech, and urging them to self-examination, thus improving the language capabilities of English teachers.