On The Features Of Pre-service Teacher Talk

Teacher talk plays an essential role in the classrooms of second language acquisition: on the one hand, it is the instrument for the English teachers to organize class activities and implement the teaching plans; on the other hand, it is the important source for the students to acquire the second language input. Therefore, the quantity and quality of teacher talk influence and even decide whether the teaching is successful or not.Pre-service teachers who teach English are a special group of English users. On the one hand, they are advanced English learners who have passed the Grade 8 of TEM (Test for English major). On the other hand, they are novice English teachers who have no teaching experience although they have learned lots of teaching theories. Students in vocational college are also a special group of English learners. Most of them do not master the basic knowledge of English which they should get in senior high school and they still face the challenge of taking the exam of CET (College English Test), which is quite difficult to pass for them.What are the features of their teacher talk when the pre-service teachers give lessons in English classrooms of vocational college? How about their interaction effects with their students? The author collected recorded materials from six pre-service teachers' classrooms. All these six pre-service teachers were postgraduates majoring in English teaching from Foreign Language Department, Hua Zhong Normal University and they all had their internship in vocational college. This study described the features and effects of pre-service teacher talk during their internship in EFL classrooms. The purpose of this study is to find out the advantages and disadvantages of pre-service teacher talk and then provide some suggestions to solve the problems.By comparison with the statistics of Zhao Yongmei's study and Zhou Xing and Zhou Yun's study, whose research subjects are experienced teachers, this study analyzed the features of pre-service teacher talk from the following four aspects:the amount of pre-service teacher talk; the amount of students'pushed output, the amount of interactional modifications and the usage of the three categories of interactional modifications. The results showed that:1, Pre-service teacher talk took much of the class time, though it's amount is less than experienced teachers'; 2, Almost all the output of students are pushed output and there is more pushed output in experienced teachers" classes; 3, Pre-service teachers use less interactional modifications than experienced teachers do; 4, All the three kinds of interactional modifications are used by the pre-serviced teachers and both the pre-service English teachers and the experienced English teachers use more comprehension checks than confirmation requests in their classes.The research results are of certain significance in the following two aspects. On the one hand, the results can be a guideline to English teaching. Pre-service teachers should pay more attention to the interaction between teachers and students and make attempts to create sound cognitive and emotive settings, which will benefit the second language acquisition. On the other hand, it can also provide some suggestions for the education of English teachers in the normal universities. Theoretical learning should be combined with teaching practice. Therefore, it will be helpful for the pre-service teachers if the normal universities extend pre-service teachers'internship.