Research On Metalanguage Of Teacher Talk In College English Classroom

Teacher Talk (TT) plays a crucial role in assuring a successful teaching process in foreign language study, also serves as a bridge for the communication between the teacher and the learners. Recent years, metalanguage as an ingredient in TT has drawn attention of the researchers. This study investigated the teaching talk of six college English teachers in Huazhong Universtiy of Science and Technology. Their students are from different English levels L1, L2, L3. About 540 minutes class has been recorded for further analysis, 90minutes for each teacher. Based on the recording, the analysis is carried out from the following aspects.1) Teacher Talking Time; 2) Questions raised in classroom;3) language used for explanation in classroom; 4) the use of mother tongue, aiming at investigating different performance of teachers'language when they face students of different English proficiency.It was found that six teachers in charge of students of different efficiency behave in different ways by the employment of metalanguage in classroom. Teachers in charge of higher English proficiency students spend less time talking in classroom, raise more referential questions, use more advanced words and less mother tongue in classroom. While teacher in charge of lower English proficiency students take measures to ensure smooth communication with the students.Based on the analysis of the data, we can get the following conclusions: although teachers in charge of students from different levels share some similar language strategies in classroom, they adjust their language in accordance with the English efficiency of their students. This kind of adjustment can guarantee an effective teaching activity to reach the expected teaching target.