A Comparative Study Of The Teacher Talks Between Novice And Expert Teachers In The College EFL Classroom

Teacher talk is always considered a focus which attracts much attention from many linguists and teachersin the field of second language acquisition both home and abroad. The current study aims at exploring thefeatures of college English classroom teacher talk among the novice teachers and expert teachers from theperspective of teacher's professional development with the view of giving some pedagogical suggestions tocollege English teachers in their language teaching and professional development. Specifically, this studyinvestigates the features of college English classroom teacher talk among two types of teachers from fourresearch dimensions, namely the amount of teacher talk, teacher's questioning manners, teacher'smodification manners and teacher's feedbacks on the basis of theoretical foundations of Krashen'sComprehensible Input Hypothesis, Long's Interaction Hypothesis and Swain's Comprehensible OutputHypothesis.Within the framework of qualitative research, this study is a comparative case study on college Englishclassroom teacher talk among different types of teachers, in which video recording and questionnaire areemployed to illustrate the variations of teacher talk. Five college English teachers and two hundred studentsfrom two key universities in Lanzhou participated in this study. The major findings from this study arepresented as follows:In terms of the amount of teacher talk, it is found that teacher talking time is prominent over the studentstalking time on the whole. It is also found that the teacher talking time of the novice teachers is shorter thanthat of the expert 1 and 2 while longer than that of the expert 3. Another important finding is that in theclasses where more interactive activities are held, teachers'talking time is much shorter than the classeswith few interactive activities.As to teacher's questioning, it is found that, of the two types of questions investigated in the study, thedisplay questions are more frequently addressed than the referential ones in the classes of both the noviceteachers and expert teachers. Even so, the novice teachers use more referential questions than the expertteachers 1 and 2 but less than the expert 3. In addition, in the classes with more interactive activities, theteachers raised more referential questions.In light of teacher's modification manners in this study, one major finding was that, in the classes of boththe expert teachers and the novice teachers, comprehension check is most frequently adopted andconfirmation check is less used while clarification request the least. Another finding is the distinction in themodification manners between the two groups of teachers: the novice teachers tend to use more confirmation checks and less comprehension checks than the expert teacher 1 and 2 but less confirmationchecks and more comprehension checks than the expert 3. In addition, in the classes where more interactiveactivities are held, more confirmation checks and clarification requests are raised by the teacher.Finally, as for the teacher's feedback manners, on one hand, in the investigation of the positive feedbackmanners, it is concluded that"repetition followed by praises"is the most preferred feedback to students byall the teachers while"praises followed by comments"is less preferred and"no praise"the least. Thedistinction between the novice teachers and expert teachers in this aspect is the novice teachers use more"praises followed by comments"as feedback to students than the expert teacher 1and 2 but less than theexpert 3; the novices use less"repetition followed by praises"than the expert 1 and 2 but more than theexpert 3, though the difference is not so significant. On the other hand, when investigating the teachers'negative feedback manners, it is found that both types of teachers preferred to"provide with students a clueand expect them to complete the rest"and"remind students of the error by repetition and induceself-repair". As to the difference between the two types of teachers in the error treatment, it is revealed thatthe novice teachers are more frequent in"reminding the students of the errors by repetition and inducingself-repair"while the expert teachers are more likely to"provide with the students a clue and expect themto complete the rest". On a whole, according to the results of the questionnaire, most students prefer theirteachers'positive feedback manners rather than negative ones.Despite its implications and suggestions to the further studies in the relevant domain, this study has islimitations as well due to the lack of depth interview with the subjects investigated, difficulties encounteredin the process of investigation and the limited competence of the researcher. Still, this study initiates anempirical investigation on college English classroom teacher talk from the perspective of teacher'sprofessional development in Gansu province. Therefore, it is expected that the findings of this study mayshed light on the further studies of teacher classroom talk and on the language teachers'professionaldevelopment in Gansu.