An Investigation And Analysis On Teacher Talk In EFL Classroom Context

Since the mid 1990s, "teacher research" has been advocated by many western researchers (TESOL Journal, 1994 /4). This trend demonstrates the fact that the role teachers play in implementing teaching plans and in researching on teaching processes is gaining an increasing recognition. Then it is necessary for us to strengthen the researches into teachers' classroom behaviors. Teacher talk, one of the crucial parts of teacher behaviors, is the language which teachers use to organize and manage the L2/FL classrooms and implement their teaching plans (Nunan, 1991). It is one of the major ways that teachers convey information to learners, and is also one of the primary means of controlling learner behavior. As Nunan (1991) points out: "Teacher talk is of crucial importance, not only for the organisation of the classroom but also for the processes of acquisition. It is important for the organization and management of the classroom because it is through language that teachers either succeed or fait to implement their teaching plans. In terms of acquisition, teacher talk is important because it is probably the major source of comprehensible target language input the learner is likely to receive." The amount and type of teacher talk is even regarded as a decisive factor of success or failure in classroom teaching (Hakansson, 1986). A lot of constructive researches have been conducted on the L2/FL classrooms for the past 20 years. The results obtained from these researches show that learner's successful target language output is correlated significantly to teacher talk and classroom interaction. Ellis (1990) also thinks that teachers have the ultimateresponsibility for managing classroom interaction.However, the traditional analyses tended to put focus on the features of teacher talk only for language input purpose, namely, instructional purpose. The focus was on tempo of speech, intonation, adjustments on the level of vocabulary, syntactic structure and text (Chaudron, 1988). Furthermore, what these researches investigated were teacher-fronted classrooms. For example, Pica & Long's (1986) study reveals that most of the teachers' questions are "display" rather than "referential" and that significantly more comprehension checks are used than confirmation checks and clarification requests. Based on these findings they suggest that ''the SL classroom offers very little opportunity to the learners to communicate in the target language or to hear it used for communicative purposes by others", and thus fails make learners negotiate meaning and produce more comprehensible output to facilitate L2 acquisition. Meantime, a bulk of other researches in this field also provide illuminating and insightful ideas concerning the functions of teacher talk. Brock's study (1986) reveals that referential questions may function to increase learners' target language output and therefore facilitate their target language acquisition. Ellis (1990) contends that clarification requests and confirmation checks are used to deal with communication problems in naturalistic setting. Teachers may leave much room for learners to do negotiation of meaning in this way. Nunan (199) concludes that positive feedback is much more effective than negative feedback in changing pupil behavior, and thus would result in increasing motivation of learning on the part of the learners.Although there has been an increasing amount of studies on classroom teacher talk in western countries, little has been conducted in China to examine the features of teacher talk and classroom interaction in the Chinese context. There exists a shortage of empirical studies concerning the following aspects of teacher talk: the amount and type of teacher talk, frequency and types of teacher questions, frequency of interactional modifications. teachers' feedback to learner's performance and ways of error treatment. Therefore, the following respects deserve a further study: what are the characteristics of teacher talk in EFL classrooms in the Chinese context? What aspects of these cha...