Analysis Of Teacher Talk In Light Of Relevance Theory

Teacher talk is viewed as one of the decisive factors of success or failure in classroom teaching, and as a result, more and more researchers and teachers have paid their attention to teacher talk. It has been one of the most important and productive areas of research in SLA. Early studies of teacher talk focused on the phonological and syntactic features of teacher speech and teacher questions. Based on the basic principles of Relevance Theory, the present thesis has focused on the teacher-student interaction in form of question-answer in language classrooms and tried to analyze teacher talk under the framework of Relevance Theory to prove that Relevance Theory is able to provide an explanation for teacher talk in teacher-student interaction. Through the analysis, we have found that teacher-student interaction, from a cognitive pragmatic point of view, is by nature a process of searching for optimal relevance and Ostensive-Inferential communication between teacher and students. In addition, the current thesis has discussed some factors that affect successful teacher-student interaction,such as mutual manifestness, cognitive environments, contextual effect, processing effort and relevance in teacher-student interaction. Based on the analysis, this thesis proposes some pedagogical implications for successful teacher talk and teacher-student interaction in EFL context.