An Analysis Of The Input Features Of Teacher Talk In EFL Student-teaching Classrooms

Input, that is, access to the target language data, plays a crucial role in learning a second language. For most English language learners in China, English spoken by their classroom teachers is the main source of target language input. The quantity and quality of teacher talk in English is one of the decisive factors contributing to learners' oral, even overall development of English. Within the classroom research paradigm, teacher talk is usually examined from two perspectives: input and interaction. The input perspective is concerned with how much the linguistic data learners are exposed to through teacher talk and how good the quality is, while the interactional perspective investigates how teacher talk engages learners in two-way communications. Recent research literature is found to be predominately focused on the later and neglecting the former, which is unjustifiable. Moreover, nearly all researches look at the talk of in-service EFL teachers, with few on that of EFL pre-service teachers or student-teachers, who are a special and therefore interesting category of English users, being both advanced learners and novice teachers of English. For such lacks of study, the present research sets out to describe the input features of teacher talk in EFL student-teaching classrooms.For the convenience of analysis, the input features of teacher talk are described in terms of seven areas, namely, amount of teacher talk, choice of language, functional distribution, rate of speech, variety of vocabulary, syntactic features and self-repetition as a modification of discourse.By classroom observation and audio-recording, it is found that on the whole, the student-teachers investigated mainly use English to teach, and can therefore provide the students with enough target language input. As a complement of English, Chinese is resorted to now and then to save time and to ensure understanding of the students; rate of speech appears to be slower; vocabulary variety, measured by type-token ratio, is relatively small, with more saliency to the target words; as for syntactic features, student-teachers tend to use shorter utterances, fewer subordinate clauses, more verbs marked for the simple present tense and more declaratives than interrogatives and...