An Analysis Of Teacher Talk In Intensive Reading Class Of College English

With the deepening of the reform of foreign language teaching in China, the importance of communicative language teaching approach has been recognized by language teachers and researchers. They realize that students will be trained to have communicative competence as well as linguistic competence. The learners'successful outcomes may depend on the type of language used by the teacher and the type of interactions occurring in the classroom. So,'teacher talk'has come into focus due to its vital role in SLT (second language teaching).This thesis reviews the theories of teacher talk firstly from the structure of teacher talk, which begins from the well-known I-R-F exchanges (Sinclair and Coulthard 1975) between the teachers and the students to its varieties appeared in the teaching practice. Secondly, a language lesson is different from a subject lesson for the language is not only the medium of teaching, but also the target. According to this feature, many researchers divide the teacher talk into'instructional language'and'natural language'. The author gives some discussion on these divisions and gets some implication for language teaching. Finally, the author analyzes the teacher talk from the quantity and quality of teacher talk, including the teacher talking time, the types of questions teachers raise towards their students, the way they respond to students'contribution, the use of L1 in their talk, etc.Enlightened by the theories of teacher talk analysis and based on the context of college FLT in china, the author designs questionnaires focus on the teacher talk in the intensive reading class of college English. The data are collected through the recording of five classes. In order to ensure the reliability, the author chooses two cities, Shanghai and Nan tong as the target places.Research findings indicate that most college English teachers now realize that they should minimize TTT and achieve some good effects but fail to pay sufficient attention to the quality of teacher talk. Based on the results of the study and the relevant research findings in the field, the author has also made some suggestions in on how to improve teacher talk.