A Research On Teacher Talk In Reform-Oriented College English Classroom

Teacher talk is of crucial importance, not only for the organization of the classroom but also for the processes of acquisition. It is the instrument for the teacher to implement the teaching plan and the major source of comprehensible target language input the learner is likely to receive in the foreign language classroom teaching. The amount and quality of teacher talk has a great effect on and is even a decisive factor of success or failure of classroom teaching. Since the 1970s, a great number of scholars have made a lot of empirical researches on it. However, only a few have been conducted to examine the features of teacher talk in Chinese context Especially, there is little research that empirically explores a new "reform-oriented" teaching mode which is a transition from "teacher-oriented" to "student-oriented" in Chinese College English classroom. Therefore, it is significant to have a full and systematic research on teacher talk in reform-oriented College English classroom.In this paper the author has reported a study on teacher talk with one objective: to find what the characteristics of current teacher talk in reform-oriented College English classroom are. The methods adopted in this study include: classroom observation, audio-recording, interview and questionnaire. First, the author chooses six college English teachers from Dalian Fisheries University (DFU) as the participants, makes observations of the classroom activities and audio-records the classroom discourse as a whole. All the audio-recordings are transcribed into written materials after class. To further find out reasons accounting for teachers' practice and how teachers perceive teacher talk, the author has done an interview with the 6 teachers collectively. In addition, a questionnaire based on that of Zhou & Zhou's (2002) is used for students to gain their feedback to their teachers' teacher talk. Altogether 300 students from 6 classes in DFU respond to the questionnaire. Then the data is classified and analyzed in the statistic way in mainly 5 aspects: amount of teacher talk, use of native language, teachers' questions, interactional modification and teacher feedback.The findings show that in this new reform-oriented teaching mode, although there still exists certain kinds of problems in teacher talk, the teachers' familiarity to the new mode and their professional proficiency need improving, this new teaching mode has gained the acceptance of the learners, and it can provide comparatively more opportunities for the learners to have two-way communication and meaningful negotiation. If the new teaching mode is further developed, it will be sure to strengthen the effects of College English teaching to a large extent and contribute a lot to the cultivation of the learners' comprehensive...