An Analysis Of Teacher Talk Of College English From The Perspective Of Function

Foreign language teaching is unique in that language is not only the means of class organization and control, but also the teaching content. Based on this point, three functions of College English teacher talk are put forward in this paper: knowledge-imparting function, interpersonal function and the function of building a good language environment.The knowledge-imparting function and the interpersonal function are the two functions of general teacher talk, but they have particular requirements for language teachers. In the chapter on the knowledge-imparting function, an analysis is made of the linguistic modification of teacher talk in English, and some suggestions on these modifications are also provided. Then the view of avoiding the overuse of Chinese is presented.In the chapter on the interpersonal function, emphasis is put on the importance of the cooperation between a teacher and his students. Through the analysis of the structure of each discourse unit, the author proposes an objective criterion for judging cooperation: making a structural analysis of each discourse unit. However, further research should be made on the variety of discourse structure and the scope of its application.Building a good language environment is an important means to improve the effect of teaching. Analyses are made of language input, language output and interaction. A conclusion is drawn that teacher talk should provide enough comprehensive input and adequate opportunities for students to utter comprehensible output in effective ways, such as through meaning-negotiation.To make the conclusions and suggestions more practical, experiences from teachers are used for reference. The audio recording of a randomly chosen College English class is used as an example in this paper, and through a process of"theory─practice─comment,"an analysis is made of her application of the three functions. The data of the questionnaire obtained from the students in that class are used as one of the criteria in evaluation in order to make the conclusion objective.