Study On Teacher-Child Speech Interaction In English Immersion Classroom Teaching

At present the world is a global one and China is a increasinglydeveloping country. With the world gtobatized and China open to the world, ComradeDeng Xiaoping used to take a broad and long view, saying, "Our education should facethe world, face the future and face modernization."The "Three Faces" in education means that we should enable a great number ofmodern people who can finally adapt themselves to the development of society. One ofthe necessary conditions for modern people to study, work and develop in society is tomaster "bilingual languages" or "multiple languages". As a result, Second Languageeducation has never been valued than ever before during the reform of world education.China' s former Vice Prime Minister Li Lanqing once pointed out emphatically,"In open conditions, foreign languages are especially important…. Studies should bedone on how to popularize English education with the most scientific and effectivemethods, and on how to improve and create English teaching methods which are fit forChinese character." (From the first section of Paper of Chinese Education, October 28th,1994)In June,1997, "the Conference on Bilingual Language Teaching" was held by theEducation Cooperation Project between China and Canada in Xi'an, during which theResearch Group of English Immersion was set up after a great deal of commonarguments and repeated discussion by many researchers in several fields from manyuniversities both in China and Canada. Using the successful experience from FrenchImmersion in Canada, 8 representative kindergartens in Xi'an started the experimentalteaching study on English Immersion for preschool children in China inSeptember, 1997. Since then, this project has lasted 10 years and has developed fromkindergartens to primary schools and middle schools in many big cities like Guangzhou,Shenzhen, Shanghai, Beijing, etc. in China. As a graduate, I myself had the great honor to participate in the teaching study onEnglish Immersion for preschool children at the beginning of my study in ShaanxiNormal University. With my tutor' s leading, I got to know that this project is aChina-nativized English teaching model for children. From then on, I began to learn alot about Immersion, tried to understand it and in the end got the itch to do some studyrelative to English Immersion, so as to try my best to do something significant for thisgreat project.As a creative study project, it mainly focuses on building up the theoretic basis,summarizing the characters of the English Immersion, fostering the teachers of EnglishImmersion, constructing synthesized immerging English course and testing the teachingefficiency of English Immersion and so on. So far, there has only been direction ontheory. Little practical study has been done on teaching and learning in the classroomteaching, such as the interaction between teachers and children, language input andoutput, etc. Thus, when making the decision of the study content, I was determined tofocus on the Study on Teacher-Child Speech Interaction in English ImmersionClassroom Teaching as my title, hoping to find out something in English Immersionclassroom teaching from the perspective in language input and output.The quantitative and qualitative methodologies were both used in this thesis, andby presently observing of English Immersion classroom teaching and video taperecording, a lot of information about teacher-child speech interaction was collected. Theinternational Child Language Data Exchange System, known as CHILDES, wasadopted to analyze the collected information qualitatively and quantitatively. In the end,some relative teaching suggestions were given.Some worthy practical results from the perspective in linguistics and educationcame out as follows.1. Effective teacher-child speech interaction in English Immersion classroomteaching results in highly thick language output and input. Rich teaching content andabundant speech are complementary to each other. The English vocabulary in theteacher-child speech interaction is almost as big as that of senior grades of primaryschools.2. There are plenty of complete sentences appearing in the teacher-child speechinteraction during the English Immersion teaching activities. Children can speakEnglish daringly. They begin to use English to express what they know and how they feel about something. And sometimes they can even create new sentences themselves,so English Immersion is a meaningful way of second language learning.3. The analysis of the teacher and children's speech tendency in the EnglishImmersion teaching activities shows that one third of the teacher's speech is on theteaching theme they are talking about and over half of the children's speech is on theteaching theme, too, which show that the second language learning in EnglishImmersion teaching is well integrated with children's cognition and organically socialcommunication.4. Teacher's language input greatly influences children's output in EnglishImmersion classroom activities and the effective usage of teaching tactics helps toimprove the speech teacher-child interaction, children's second language learning andthe development of their second language.