An Analysis Of College English Classroom Discourse

In order to adapt education to the rapidly changing society and to meet the challenges brought about by the information age and a knowledge-based economy, the Chinese government has initiated an unprecedented education reform to update its education policy as well as the teaching practices in education institutions at various levels. It has been stipulated in the current College English Curriculum Requiremets issued by the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China in 2004 that the primary objectives of the contemporary College English teaching reform is to vitalize the traditional teacher-dominated didactic practice with a new mode featured with learner-centeredness which puts more emphasis on developing students'autonomous learning ability and improving their language communicative competence. However, how and to what degree this notion is carried out in College English classroom remains a topic quite at issue. For, investigations, especially field investigations in this regard are far from enough to produce convincing results and conclusions.Classroom discourse analysis provides language teachers and methodologists with a profound comprehension of teaching and learning, the teaching activities and interactions between the teacher and students. By analyzing the classroom discourse samples collected from College English classrooms in Guangxi Normal University (GXNU hereinafter), this paper attempts to reveal the merits and demerits of each of them from the perspectives of discourse structure, the amount of teacher and student talk, the distribution of turn-taking, the frequency of display questions and referential questions used by the teacher,whereby some tentative implications and strategies are put forward at the end of the paper.This thesis is composed of five parts:Chapter one introduces the necessity and significance to explore College English classroom discourse.Chapter two evaluates the accomplishments and imperfections so far achieved at home and abroad in classroom discourse analysis, upon which the present investigation is theoretically based. Chapter three specifies the issues to be explored in the investigation, the approaches to collect the data and the ways to transcribe them.Chapter four presents the research findings and the attempted discussions. The results diagnosed from this project are as follows: (1) The amount of teacher talk far exceeds that of the students. (2) IRF structure dominates the classroom discourses. (3) The teacher's turn-length is much longer than that of the students'; and a turn-taking, in most cases, is realized by the teacher's nominating a student to talk rather than a student volunteers to present him- or herself. (4) The teacher uses display questions more frequently than the referential questions to organize and control the proceeding of the whole class. The diagnosed results are convincing enough to evaluate that teachers are still the centre of the classroom teaching surveyed in this project, and their teaching modes are yet to be amended as required by the Ministry of Education.Chapter five offers some tentative suggestions upon the implications from the data collected: A non-major College English teacher is advised to: activate his or her classroom by means of commissioning the students to drill and practice as much as possible; help the students acquire the necessary ways to negotiate meanings and participate in or even control the proceeding of the class through referential questions to facilitate the interactions between him- or herself and the students; and finally, but most importantly, indoctrinate the students with the strategies and skills to gain and keep to themselves the opportunities for natural discourse, and to improve their communication competence in the long run.