A Study On The Teacher Talk In College EFL Classroom

In recent years, the interest in the research on teacher talk in class has gradually drawn people's attention. Teacher talk is of crucial importance, not only for the organization of the classroom but also for the processes of acquisition. In terms of acquisition, teacher talk is particularly important in an EFL context, for it is probably the major source of comprehensible target language input the learner is likely to receive (Nunan, 1991:189). Krashen takes comprehensible input as a major causative factor to promote language acquisition. The quantity and quality of teacher talk would influence or even decide the success or failure of the classroom teaching (Hakansson,1986).The traditional analysis tended to put focus on the features of teacher talk only for language input purpose, namely, instructional purpose. The focus was on tempo of speech, intonation, adjustments on the level of vocabulary, syntactic structure and text (Chaudron, 1988). In China few articles systematically research on the interactional features of teacher talk. The present study intends to describe the interactional features of teacher talk in EFL classroom. From an interactional perspective, teacher talk is described in terms of four areas, namely, the amount of teacher talk, teacher's question, feedback and modification of teacher talk. The data is obtained from class observation and questionnaire.This thesis consists of five parts.Chapter one is an introduction, which gives a brief account of the background of the study and the research questions.Chapter two reviews literature on the concepts and structures of teacher talk, and the interactional aspects of teacher talk.Chapter three serves as an introduction of the participants, methods and data collection.Chapter four analyzes and discusses the data.Chapter five concludes the whole thesis.