A RT-based Study On Conversations Between Teacher And Students In EFL Teaching

With the continuous development of the reform of college English teaching, discourse analysis, especially classroom discourse analysis attracts the interests of more and more linguists and educators, and has become one of the subjects concerned by many linguists. As a principle means of transmitting knowledge in class, conversations between teacher and students should be attached great importance to. Based on relevance theory this thesis tries to expound on the cognitive and communicative process of conversations between teacher and students, and to testify the guiding role of this theory in EFL teaching, looking forward to promoting the interactions between teacher and students and stimulating the students' interest in learning English.This thesis reviews the researches on discourses analysis and classroom discourses analysis conducted by sociologists, linguists, and psychologists. And it indicates that those researches neglect the fact that classroom conversations are conducted in a cognitive and communicative process. According to relevance theory, proposed by Sperber and Wilson in 1986, the process of classroom conversations between teacher and students is an ostensive-referential process seeking optimal relevance. The crucial factors affecting interactions between teacher and students are the mutual manifestness they achieved, the efforts they made and the context effect they harvested. The content of conversations is associated with dynamic context, which is different from the traditional tactic context. The students must employ the various encyclopedic knowledge existed in their mind in the procedure of reasoning.By means of tape-recording, questionnaires observations and interviews, this paper collected the natural classroom conversations and analyzed and compared them from the perspective of the purpose, content, form of conversations and the affective factors affecting the progress of conversations. The results show that under the guidance of relevance theory the amount of conversations between teacher and students in class has been increased, the content of the class has been enriched and the students have been stimulated to answer teachers' questions actively.Based on this research, some feasible advice is brought up to promote the communication between teacher and students: Firstly, the aim of teaching English should be cultivating the students' communicative competence and helping the students acquire language in communication. Secondly, teachers' skill of asking questions is another crucial factor in stimulating the students in class. Hence, teachers should develop their own skills of asking questions, and diversify the questions in both content and form to promote the interaction between teacher and students. What's more, in class the amount of related cultural background is supposed to be increased in order to widen the mutual cognitive context between the teacher and the students. Finally, make sure the students share the equal status with their teacher in class so as to realize the optimal relevance effect.It is hoped that EFL teaching can benefit from these suggestions in stimulating interaction between teacher and students and improving the teaching efficiency as well.