A Relevance-based Study Of Teacher Talk In English Classroom

Teacher talk is of crucial importance, not only for the organization of the classroom but also for the processes of students' language acquisition. More and more studies on it have been done by many researchers and teachers in recent years. Early studies on teacher talk merely focused on the phonological and syntactic features of teachers' speech and questions. Recently, SLA scholars have turned their attention to the relationship between teacher talk and second language acquisition. They claimed that comprehensible input and teacher-student interaction play an important role in improving students' acquisition of the target language. Therefore, they advocated that teachers should simplify their linguistic forms to achieve comprehensible input and to ensure the success of teacher-student interaction. It is obvious that these studies mainly focused on the linguistic forms of teacher talk, and few considered the appropriateness and effectiveness of teacher talk from the perspective of pragmatics.Within the framework of Relevance Theory, the present thesis analyzes teacher talk in the specific context of EFL classroom. The purpose of this thesis is to study teacher talk in EFL classroom from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics, and to explore the theoretical explanation for comprehensible input and successful teacher-student interaction. It analyzes the characteristics of cognitive environment in EFL classroom, the process of ostensive-inferential communication of teacher-student interaction and optimal relevance in teacher talk. Through the analysis, we can conclude that comprehensible input and success of teacher-student interaction don't merely depend on the simplification of teacher talk. In fact, according to Relevance Theory, the nature of teacher-student interaction is a process of ostensive-inferential communication in which the two sides of the communication, based on cognition using logical inference, seek for optimal relevance. It can be concluded that the comprehension of teacher talk and the success of teacher-student interaction are determined by a series of cognitive factors defined by Relevance Theory, such as cognitive environment, mutual manifestness, contextual effect, processing effort and relevance. Finally, based on the analysis, the thesis attempts to propose a relevance-based teacher talk mode for EFL classroom.