Interpreting The Interpersonal Meaning Of Teacher Talk In EFL Classes From The Perspectives Of Mood And Modality

Teacher Talk(TT) refers to the speech made by the teacher in the process of classroom instruction.TT functions both as classroom language input and a tool of instruction.Existing studies on TT have proved its significance in the teaching process.However,most of the studies focus on describing the linguistic features of TT;few concern its contributions to the construction of the teacher-learner role relationship in the EFL class.In the framework of Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL),this study,from the perspectives of Mood and Modality,investigates the linguistic devices that are employed in TT to realize its interpersonal meaning in EFL classes.In doing so,the interpersonal meaning of TT is revealed so that the teacher-learner role relationship in the EFL class can be reflected and evidence can be provided for the improvement of TT.Moreover,some suggestions are hoped to be helpful for further improvement of the teacher-learner role relationship and for the building of harmonious classroom atmosphere.Naturalistic enquiry is the exact method of this study.The data of TT were collected in the EFL class with no intervention and control of the setting.Ten English teachers from a university were involved.Their intensive reading classes were recorded;then the recordings were transcribed for later analysis.The linguistic devices are the focus of the investigation,such as the subject personal pronouns and the interrogatives in the Mood system and the modal expressions in the Modality systemThe choice of TT is not arbitrary.Through investigation,two main features have been found in the Mood system of TT.The subject personal pronouns not only help the teachers to express their personal judgments and achieve empathy in the class,but more importantly,they reflect the teachers' pursuit of equal role relationship with the learners.In terms of the interrogatives in TT, WH-interrogatives outnumber yes-no interrogatives.This indicates that the teachers tend to motivate the learners to participate in classroom conversations while negotiating meaning with them.Here teachers act as initiators.There are two particularities concerning WH-interrogatives in TT,namely,the post-positioning of the question words and the ellipsis of WH-interrogatives, which prevail in daily communication.Also,two general characteristics have been found in the Modality system of TT.Different kinds of modal expressions vary greatly in the frequency of occurrence,with modal verbs taking up the biggest portion in TT.Also the modal expressions of different values distribute quite differently in TT.Low value modal expressions are the greatest in number(e.g.can,could,may, might etc.),and then come median value modal expressions(e.g.will,would,shall,should etc.); high value ones are employed least by teachers(e.g.must,have to,need etc.).The distribution of modal expressions indicates that teachers are striving to construct an equal teacher-learner role relationship by using appropriate TT.The characteristics in the systems of Mood and Modality have best illustrated the common interpersonal meaning in TT.However,there are still some expressions unfavorable to the construction of a harmonious classroom atmosphere.For instance,some modal expressions that are often employed in modern English occur in low frequency in the data of TT.Some reasonable suggestions are put forward for the improvement of the quality of TT.On the whole, this study has provided a new perspective for future studies on TT.It has proved that TT is a good resource for interpreting the teacher-learner role relationship in the EFL class and that Halliday's SFL is effective in exploring the interpersonal meaning of spoken discourse.