A Comparative Analysis Of The Teacher Talks Between The Novice, Proficient And Expert Teachers In The EFL Classroom

With the paradigm of language teaching research shifted from the pursuit of the language teaching methodologies to classroom-based research, particularly, the research on language teachers, many focuses are stressed on what happens between instructor and learners in the language classroom and to what extent teachers'behavior influences the outcome of learner's language development. Among teacher's behavior, one of important parameters is teacher talk. In the light of the general discourse analysis, great quantities of research findings and fruits on the domain of teacher talk have been witnessed in literature.On the basis of classroom discourse analysis, the present study predominantly intends to investigate the variations of teacher talks of the three groups of teachers, i.e., the novice, the proficient and the expert teacher in high schools, in terms of discourse quantity, questioning types, interactional modification features and feedback manners, in the perspective of teacher professional development.Within the framework of qualitative research, the discourse analysis, video recording method as well as one coding scheme is employed along with an empirical quantitative analysis to demonstrate the variations of teacher talk among the four participants from one key high school in the city of Lanzhou and one leading high school in Gansu Province, on the basis of theoretical foundations of Swain's Output Hypothesis, Long's Interaction Hypothesis, and Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory. All the statistics are taken from the 72-pages transcriptions of the video recordings of six classes presented by the participants involved in the study. After encoding and analyzing the transcriptions, some major findings are demonstrated as follows:1. The expert teacher's talk time (TTT) is less than the novice and the proficient, while the proficient teacher's talk time (TTT) is the most. TTLT (teacher target language talk) of the proficient teacher is more than those of the novice teachers and the expert teacher's and the last one's is relatively the least while TNLT (teacher native language talk) of the expert teacher is bitterly the most. So in the expert teacher's classroom, there is much more native language talk than those of the two others; and then the novice teachers use native language less while the proficient teacher speaks native language least.2. The expert teacher raises the greatest number of referential questions (RQ), while the novice teachers raise them less and the proficient teacher asks least. Accordingly, the proficient teacher raises display questions (DQ) most while the novice teachers deliver less and the expert teacher asks least.3. The novice teachers employ more comprehension checks than the proficient and the expert teacher while the expert teacher uses them least. Then, the novice teachers adopt confirmation checks less than the proficient teacher and the expert teacher, and the expert teacher uses them most. For clarification requests, the novice teachers employ them more than the proficient and the expert teacher, while the expert teacher adopts them least. Comparatively, there are more communication opportunities in the expert teacher and the proficient teacher's classes because many confirmation checks are employed.4. The novice teachers employ the greatest number of discourse feedback while the expert teacher uses less and the proficient teacher adopts least; correspondingly, the novice teachers use evaluation feedback less than the expert and proficient teacher, while the proficient teacher employs those most. Therefore, in the classes of the novice teachers and the expert teacher, there are more chances for learners to express their opinions and ideas to practice target language so as to develop it.Inevitably, some limitations meet with the present study, in which interviews with the participants and questionnaire investigations to learners and others teachers are unavailable because of the difficulties and inconvenience of the participants involved, as well as limited research competence of researcher. However, after all, as an exploratory research, the present study firstly investigates the teacher talk in high schools in the perspective of teacher professional development, employing an empirical way. Therefore, it's expected that the present study shed some lights on the pedagogy and foreign language teacher education and development programs related to both pre-service and in-service teachers.