Syntactic Preference By TESOL Teachers At Secondary Schools In China

English is a core subject curriculum and set as a compulsory course at secondaryschools in China. English instruction is mainly implemented in classroom setting.English teacher speech is, to a great extent, the major source of the comprehensibletarget language input for the Chinese learners of English, especially for the beginners.Teacher speech in English class serves as not only the objective of the course, but alsothe medium to achieve the objective as well. Therefore, it is necessary to make aninvestigation into teacher speech to facilitate English instruction and English teachers'professional development.The study, based on classroom observation of 10 TESOL teachers from 7different provinces and metropolises (including prize, demo and non-demo classes) byvirtue of videoing, recording and transcribing, and by the use of the programmeWritten Texts Analysis supported by the software Microsoft Visual Foxpro 6.0,tentatively makes classroom discourse analysis of all the 11 transcripts, and issupposed to explore the syntactic features in teacher speech, covering sentence length,speech rate, sentence type distribution, basic syntactic patterns, rarely used patterns,repetition sentences, vague sentences, and grammaticality. The findings are as followsand suggest that syntactic preferences exist, with merits and demerits parallel inteacher speech.1. The average sentence length ranges from 4 to 6 words per sentence (wps),mostly below 10 wps.2. Teacher speech rate is higher, ranging from124 to176 words per minute (wpm).3. Simple sentences abound; more complex sentences are used than compoundsentences suggesting a certain degree of subordination and complexity.Complex-compound sentences are less or rarely used.4. More object clauses, adverbial clauses and attributive clauses are used thansubject clauses, predicative clauses and appositive clauses; adverbial clause types aresporadic, with adverbial clauses indicating condition, time, reason and compromiseidentified.5. More declarative sentences are used than interrogative sentences; moreinterrogative sentences than imperative sentences; exclamatory sentences are scarcely used; yes-no & wh- questions have a major proportion of interrogative sentences, withalternative & tag questions much fewer.6. Many more positive sentences are used than negative sentences.7. Incomplete sentences occur quite often in classroom context for the sake ofellipsis & simplification.8. Basic and rarely used syntactic patterns exist, with teachers'preferences.9. Too much repetition is quite common in novice teachers. Vague sentences arefrom all the investigated teachers.10. Ungrammaticality is common in all the subjects, with or without repair.11. By contrast, T1 doesn't vary significantly in speech when addressing learnersof different levels.According to the findings some implications for teaching are drawn as follows: 1.Raise language awareness, promote language skills; 2. Make career-planning inteachers'training programme; 3. Make action research; 4. Make case study; 5. Designteacher speech plan; 6. Polish up teacher speech, make it orderly, effective, andinteresting. Limitations and further research are put forward.