A Study On Teacher Talk In Intensive Reading Class Of Non-English Majors

Along with the appearance of the mode of autonomous learning and learner-centered teaching, most teaching researches focus on learners in recent years but the research on teachers is far less. Teacher talk is a kind of language teachers use to organize the second language classrooms and implement their teaching. Teacher talk has a great influence on learners'classroom performance, learning attitude, language output and even their whole learning process. Nunan (1991)points out that teacher talk is crucial to learners'language learning and the organization of the language classrooms because it is through perfect teacher talk that teachers succeed in implementing their teaching plans. At the same time, teacher talk acts as a demonstration role for target language and it is probably the major source of comprehensible input learners are likely to receive.This thesis aims to study the characteristics of teacher talk in College English intensive reading class and its effect on language learning qualitatively and quantitatively from four aspects:teachers' questions, teachers' feedback, interactional modification and teacher talking time based on the empirical record in classroom, questionnaire and interview.The results of this study reveal that the number of display questions teachers use in class is more than that of referential questions; comprehension check is most frequently used by teachers but clarification request is seldom used; the amount of teacher talking time is much higher than that of learner talking time; nearly all teachers give learners positive feedback to praise and encourage them, which indicate that teachers are still the center of the classroom. Based on the results of the study and the relevant research findings in the field, some tentative suggestions on how to improve teacher talk in Chinese context are made and some suggestions for future study are presented.