A Comparative Analysis Of Teacher Talk In College English Classroom

Under the current situation of the English teaching in China, it is a common phenomenon that the traditional teaching mode, also called"teacher-centered"teaching method has been still popular in many college English classrooms, especially in the homogeneous class for many years. Language teaching is different from the others because the language is not only the aim of the teaching, but also the medium used in the whole process. Therefore, the quantity and quality of teacher talk is of great importance to measure the success or failure of language teaching. With the increasing researches on discourse analysis by many linguists and educators, there has existed large numbers of fruits and research findings about teacher talk abroad. But the relevant study on teacher talk in classroom discourse analysis in China is not enough, especially in terms of the comparative study on the different types of teacher talk.Under the framework of discourse analysis, the language output and input hypothesis is viewed as the theoretical foundation. Twelve English teachers coming from a university in the northwest of China are participated in this study. They are classified into three types:novice teacher, proficient teacher and expert teacher. Through analyzing the transcriptions of authentic class recordings based on the three types of teacher, the research makes a statistical analysis on the variations and respective features of teacher talk of each type terms of the teacher talk time, questioning types, feedback manners, interactional modification and classroom discourse structures.The conclusions are presented as follows:The"learner-centered"teaching mode is more likely used by the novice teacher. Their talk time in classroom is less than half of the whole class time. But the quality of novice teacher talk has yet to be improved. With the high proportions of display questions and evaluation feedback, the whole teaching effect is influenced largely by the quality of teacher.The advantage of proficient teacher lies in the highly using frequency of target language, which makes students with more exposure of target language. However, there are more traditional IRF structures and display questions, the proficient teacher pays more attention to the basic language knowledge acquirement and neglects the training of learners' communicative abilities.The expert teacher is inclined to use"teacher- centered"teaching mode in that the amount of expert teacher talk highly exceeds those of proficient and novice teachers. However, the quality of expert teacher is beneficial to the L2 acquisition because they employ large amount referential questions so as to stimulate the comprehensible output being close to the natural expression.The aim of the present study is to help the English teachers to further know the current situation of language teaching in the present environment of China based on the authentic recordings of college English lessons for non-English majors. The thesis provides a new perspective of teaching method reformation to improve the level of college English teaching and the learner's language acquisition in the practical teaching process, and eventually puts forward some tentative suggestions to improve the teaching effects.