A Preliminary Research On The New Characteristics Of Senior High School English Classroom Discourse

With the continuous development of the society, economy, and culture, our high school English teaching is also facing new challenges. The proposal of the new curriculum standards also requires high school English teachers to change the traditional teaching mode and teaching philosophy in order to achieve better teaching results. In this context, high school English classroom discourse and teacher-student role relationship are going through series of changes, showing some new features. This dissertation attempts to make a critical discourse analysis on several specific high school English classroom discourses to display these new features. The previous study on the teaching mode and teacher-student relationship are mostly from the pedagogy, sociology, and culturology perspectives. This dissertation will analyze this phenomenon in discourse from a new perspective which combines the critical discourse analysis with some concepts in the systemic functional grammar, in order to construct a new framework of theoretical analysis which is suitable in China's environment. The analysis will put emphasis on the turn-taking between teacher and student, the teacher's use of pronouns and modal verbs in their discourse, to conclude the new features of today's high school English classroom teaching. Meanwhile, it will give a detailed analysis and interpretation to the emergence of these new features. Critical analysis of this phenomenon has the following significance. First, previous study of classroom discourse mainly focus on the micro-level, this dissertation will make a multi-directional discourse analysis with both macro- and micro-perspective included, to enclose the new characteristics of nowadays'classroom discourse, and attempt to give an explanation for the causes of these new characteristics from ideology and social factors. Secondly, it will provide some methods or implication for further study in this field. Thirdly, the critical analysis on this phenomenon will enhance teachers' and students' critical language awareness: on the one hand, it will help today's teachers to be aware of their changing role and adjust teaching strategies in their teaching process; on the other hand, it will encourage students to actively participate in teaching activities in order to have a better communication with teachers, and achieve teaching objectives successfully. Finally, based on the result of this analysis, we will find out which kind of English teaching mode is suitable for today's China context.