An Analysis Of Teacher Talk In English Reading At Senior Middle Schools

Talk is an essential tool of teachers' trade. Needless to say, teacher talk is critical to the learning process. The present study is a case study based on classroom observation, audio recording and questionnaires. It attempts to make use of qualitative and descriptive methods to identify the functional features of teacher talk in English reading of senior middle schools in the Chinese context, particularly the amount of teacher talk, teachers' questions and teacher feedback, in hopes of objectively reflecting problems of teacher talk in the real situation at present and providing English language teachers with useful implication in pedagogical practice.The present paper includes five chapters. The first chapter gives a brief introduction of the background information about teacher talk, and then illustrates the purpose and significance of the study. The second chapter presents the theoretical background and summarizes literature review of studies and researches on teacher talk in EFL classrooms at home and abroad. The third chapter is to deal with the methodology of this investigation in detail. The data are collected in an experimental high school in Wuhan (from October 10th to December 10th in 2010). Six teachers, who are teaching English to students of grade two in the first semester in an experimental high school in Wuhan, are randomly selected, recorded and observed in extensive reading classes(about 45 minutes each class). Observation is done with the help of Douglas Brown's (1994) "Teachers Observation Form" (see Appendixâ…¡). Audio recordings of the classroom discourse are then transcribed into written excerpts for subsequent statistical analysis with regard to the predetermined functional categories. The questionnaire (see Appendixâ… ) is designed by Lucky Akter (2010) with a combination of 15 multiple-choice questions and 4 open-ended questions on the basis of Likert Scale to investigate 302 students' opinions about their English classes and their evaluation of teachers'speech based on the usual, normal class activities. The forth chapter, which is also the soul of this paper, discusses the data from three perspectives:the amount of teacher talk, teachers'questions and teacher feedback. Based on the analysis, the following findings can be concluded:In terms of the amount of teacher talk, the findings reveal that teacher talk rather than student talk dominates the whole class time; With regard to the frequency of the use of different types of questions, the result show that teachers prefer to use display questions rather than referential questions; As to teacher feedback, positive praise is most frequently used by teachers and no direct correction is given to students when errors occur. The fifth chapter offers implications to improve the quality of teacher talk in pedagogical practice, including developing effective teacher talk and promoting communication in EFL classrooms; raising awareness of questioning strategies and giving sufficient question wait-time to students; and providing effective praise and adopting appropriate correction techniques. Last but not least, the final chapter presents the limitations of this thesis, thus providing researchers with suggestions in their further studies.In a word, the findings of the present study provide an empirical evidence to examine the functional features of teacher talk, which might shed some insight into the process of classroom learning and teaching in EFL classrooms in the Chinese context.