The Interpersonal Meaning Of Teacher Talk In Senior School English Model Class

Teacher talk has great influence on English teaching. It is not only a tool of teachers' implementing their teaching plans, but also an important source of language input for learners. Due to the importance of teacher talk in different aspects, it has drawn researchers' attention. Most of the studies concentrate on the linguistic description from the aspect of pragmatics, cognition, second linguistic acquisition, etc. This study is designed to study teacher talk in the theoretical framework of systemic functional linguistics, specifically from aspects of mood, modality and the person system, to explore the teacher-student relationship in class, and guide the teachers to improve the teaching effect by focusing on the quality of teacher talk.The samples are chosen from the videos of senior school English model class issued by Audio & Visual Press of China Central Radio & TV University through simple random sampling. The teachers' words in these videos are transcribed into written form. The present study is a combination of quantitative and the qualitative approaches; it tries to answer the following questions:1) How does the mood system contribute to the realization of interpersonal meaning?2) How does the modality system help to the realization of interpersonal meaning?3) How does the person system promote the realization of interpersonal meaning?The study reveals that to some extend the teachers in the senior school English model class still have a dominant role in the classroom teaching yet they are making efforts to change their traditional role. They show respect to students in repetition, employing negotiable language forms, involving themselves in the activity, etc. The teachers are organizers of the classroom activities and assistants of the task accomplishment. In this classroom interaction and communication, an equal and harmonious teacher-student relationship is constructed. The modeling effect of how to build up an equal and harmonious teacher-student relationship is successfully achieved. With respect to the findings and conclusions of the present study, some suggestions are put forward on the realization of interpersonal meaning and the creation of an equal and harmonious relationship between the teachers and students so as to further improve the teaching effect by focusing on the quality of teacher talk. Teachers should adopt mood structure according to specific task types. Overuse of the declaratives should be avoided. When imperative mood is used, the teacher should make it sound more acceptable. Negotiable languages of median and low value modal expressions are advocated in teacher talk. Also, the teacher should use more plural forms of the first personal pronoun to build up a cooperative relationship with the students. It is hoped that more attention is paid to teacher talk, so that we may make best use of it to improve classroom teaching.