A Study Of Teacher Talk In EFL Junior Middle School Classroom In Rural Area

In recent years, teacher talk as an important aspect of EFL (English as foreign language) teaching has been paid more attention by researchers. For most EFL learners in China, English spoken by teachers in the classroom is the main source of target language input. Teacher talk has a great influence on students'language acquisition. Therefore, it is of great importance to study the general features of teacher talk and to find some existing problems of teacher talk in EFL classroom. However, the researches on teacher talk in China were seldom carried out in EFL junior middle school classroom in rural area. So, based on the theories of input hypothesis, the interaction hypothesis and the output hypothesis, the author made the study of teacher talk on four English teachers and their classes in the rural junior middle school. The measures of classroom observation, classroom recording, questionnaire and interview were conducted through the study. The findings are summarized as follows:The amount of teacher talk was larger than that of student talk; Teachers used more native language as their teaching language; Displayed questions were used more frequently than referential questions; Comprehension checks and then the confirmation checks were preferred by teachers; Enough wait-time and more positive feedback were given to students. According to results of the study, some suggestions to the EFL junior middle school English teachers, especially the English teachers in the rural area, were put forward at the end of the thesis.