Research Into Teacher Talk In Senior High School EFL Classroom From Systematic-functional Grammar

In recent years, discourse analysis has become the hot spot concerned by the foreign and domestic linguists; especially the analysis of the classroom discourse has been gained popularity among the linguists and educationists. Halliday's Systematic-Functional Grammar which gives much help to many teachers and has been applied into EFL classroom many times, but currently, the researches on teacher talk by foreign and domestic scholars mainly focus on the kinds of characteristics of the teacher talk, such as word speed, intonation, and vocabulary, as well as syntax, etc., while the study on the function of the teacher talk is very short; in particular, the research on how to employ different forms of discourse to guide the students in different levels to learn effectively is even limited.Based on the reasons mentioned above, the current study tends to explore the features of teacher talk in EFL classroom in China, with the aim to provide teachers to understand which kind of classroom talk is more helpful for students'learning, and how to help the students in different levels to learn effectively according to their own competence and personality.The subjects that are involved are three high school English teachers; meanwhile, there are also 110 students in two classes involved in my former high school, and they are arranged to reply the questionnaire which is composed of 11 items on English classroom teacher talk. The findings are summarized as follows: (1). the proper amount of teacher talk in the class should be within 15%-35% of the whole class and the proper use of Chinese should be allowed when teachers explain a difficult knowledge point in order to let the students know clearly; (2). teacher should give their considerations to every student in the classroom in order to make them feel teachers'care and then they will have much power to learn English with much interest; (3). the body language is a very crucial supplementary means for teachers to use in the process of teaching. Appropriate application of body language can make students learn the second language in a relaxing and comfortable atmosphere.The findings of the study give us some useful insights on EFL teaching in senior high school in the Chinese context. Based on them, some advice is given in accordance with the above aspects.Furthermore, the limitations and suggestions about the study are also discussed in the present thesis, for example, the samples involved in the study are only selected in a fixed district, which may provide some uncertainty and limitations, and the results obtained from the research need to be verified and proved. It is hoped that more accurate and strict results can be obtained in the future study.