A Study Of Primary School Teacher Talk And Its Cognitive Orientation Based On English And Chinese Data

Teaching involves such aspects as curriculum, teaching materials, and teaching methodology. All these can only be really put into use and reality through classroom teaching processes. By the end of 1960s, due to the fact that findings of comparing the relative effectiveness of different teaching methods turned out to be disappointing, researchers began to shift their attention from a comparative study of methodologies to classroom teaching and learning process itself.The quality of teacher talk may have a direct influence on the results of learning. From the perspective of both language teaching and education, there is always a request for different types of teacher talk that suit the objectives of teaching and learning at different stages.Researches in teacher talk have been abundant both abroad and in China. According to the methods adopted and their focuses, researches in teacher talk have mainly gone through three significant phases, namely, the phase of classroom interaction analysis, in which teacher talk and student talk has been classified into different categories, recorded and studied, with the purpose of setting an ideal model for classroom interaction; the phase of classroom discourse analysis in 1970s and 1980s. Researchers made a study of teacher talk and student talk from the perspective of discourse structure, turn-taking and topic development and focused on the nature and structure of classroom interaction, aiming to put forward a sequence of "moves" that all classroom interaction followed; Since 1990s, researchers began to pay attention to the relationship between teacher talk and students' language acquisition with the intention of finding out how modifications in teacher talk, as an important source of language input in class, influences students' comprehension and thus their language acquisition.As early as the 1950s, a group of American psychologists and educationalists led by Bloom classified objectives of learning into different categories. Six majorclasses of interrelated objectives were identified in the cognitive domain by Bloom, namely, knowledge, comprehension, analysis, synthesis and evaluation which were placed in ascending order from simple to complex. A higher class of objectives was built upon the classes that preceded it.In the 1970s, after several attempts at adapting the Bloom taxonomies, Valette produced a coherent expression of objectives for language teaching and learning and arranged them in five stages, namely, mechanical skills, knowledge, transfer, communication and criticism. For each stage, relevant internal and external behaviors required of the students are stated explicitly.Since the 1980s, Morris and his colleagues had tried to simplify Bloom's taxonomies. They identified three levels of development in the cognitive domain: recognition — comprehension — application, and applied them in reading comprehension exercises. Morris and his colleagues not only designed reading comprehension exercises based on the three levels of cognitive development, but also concluded and made a list of language forms used in different exercises.Development of students' cognitive abilities has always been one the most important goals of education as has been revealed in curriculum, tests and exercises design. With an understanding of previous researches, the author of the present study assumes that since different language forms may involve students in different levels of thinking, teacher talk, as a most important language input in class, also plays an important part in the development of students' cognitive abilities. Through rational choices of different language forms in their talk, teachers may play a better role in the development of students' intellectual and cognitive abilities.On the basis of collecting first hand data from language classrooms, the author of the present thesis makes a quantitative and descriptive analysis of native English and native Chinese primary school teacher talk from three aspects: use of directive words; use of questions; and the interactive mode between the teacher and students. The purpose of the present study is to analyze the cognitive orientation of primary school teachers as reflected in their talk and find out the possible factors that lead to...