An Investigation And Analysis Of EFL Classroom Teacher Talk In The Middle Schools Of Karamai Area

Teacher talk is the speech that teachers use in EFL classrooms, which is one of the major channels that teachers convey information to students, one of the primary means of controlling the learners'behavior and is believed to be a key variable in L2 development.After many years'investigations, comparisons, and analyses made by linguists like Long, Sato, Pica, Nunan, Allwright and Ellis, it is found that in order to encourage the students'interaction in the target language in an EFL classroom and finally to facilitate the students'second language acquisition, teachers should adopt more referential questions, through which more classroom interactions would take place; use more confirmation checks and clarification requests than comprehension checks to undertake negotiation of meaning and use positive feedback to strengthen the students'learning motivation and improve their confidence in using the target language.The chief aim of the present work is to investigate the interactional features of teacher talk in initiating questions, negotiation of meaning and features of feedback in order to see whether or not EFL middle school teachers in the Karamai Area could provide a favorable learning condition for the students'L2 acquisition. The research has obtained valuable data by using recordings and questionnaires. The followings are the results of the study:(1) The frequency of display questions was higher than that of referential questions.(2) Among the three ways of meaning negotiations, the most frequently used by the teachers was comprehension checks, and then clarification requests, and the last was confirmation checks.