A Study Of Teacher Talk In The English Class In A Senior High School

In the past three decades, more and more researchers have shown interest instudying teacher talk. In China the researches on it were mostly carried out in thecollege but seldom in the senior high school.Based on the input hypothesis, the outputhypothesis, the interaction theory andthe findings of former researches about teacher talk, this thesis is to describe thegeneral features of teacher talk used by teachers of English and to explore theproblems of teacher talk in senior high school EFL classrooms as well. Teacher talkis analyzed from four aspects, namely, the amount of teacher talk and student talk,teachers' questioning behavior, the frequency of interaction modification andteachers' feedback. The thesis aims to help teachers avoid some problems whenusing teacher talk in class.The subjects of this study were eight teachers of English and their classes inDagang No.1 senior high school. The methods adopted in this thesis include:classroom recording, interview and questionnaire. Eight English classes taught by theeight teachers were recorded and the recorded materials were transcribed for analysis.To further find out reasons accounting for teachers' practice and how teachersperceive teacher talk, interviews were done with eight teachers respectively. Inaddition, a questionnaire was designed to gain students' feedback to their teachers'teacher talk, attempting to lend some support to the results of the transcriptionanalysis. The findings are summarized as follows: 1. The amount of teacher talk was larger than that of student talk.2. Display questions were reported to be used more frequently than referentialquestions.3. Comprehension checks were used very frequently, followed by confirmationchecks, while clarification requests were the least frequently used ones.4. All teachers preferred positive feedback over negative feedback. However,there were some problems when they gave feedback. It was shown that praisesfollowed by appraisals, which is considered as an effective way to give positivefeedback, were less frequently used in the study; correcting students' errorsimmediately was used by the teachers in surprisingly high frequency. Moreover, theteachers seldom used ignoring and correcting errors later and expecting students'self-repair.Based on the results of the study, it is suggested that teachers should be aware ofthe importance of using teacher talk appropriately in EFL classrooms and offerlearners more opportunities to produce more target language output, train learners tobe efficient managers of their own learning and create a relaxing and unthreateningenvironment for learners' foreign language learning.