A Study On Interpersonal Meaning Of Teacher Talk In English Language Teaching In Secondary School

Over viewing the traditional researches about English teachers, we can find that teachers' knowledge and teachers' behaviors have always been the focuses in the previous researches. In contrast, there are fewer studies related to the teachers' ideology (beliefs in the field of education), which is considered to be playing an important role in construction of teachers' knowledge, assessment of teachers' behaviors and teachers' decision making in class. The empirical studies concerning about this field, especially in China, are more than fewer. Simultaneously, the current new round up educational reform which is characterized with the promotion of constructivism in philosophy, humanism in psychology as well as functionalism in linguistics is surely to challenge the teachers in the current English teaching. And in reality, the factors resulting in the inefficiency in English teaching must attribute to the conflicts between traditional beliefs held by the teachers and the update beliefs embodied in the new curriculum or syllabus.So based on Halliday's systemic-functional linguistics (SFL), the present study is to analyze the realizations of interpersonal (IP) meaning by modality in Teacher Talk (TT) of Chinese secondary school English teachers and then to explore the Chinese teachers' teaching beliefs through the modality expressions analysis.The current study mainly takes an empirical approach. First, through the elaborate sampling, two groups of subjects (16) are chosen out of the 135 teachers. Second, through class observation and audio recording, the languages of the 16 subjects' are collected and transcribed. And following this, the modality realizations distributional features are described and the interpersonal meaning is decoded with the explorations of the teachers' beliefs as the end.By statistics computation with SPSS10.0, it's found that: 1) all the Chinese secondary school English teachers are applying massively median and low value modality realizations, which has been an extrovert trend, though the high value modality realizations are also taking a certain percentage. 2) the inter-group differences in application of modality realizations are significant, esp. in high and low value modal occurrences. Ordinary teachers (To) have employed more high value modal realizations than model teachers (Tm), but fewer cases of low value modal realizations than model teachers. 3) based on the above descriptions, it's evidenced that model teachers are more inclined to view teachers as equal counterparts as students in class and treat teacher-student relationship (T-S relationship) as a subject-to-subject process (S-S relationship). However, ordinary teachers are more tending to view teachers of more powerful positions and likely to treat T-S relationship as a subject-to -object process (S-O relationship).With this account, the current study is to arouse the teachers' and teacher educators' awareness in knowledge of the existence of teaching beliefs and to help the teachers recognize the significance of beliefs transformation so as to keep pace with the new round up educational reform.