Investigation Of The Current Status Of Teacher-Student Dialogue In Junior Middle School EFL Classroom

Discourse analysis has been studied extensively and has become a topical focus of the attention of linguists and educationlists. But the interrelationship between teacher-student diagloge and the English learning remains to be further explored. Teacher-student dialogue in classroom is the dialogue betweem teachers and students in the teaching process. Dialogue analysis in classroom is an objective approach to classroom research which aims to describe the teaching and learning processes.Since 1970 the Birmingham school headed by J. Sinclair has begun to study classroom interacticn systematically and made a deep analysis of teacher-student dialogue. The theoretical basis of their model in designing teacher-student dialogue was based on Grammar Theory Domain published in 1961. There are also other relevant studies of the teacher-student dialogue, e.g. Research on Teaching and Learning written by Chaudron in 1988, Understanding Communication in Second Language Classrooms written by Johnson in 1995, and Language Teaching Methodology written by Nunan in 1991. Although much research has been carried out abroad, there exists a shortage of empirical studies concerning such aspects as: teacher-student dialogue, turn-taking quantity and guestion types. Investigation of the classroom teacher-student dialogue aims to adjust teacher-student dialogue modes, to promote students' interests and self-confidence, and to improve the efficicency of the teacher-student classroom interaction. The investigation in junior middle school also aims to shed some light on the improvement of teaching efficiency. The investigation is done in aspects of: turn-taking guantity, speech quantity, teacher-student interaction, teachers' question types, question waiting-time, and mistakes correction modes.Teacher-student dialogue in classroom will shape interaction between them to a great extent. This thesis is aimed at the investigation of the current status of teacher-student dialogues of junior middle schools in Wuhan, revealing the experience and defects of valid dialogues, based on which improving measures can be proposed. Therefore, general guidelines are expected to summed up to fulfil our purposes.The subjects involved are thirty-four experienced junior school English teachers who are from Wuluo Road Middle School in Wuhan. Meanwhile, also involved in this study are 180 students, who are 13-15 years old students from 3 classes of Grade One, Grade Two and Grade Three in this school. During the time between September 2007 and January 2008, the teacher's teaching processes were audio-recorded and the recorded materials were transcribed into written records to be used for analysis. Meanwhile, the students were asked to respond the questionnaire on teacher-student dialogues in English classroom. On September 10th and 12th in 2008, the 180 copies of the questionnaire were delivered and 169 out of the 180 were retrieved valid. 175 copies of questionnaire about mistakes correction mode were delivered, and all of them retrieved valid.The findings are summarized as follows: The teacher-oriented classrooms have changed into student-oriented classrooms in junior middle school. But during the teacher-student dialogues, there are not many referential questions and there is not much time left for students to ask questions, etc. And these problems remains to be further explored and improved.