A Research On The Teacher Talk In English Reading Class In Senior High Schools

As one of the main means of inputting languages, reading plays an important part in learning English. The reading levels not only influence the learners' understanding of the input materials and the absorbing of the useful information, but also have an effect on the smoothness and quality of the output materials. Because of the importance of reading in learning English, the teaching of reading has been paid much attention to.The traditional analyses of classroom discourse tended to put focus on the features of teacher talk only for language input purpose, namely, instructional purpose. The focus was on tempo of speech, pause, intonation, stress and adjustments on the level of vocabulary, syntactic structure and text (Chaudron, 1988).Although there has been an increasing amount of study on classroom teacher talk in western countries, little has been conducted in China to examine the features of teacher talk. There exists a shortage of empirical studies concerning the following aspects of teacher talk: the amount and type of teacher talk, frequency and types of teachers' questions, teachers' feedback to learner's performance.For the reasons mentioned above, the current study aims at exploring the features of teacher talk in English reading in senior high middle schools in China, with the specific purpose to provide some pedagogical suggestions to the Chinese English teachers on what types of teacher talk would be beneficial to learner's language acquisition and therefore would be employed in classroom teaching. It also aims to shed some light on teacher training and development.The subjects involved were 9 teachers giving lectures in English reading lessons from 3 different high schools in Jingzhou City. The teachers' teaching processes were audio-recorded and some of the recorded materials were transcribed into written record to be used for analyses. Meanwhile, also involved in this study were 405 students attending the lectures . They were asked to respond the questionnaire on English classroom teacher talk. This questionnaire was composed of 11 items and was administered to collect information on the use of teacher talk in classroom, attempting to lend some support to the results of the transcription analysis. The findings are summarized as follows:With regard to the amount of teacher talk and student talk in the 9 classrooms under investigation, the study indicates that there is a preference of teacher talk over student talk.As to the frequency of the use of display questions and referential questions, display questions are reported as being used more frequently than referential questions.Concerning the frequency of praises offered by teachers, the study demonstrates that all teachers prefer positive feedback over negative feedback.After the study, some suggestions are given, such as , English teachers had better use appropriate teacher talk, ask more referential questions initiatively, provide varieties of positive and effective feedback.Limitations and suggestions for the future research are also discussed in the study. For example, due to the practical difficulties involved in the task of audio-recording , the subjects were chosen only in 9 middle schools in Jingzhou City. In addition, multiple techniques for data collection should be used to get more accurate results. Consequently, the results obtained in the present study leave much to be verified and improved. It is hoped that more accurate results would be obtained in the future research.