A Pragmatic Study Of Teacher Talk In English Classes Of Junior High Schools

In English classroom, teacher talk is a tool for organizing teaching activities, an important means of controlling students'classroom behaviors, and the carrier of language input. It provides language teachers with a good perspective for the study of second language acquisition. A growing number of researchers are aware that we should cultivate and enhance the learner's communicative competence as a key, and change the input mode in order to highlight the activities of learners in the interaction of the dominant position in the English language learning. According to Longman Dictionary of Applied Linguistics (1989), teacher talk is the language used in the teaching process. Hakansson (1986) claims that the quantity and quality of teacher talk will affect the success or failure of the teaching discourse.In China, due to the lack of authentic English language environment, English class is the main place for students to practice using English. Developing the students'communicative competence of the English language mainly relies on the classroom teaching, which means that English teachers should pay more attention to the quantity and quality of teacher talk as language input in the classroom. And teacher-student interaction mainly occurs in the English class. Teacher talk guides and organizes the students to participate actively in a variety of classroom activities in speech communication. Teacher talk also creates the environments and chances for the students to exchange information and express their ideas. It can promote language acquisition through a process of two-way communication and negotiation.The analysis of classroom discourse is one aspect of classroom studies. Since Harris raised the concept of "discourse analysis" in 1952, it has drawn much attention in the field of linguistic studies, both at home and abroad. The study of teacher talk starts at the beginning of the 1970s. Early researches conducted a large number of theoretical and empirical studies, and many scholars studied teacher talk from the perspective of discourse analysis, corpus analysis, as well as the linguistics and pragmatics.Ever since the 1950s and the 1960s, linguists at home have started their studies of teacher talk in foreign language classroom. These studies mainly focus on the quantity, types, functions as well as teachers'initiation, feedback and error correction of teacher talk. Inspired by foreign researches, there have been empirical studies and researches in the last few years in China, such as: Zhou Xing & Zhou Yun (2002), Zhao Xiaohong (1998), and many others. Yet overall, these researches seem to stay in the areas of the art of teacher talk, or a general description of teacher talk or the collection of the materials. So far, there have been little systematic study on this special professional language within a particular theory. In the present study, we analyze teacher talk within the theoretical framework of the Speech Act Theory and Face Theory. We intend to study the strategies and functions of teacher talk in junior high schools from a pragmatic point of view. Our aims are to find the ways to improve the effectiveness of teacher talk for English teachers in junior high schools, and improve the teaching efficiency.