The Discourse Of English Reading Classes In The Middle School: A Sociocultural Perspective

What transpires in the Chinese middle school ELT (English Language Teaching) classroom receives very little empirical attention, constituting in the field of applied linguistics an academic gap that needs filling. The study attempts to probe discourse style of Chinese middle school English language teachers by highlighting and investigating IRE/IRF cycles, the much-studied default format of nearly all formal educational settings. The thesis would go beyond relevant literature on the classroom discourse analysis worldwide to ask, first, how do our middle school colleagues use the IRE/IRF cycles? And, second, is there any tension between the local classroom realities and national curriculum rhetoric? If yes, to what extent? The work is pedagogically significant in that it aims to contribute to providing empirical evidence for reconstruction of teacher education programs for middle school English teachers.The study bases its findings on the data coming from Panel 4 of the Project of Secondary ELT Pedagogy conducted by the research team of Northeast Normal University. The transcribed classroom discourse of eight ethnic Chinese middle school English teachers selected has been qualitatively coded and quantitatively measured. The paper draws on descriptive system of the Birmingham school, focusing on the teacher-led three-part turn-taking patterning of IRE/IRF cycles. The research findings reveal that considerably similar discourse style is used by the eight Chinese middle school English teachers, with the ritualized IRF format– IRE dominating the EFL classroom communication examined. Further, there does exist a tension between what the teachers subscribe to and what the national curriculum prescribes.Certain speculative thoughts of why it is so are presented in the conclusion chapter, with broader contextualized and socio-educational factors taken into practical account. The study also tentatively suggests the possibility of incorporating into Chinese middle school teacher education programs a separate strand of how to make informed choice along the IRE/IRF continuum. Plus, academically, empirical studies like this thesis are capable of inspiring potential research text composed by drawing upon complementary traditions and approaches; pedagogically, scholarly understandings of teacher-student classroom interaction of this nature expect further research into the topic in question, producing more empirically-based research literature to contribute to construction of future curriculum reform. (353 words)...