An Analysis Of Teacher Talk In Integrated English Class For College English Majors

Teachers are constantly important language guides and models to the students, regardless of their level or major. And the classroom language of English teachers is of the most vital importance, because teacher talk is not only putting teachers'pedagogical program into practice and imparting the language points, but also a quite significant source of the target language to students. It is the teaching objectives, and the media of teaching at the same time. On account of the importance of teacher talk in language classroom, it is becoming the focus of research in the field of education in China and abroad. It has got many linguists'and educationalists'attention. English majors require higher professional level, there is correspondingly higher request for the teacher talk of the teachers taking Integrated English classes. Therefore this study has positive meaning for the improvement of the instruction of Integrated English classes.The present study is carried out under the guidance of these theories:Krashen's Input Hypothesis; Swain's Output Hypothesis and Long's Interaction Hypothesis. All the statistics are taken from the audio records of the classes of four teachers involved in the research. They are four teachers with different titles and different teaching experience in the College of Foreign Studies of Guang Xi Normal University. And this research analyses the classroom discourse from the following aspects:the amount of teacher and student talk; the class interactional structures between teacher and students; the amount of teachers'and students'turn-taking; the types of teachers'questioning. After encoding and analyzing the transcriptions, some major findings are demonstrated as follows:1. Though the amount of teacher talk is bigger than that of the students, the teachers are trying their best to give students as many opportunities as possible to out put the language;2. Teachers'display questions surpass the referential questions, but they also ask much more referential questions than the former times, and the difference between them is small now;3. Some teachers give the students negative feedback habitually, such as "ok" "all right", or even no response sometimes, and most of the teachers give positive feedback after the students'response;4. Teachers do not only use the comprehension checks in interactional modification, but also use three of them, and sometimes the use of confirmation checks surpasses the other two kinds by some teacher;5. The students have enough opportunities to speak the target language in the classes, but some teachers incline to interrupt the students'response when they make minor mistakes.This research sheds some lights on the professional development of the in-service foreign language teachers. There is much room for improvement for this study. The author has not got an in-depth communication with the teachers under the research, therefore it is not able to know about the teachers'teaching concept sufficiently in a direct way. And this will influence the author's grasping the teachers'instructional features and concept.