An Analysis Of Classroom Discourse Features Of EFL Student-Teachers

In classrooms with English as a Foreign Language, teacher talk not only works as the method of organizing the whole class, but also is the target language input that students need to receive and imitate. So the quantity and the quality of teacher talk play a direct role on the teaching effect and students' target language output. Recently, teacher talk has become the focus of the classroom study. However, most researches center on the classroom talk of in-service EFL teachers, with few on that of EFL student-teachers, who are special category of English users, being both advanced English learners and novice teachers. In order to find out the real situation of their classroom interaction and feathers of teacher talk, the present study sets out to describe the interaction features of teacher talk in EFL student-teaching classrooms.The present study selects four student-teachers, majoring in English Education from Nanjing Normal University, as the research objects. Without any interfering, the author adopts Natural Inquiry method to observe the whole teaching process, collecting four classroom corpuses with Recorder Pen. For the convenience of analysis, the classroom features of student-teachers are described in the terms of four areas, namely, the amount of teacher talk, the structures of teacher-pupil discourse, the types of teacher questioning and the ways of teacher feedback. The study findings are as following:It is found that, on the whole, the classrooms of student-teachers tend to be the traditional teaching model, with the teacher as the center but not the students. The student-teachers are able to teach in English mostly, and therefore provide the students with sufficient target language input. However, the student-teacher take up the most amount of classroom time, so the students have few opportunity to speak English; the discourse structures are mainly the traditional IRF model; student-teachers set too much display questions, and can't feedback properly to lead further answers of students. Neither helps to initiate students'target language output. Meanwhile, student-teachers'expressions sometimes are not accurate, clear, and succinct.The results of the'present study can, on the one hand, guide student-teachers'teaching in the future, namely, arousing the consciousness to improve their teacher talk, and thus to create optimum language input for the students' language learning and to guide more students' English output, by constantly improving their discourse strategies. On the other hand, the results could offer suggestion for the language teacher education programs in Chinese Normal Universities, namely, specified English-teaching courses should be strengthened, especially the teacher-specific oral language skills.