A Contrastive Study On Teacher Elicitation In College English Classrooms

Currently studies of classroom interactions have generated wide interest in how teacher-student and peer-to-peer interaction promote students' active participation during the instruction in college foreign language teaching, especially in the Chinese context. Yet we have limited knowledge of how teachers regulate student participation in classroom discussions and how this regulation affects students' cognitive development. Many linguists and educators did researches on classroom discourse analysis and have received large numbers of research findings about Teacher Talk. But the relevant study on teacher elicitation is quite rare, not to mention the study on the different types of teacher elicitation.In order to conduct this study, both quantitative and qualitative analyses are to be adopted. Participants are students and college English teachers in six college English classrooms in a university in Zhejiang province. They are classified into two groups:a group of novice teachers and a group of expert teachers. After the transcriptions of six class recordings have been carefully analyzed and identified,319teacher elicitations are tagged out. According to Mehan's categorization system for teacher elicitations, the research makes a statistical analysis on the variations and respective features of teacher elicitation of each type, as well as the functions of teacher elicitation.The novice teachers are more likely to employ "learner-centered" teaching mode, and they provided more elicitation questions and statements than the expert teachers. With the high frequency of the choice elicitation (CE) and product elicitation (PE), the quality of novice teacher elicitation is not good enough and has to be improved. The advantage of expert teachers lies in the high frequency use of target language which makes students with more exposure to target language. They are inclined to use "teacher-centered" teaching mode, but their elicitation techniques are more skillful than novice teachers. They regulate the level of complexity of his elicitations in response to students'responses, which increase the learner's participation and the output of the target language.The aim of the present study is to help the English teachers to understand how to draw students'attention in the classroom instruction, stimulate their participation and engagement in the activities and scaffold students'construction of target language knowledge. Despite the theoretical and practical value of this study, some limitations are still need to be mentioned, such as the limited size of the subjects, the subjective process of the categorization of teacher elicitation. These limitations require more efforts on the related studies in the near future.