An Analysis Of The Interactional Features Of The Classroom Discourse Of Topnotch Junior English Teachers

Teacher talk is one of the most important parts in classroom teaching, and it's very useful to make empirical studies on it. This paper will give overall and systematic analyses and statistics on the classroom discourse interaction of 6 topnotch middle school English teachers.The writer has selected 6 topnotch English teachers from middle schools for research. By means of observing, videotaping and transcribing, the author summarizes and analyzes the five aspects of teacher talk. Meanwhile, in order to provide evidence for the result of video analysis from another point of view, this study has made a survey of the 280 students in the classes of the writer's school by a questionnaire. The results of the questionnaire survey and video analysis provide two groups of information, which jointly reveal the features of the teacher talk of topnotch middle school English teachers. The study results are as follows:(1) The amount of teacher talk is often slightly larger than that of student talk.(2) The teachers use referential questions more frequently than the display ones.(3) Topnotch teachers' classroom discourse has more complicated modes than the IRF structures. They are good at using repetition, adding more questions and other methods to bring out more language output out of the students.(4) When there come difficulties in communication, the method the teachers most frequently use is confirmation check.(5) In the feedback the teachers give to the students'classroom performance, all the teachers use positive feedback and give relevant comments after praising them.According to the investigation results and relevant research results, this study also gives some advice on how to perfect teacher talk:(1) Teachers'development training should be encouraged and teachers should improve their oral English and theoretical level of their foreign language teaching skills.(2) Traditional teaching patterns should be reformed, the "teacher-centered" mode should be changed into the "student-centered" mode, and teachers should change their own traditional role in class.(3) Questions should be designed reasonably; on the basis of the students' language level and the course tasks, teachers can add some referential questions properly in order to promote more language output from the students.(4) Teachers should encourage, help and guide students to take part in communication actively, lead them to have negotiation of meaning, and give the students more opportunities to make mutual communication in English.(5) Reasonable feedback should be given to the students'classroom performance, using more positive feedback like praising, encouraging, and so on.