A Corpus Based Study Of Classroom Discourse In Urban And Rural Senior High Schools

This thesis studies the teacher talks produced in the English classrooms of rural and urban senior high schools, with a specific focus on the amount of teacher talk, types of teacher questioning, teacher-student communication tactics and styles of teacher feedback. Through classroom observations and analysis of classroom transcripts selected from the corpus, this study finds: 1) the rural English classes are still teacher-centered; students are in a passive position and have fewer opportunities to participate in classroom activities to use the target language; to be specific, teachers spend much time explaining language points, raise much more display questions than referential questions, use more comprehension checks as the class communication and modification tactic. 2) However, in the city senior high school, teachers tend to involve more students into class interactions, to provide more opportunities for students to conduct two-way communication and negotiate meaning. In the city senior high school, teachers raise more referential questions than those in the rural senior high school; in the way of class communication and modification, teachers prefer confirmation checks rather than comprehension checks; from the perspective of positive feedback, teachers use much more positive feedbacks than those in the rural senior high school. Based upon the findings, this thesis provides some implications: 1) teachers in the urban school have begun to pay attention to put students as the learning center, to provide more learning and speaking opportunities in classes and to give them more affirmation and encouragement. However, teaching in the urban school still can be improved; to some extent, the teacher talk is still not natural. 2) In the rural school, teachers had better try to avoid the traditional grammar-translation teaching method. They had better try not to hold tight control on the class. They should give great importance to develop students'learning interest and help build up students'self-confidence through adding more classroom activities and providing more chances for students to participate into them, which is helpful to students'language acquisition.