A Study On Efl Teachers’ Cognition Of Teacher Talk In The Classroom

Teacher Talk is of crucial importance, not only for the organization and management of the classroom but also for the processes of acquisition (Nunan,1991). Both western and Chinese scholars did research on Teacher Talk from the perspective of Discourse Analysis or Second Language Acquisition and made great achievements. However, they only focused on the "outside" dimension, namely observable dimension of Teacher Talk and ignored the "inside" dimension, namely unobservable dimension of Teacher Talk, that is, a perspective from teacher cognition.The present study is from the perspective of teacher cognition and focuses on the "inside" dimension of Teacher Talk because the development of teacher cognition research has suggested that understanding teacher cognition is central to the process of understanding teaching. The author attempts to explore how Chinese EFL teachers in basic education perceive Teacher Talk and what factors have an impact on EFL teachers’ cognition of Teacher Talk. Thus, the present study will provide a new research perspective for the future research on Teacher Talk, meanwhile provide insights into the nature of Teacher Talk and deepen the understanding of what Teacher Talk is. And much help can be offered for Chinese EFL teachers in basic education from the theoretical level and operational level. It can help them not only to have a deeper understanding of Teacher Talk as well as teaching but also to deepen their understandings of what it means to become and to be a teacher.The author collected the raw data and conducted corresponding studies mainly from the preliminary interview and questionnaire. The interview was applied as an auxiliary research tool, while the questionnaire was considered as main data sources, helping construct the central part of the study. The interview was made on October9,2011, and the questionnaire drawing support from the internet lasted18days, from December13to31,2011. Finally, there were totally164teachers taking part in the anonymous questionnaire survey and141questionnaires were adopted for statistical analysis. Then the author analysed the transcript of the interview and concluded the viewpoints of the interviewee about Teacher Talk. Calculating the mean and standard deviation of43questionnaire items, analyzing the values and describing the final result were the main work of descriptive data analysis. SPSS13.0(the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) was used for the inferential analysis of the data, specifically, making general linear process of data as well as post hoc test.Based on the result of data analysis, the author finds that the cognition of Chinese EFL teachers in basic education shows great differences in three dimensions and nine aspects of Teacher Talk. Gender has no impact on cognition about Teacher Talk, while teaching experience and teaching grade have significant impact. Therefore, the author suggests that different types of Chinese EFL teachers in basic education should improve their cognition about Teacher Talk based on their own situations. In particular, they should be more concerned about L1use and code-switching because they can really function as an effective teaching strategy in L2and foreign language classroom under the support of related theories and application in formal instruction. On the basis of the importance and significance of Teacher Talk in Chinese EFL teaching, the author considers that Teacher Talk should be brought into Chinese teacher education system as an independent discipline. It will be very significant for Chinese EFL teaching and teachers in China.