Discourse Analysis In College English Classroom

Recently, discourse analysis in classroom attracts the attention of linguists and classroom participants. It refers to analyzing the conversation of the teacher and students who participate in the teaching activities in the classroom environment. Teachers and students in classroom interaction contribute to discourse analysis. The research values of classroom discourse analysis lie in linguistics and English teaching. Nowadays, the research related to discourse analysis is endless, and the research orientation mainly focuses on the single aspect, the research of teacher talk. However, this thesis is mainly centered on the discourse analysis of teacher-student classroom interaction.This thesis makes a contrastive analysis on discourse in the traditional and multi-media aided classrooms from the perspective of adjacency pairs in discourse analysis. The aim of the thesis is to explore the structures, features, similarities and differences in the two classes with the different teaching methods in order to provide important theoretical foundation for the future teaching reform. The thesis recorded the two English classes with different teaching methods and extracted the content about the same period from the recording to transcribe. In addition, the thesis makes a detailed study on the extracted material in the light of the Krashen’s input hypothesis and Long’s interaction hypothesis of the Second Language Acquisition, applying the turn-taking rules, adjacency pairs and exchanges of discourse analysis.The study shows (1) in two classrooms the number of teacher initiation’turns is larger than that of students initiation’s turns. The turns initiated by the teacher are in the form of clauses, sentences and even cluster of sentences. The students’are inclined to be short. The teachers play a dominant role in allocating turns.(2) In the multi-media aided instruction English classroom there are some more diverse types of adjacency pairs, meanwhile, there appears the expansions of adjacency pairs, such as insertion sequence, pre-sequence and closing-sequence.(3) There exist IRF structures in both two English classrooms. However, in the multi-media aided instruction English classroom, the teacher would like to use IR1F1/R2F2structures, while, IR [I1R1(I2R2)] F structures are relatively more in the traditional English classroom.(4) Using the multi-media aided instruction is much advantageous to achieve the teaching objectives, and the teaching effect is more apparent.The thesis not only tries to enrich the theory of discourse analysis in the English classroom but also has some practical application values. There are some limitations on the research methods, data collection and data analysis. Finally, the author discusses the research implications to English teaching reform, moreover, provides the suggestions for further studies on adjacency pairs in discourse analysis.