Comparative Analysis Of Teacher Talk Between Student Teacher And Mentor Teacher In The EFL Classroom

Teacher talk is the major source of comprehensible target language input to learners in the foreignlanguage classroom teaching. It is also an important means of regulating learners’ classroom behavior,studies on teacher talk can help to reveal the process of classroom teaching and improve classroomteaching effect. The current study aims at exploring the features of teacher talk in English classroombetween student teachers and mentor teachers from the perspective of teacher’s professional development,with the view of giving some Pedagogical suggestions to student teachers’ pre-service training andin-service teachers’ professional development. Specifically, this study stresses in the teacher talk on theprocess of EFL classroom and contrastively analyzes the features of teacher talk in high school Englishclassroom between student teachers (senior interns) and mentor teachers from four dimensions, namely, thepattern of teacher and student discourse interaction type, teacher discourse quantity, teacher’s questioningtype and teacher’s feedback manner.With the framework of qualitative research, the discourse analysis, classroom observation, videorecording, questionnaire as well as one coding scheme is employed along with an empirical quantitativeanalysis to demonstrate the variations of teacher talk among four student teachers from one key normaluniversity in Gansu Province and four mentor teachers from two key high schools in Lanzhou City. Thecurrent study investigates the variation of teacher talk among eight participations from two angles ofquality and quantity with the basis of theoretical foundations of Krashen’s Comprehensible InputHypothesis, Long’s Interaction Theory, Swain’s Comprehensible Output Hypothesis and Social interactiontheories. All the statistics of this thesis is taken from transcriptions of the classroom video recordings, afterencoding and analyzing the transcriptions, some major findings are demonstrated as follows:As to teacher and student discourse interaction type, the result shows that the complex IRF are leastfrequently addressed by both the mentor teachers and student teachers, while the mentor teachers adoptmore comparatively complex IRF pattern than that of the student teachers and less basic IRF pattern thanstudent teachers’. It is also found that where there are less interactive activities there are less complex IRFpattern.In terms of the teacher discourse quantity, it is found that teacher talking time is mainly prominentover the students talking time on the whole, regardless of mentor teachers’ classes or student teachers’classes. It is also found, according to classroom observation, where there are less interactive activities there is less students’ discourse quantity but more teachers’ discourse quantity.Concerning teacher’s questioning type, the result shows that display questions are more frequentlyraised than the referential ones in the classes of both the mentor teachers and the student teachers, while thetotal number of questions that the mentor teachers put forward is much more than that of the studentteachers. It is also found that the mentor teachers prefer to ask questions in their classes, at the same time,where there are more questions, particularly more referential questions, there are more teacher and studentinteraction by classroom observation.Finally, with respect to teacher’s feedback type, the finding displays that the positive feedbacks offeredby mentor teachers are a little less than those of the student teachers, and the negative feedbacks used bymentor teachers are a bit more than those of student teachers, while the total number of feedbacks of thementor teachers is a little more than that of the student teachers. It is also found that teachers who prefer toask questions in their classes offer more feedbacks to their students and have more teacher and studentsinteraction than those who don’t like to.The findings of the present study have implications on teacher education, teacher development andlanguage teaching, and which have certain positive meaning on the high school English teaching. Inevitably,some limitations are along with the present study, in which interviews with teachers and students areunavailable because of the difficulties and inconvenience of the participants involved, as well as datacollection and statistics is not very accurate. However, as an exploratory research, the present studyinvestigates the variation of teacher talk between student teachers and mentor teachers in high schools fromthe perspective of teacher professional development and expect to have some assistance on both pre-serviceand in-service teachers’ education, training and development.