An Analysis Of Teacher Talk Of Excellent Senior-High School English Teachers In Reading Classes In The New Curriculum Setting

The subjects involved in this research were six excellent senior-high school English teachers who won the first prize in the 2010 Model Lessons Competition of Zhejiang Province. By observing, recording and transcribing these six reading classes of these excellent senior-high school English teachers, together with the interviews with them and the questionnaire surveys from their 279 students, this research made a fairly systematic study of teacher talk, in hope of exploring the rate of the amount of teacher talk and student talk in the reading classes, the typical characteristics of teacher talk of excellent senior-high school English teachers, the types of teachers’ questions, the patters of interaction modification and the way of teacher’s feedback. After carefully analyzing the data, we have got the following findings:1. According to the data collected from the six reading classes of excellent senior-high school English teachers, the amount of teacher talk is approximately equal to that of the students.2. Excellent senior-high school English teachers use longer and more complex sentence to express their ideas and organize classroom activities though IRF structure still exists, which leads to various modes of communication between teachers and students.3. In terms of questioning, these excellent Senior-high school English teachers tend to use display questions to help students better understand the reading materials while during the pre-reading and post-reading periods, they often design many referential questions for students.4. Excellent senior-high school English teachers prefer to use more comprehension checks than confirmation checks, and seldom use clarification requests of interaction modification to communicate with their students in the reading classes. 5. Concerning teacher’s feedback, excellent senior-high school English teachers mainly use positive feedbacks and hardly use negative feedbacks to encourage students to speak English more often in their classes.