A Case Study On The Thought-oriented Function Of Teacher Talk In College English Class

Teacher talk refers to the speech a teacher uses to undertake the task in class. Teacher talk is the most important tool for handling the process of teaching and it is the main media for imparting knowledge to students. Recently, the research on teacher talk has made more educators pay attention to just because a lot of scholars have realized a teacher is a force in influencing the teaching results. Teacher talk researches mainly focus on pronunciation, vocabulary, syntax, discourse in its formal features or amount, questioning patterns, feedback and interactional modifications in its functional features. But another important function of teacher talk is neglected in previous studies. Teaching students to think is also very important objective for college English majors.It is a very serious problem of Chinese students being lack of thinking skills. Some experts have expressed their worries about it. He Qizi et al.(1999) points out that we neglect to train students’thinking ability while teaching language skills. The seminar of WTO Entry and English Major Education (2001) criticizes sharply that foreign language graduates are lack of thinking ability on analyzing, generalizing, decision making and reasoning skills. Some experts support this argument by doing experiments, such as Wen Qiufang and Zhou Yan (2006) make an empirical study by comparing foreign languages majors and the financial majors. They discover that foreign language majors’thought is not developed effectively in language learning. Their thinking ability is on the low levels. Teachers are the guiders and organizers in class and in the result, their speech can lead students to think deeply and effectively. So it is very necessary and vital to do the study on the thought-oriented function of teacher talk. In China, few articles systematically research on it and it is so rare to do such research based on the Socio-cultural Theory.Vygotsky’s Socio-cultural Theory presents a new explanation between language and thought. He believes the higher thinking ability, which humans have particularly, will be developed by the mediation of language in social activities. Language can not only make people to communicate but also control and change their mental processes. He emphasizes that language as a media plays an important role in developing humans’higher mental processes. Foreign languages teacher talk is a critical media for improving students’thinking ability.From this perspective, teacher talk is analyzed by two research questions in this study:(1) On which thinking levels is teacher talk involved in a complete unit teaching? What are the differences among teachers?(2) On which thinking levels is teacher talk involved in the same segment teaching? What are the differences among teachers?Four teachers are chosen from the same foreign languages college. The present study follows the way of natural field observation. In order to fulfill the purpose, this research uses the classroom observation and classroom video recording for collecting data, supplemented by teachers’interview. Marzano’s New Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (2007) is used as the measuring tool for classifying the thinking levels involved in teacher talk. The study procedures are as the following:First, the author recorded all the classes and made an interview with each teacher immediately after her class. Second, on the basis of collecting data, the author transcribed the record and the teacher interview sentence by sentence and check out the transcriptions for two times. Third, the author chose out the valid data. At last, the author classified the valid data into different thinking levels.Two results can be got in the study.1) All teachers are not aware that training students’ thinking ability is one of the educational objectives. The orientation of teacher talk on students’thinking ability is unsystematic and disorganized.2) Different thinking levels were involved in teacher talk. A large quantity of teacher talk just engaged students in some simple repetitive and mechanical thinking activities.Teacher talk is used in most classrooms but could be more effectively used to develop students’thinking. Teachers must take into account students’current proficiency levels when planning instruction. As college students, they need more help to develop their higher-level thinking abilities, especially developing their critical thinking. Teachers should present more opportunities for active engagement with the material.The innovations of this thesis focus on three points. The first one is on its theoretical base. This research is from a new perspective based on Vygotsky’s theory that language is the psychological tool for human mental process. The second one is the research methodology. This is an explorative and descriptive study on natural field observation. Marzano’s taxonomy provides a new measuring tool for classifying thinking levels in class discourse research. The third one is in its practice. This thesis will help teachers to realize the importance of teacher talk in its thought-oriented function and it is hoped that this idea can be applied in classroom teaching in the future.