An Investigation And Analysis Of Teacher Talk In English Classrooms Of Junior Middle School Based On Naturalistic Inquiry Approach

Teacher talk used by teachers is considered as the most important means in theirclassrooms. Teacher talk is of crucial importance, not only for the organization of theclassroom but also for the process of L2acquisition. Owing to its crucial importance,the scholars in western countries have done substantial studies on teacher talk in L1and EFL settings and have achieved a lot. Compared with oversea researches,domestic researchers have increasingly attached great importance to teacher talk.However, their studies mainly focused on teacher talk in College English classrooms.Few studies have dealt with teacher talk in Junior English classrooms, especially inthe rural middle school. Therefore, this present study attempts to investigate teachertalk against the background of The New Curriculum Standards.In2001, Ministry of Education issued The New English Curriculum Standardsfor Compulsory Education，which points out explicitly that the general goal is tocultivate the students’ language performance.The present study takes the input hypothesis, the output hypothesis and theinteractional hypothesis as the theoretical framework, combining the current researchfruits from both home and abroad, and attempts to answer the following questions:1)What is the frequency of two question types employed by six Junior Englishteachers respectively?2)What is the frequency of three types of interactional modification respectively?3)Which types of feedback are adopted when six Junior English teachersevaluate students’ classroom performances? What is the frequency of eachtype respectively?4)What is the amount of teacher talk and student talk respectively?By analyzing the characteristics of teacher talk, this study aims to investigate thecurrent situation of teacher talk in Junior English class where The New CurriculumStandards has been carried out for more than ten years, and reveals the effects of characteristics of teacher talk on English beginners’ language learning. In addition, theauthor puts forward tentative suggestions for the problems existing in teacher talk.Six teachers and300students are chosen as the subjects in this study. The authoradopts the naturalistic inquiry approach to observe six English teachers’ classroomsand records their speeches. And then the recordings of six English teachers’classrooms are transcribed into the text corpora. Next, the author analyzes the textcorpora carefully and presents the statistics of teacher talk from four aspects based onthe text corpora. Finally, the author discusses and analyzes teacher talk by using thequalitative approach to answer the above questions which are posed in this study.According to the observation into the classrooms and the statistic analysis ontheir talk of six teachers, the major findings are summarized as follows:1) The frequency of display questions is much higher than that of referentialquestions in Junior English classrooms.2) Among the three types of interactional modification used by six JuniorEnglish teachers in their classrooms,“comprehensible check” ranks the first,followed by “confirmation check”, while “clarification request” is the leastfrequently adopted.3) Six different types of feedback are employed by all the teachers. The totalnumber of positive feedback is bigger than that of negative feedback. Amongthree types of positive feedback,“simple praise” is used most frequently,ranking the first; followed by “praise and repetition”. Compared with theformer two,“praise and comment” is the least frequently used in Junior Englishclassrooms. As for three types of negative feedback,“direct correction”occupies the first place and “asking another learner’s repair” ranks the second,whereas,“leading learners’ self-repair” is not fully exploited by teachers. Yetamazingly, the total amount of positive feedback outnumbers that of negativefeedback. The explanation is probably that the teachers strive to construct alight and happy atmosphere so as to encourage English beginners to getinvolved into different types of classroom interaction.4) The amount of teacher talk is much more than that of student talk in the present study. In addition, compared with the use of target language in JuniorEnglish classrooms, mother tongue is employed less by six Junior Englishteachers. According to the findings in the present study, the teachers dominatethe entire classroom teaching processes and the opportunities given tostudents’ participation are quite few.All in all, some findings are encouraging and show slight changes in Englishteaching in the countryside schools, yet a safer conclusion is that six Junior Englishteachers observed in this study have not virtually carried out the requirementsprescribed in The New Curriculum Standards, and thus classroom teaching is still inthe teacher-dominated mode rather than learner-centred one.The findings will help would-be English teachers better understand the processof language learning and teaching in Junior English classrooms to some extent.Certainly, English teachers can benefit a lot from understanding their own teachingand help English teachers improve their classroom behavior. In addition, the resultsmay also provide beneficial evidences for the pedagogical researchers and thesupervisors in order to continue to explore better development and improvement ofEnglish teaching against the current background.