An Analysis Of Senior High School English Teacher Talk—From The Perspective Of Speech Act Theory

According to Cook(1996:119), English teacher talk "refers to the amount of speech supplied by the teachers rather than the students in foreign language classroom." English teacher talk is not only for organizing English class, but also for English learners acquiring English language because English teacher talk is the major source of comprehensive target language input that learners are likely to receive. Senior high school English teacher talk plays the same role in English teaching. Therefore English teacher talk becomes a popular topic. Many researches have been done on this subject to present some suggestions for English teachers to improve their English teacher talk so as to improve teaching efficiency. Most of these researches are for college English teacher talk and some of them applied cooperative principle or polite principle to English teacher talk in senior high school.This study investigates senior high school English teacher talk from the perspective of Speech Act Theory and intends to provide some suggestions for English teacher talk. The Speech Act Theory was initially proposed by John Langshaw Austin in1950s. The purpose of this Speech Act Theory is to answer the question of how language is used to do things but not to designate things. English teacher talk should perform some actions. Each utterance of English teacher talk is used to do things which mean each utterance has to achieve its teaching intension. The research questions in my paper are the followings:1) Does English teacher talk have effect on students’ language learning?2) In students’ opinion, what kind of senior high school English teacher talk is efficient and useful?3) Whether do suggestions in students’ opinion really achieve teaching speech act?There are two questionnaires. The first one is for158students. All the participants were senior two students from Shaanxi ChengCheng middle School. This questionnaire includes five parts:greeting, instructive directives, preaching, questioning and feedback. Students were asked to fill in the questionnaire based on their class learning experience to choose options honestly. The second questionnaire is for4English teachers in this school which aims at investigating whether results taken from the first questionnaire can help English teachers achieve their teaching intention or teaching speech act. A corpus made by He Anping in South China Normal University helps understand current situation of English teacher talk in senior high schools.The implications of the findings in this study are followings:for greeting, English teachers’greeting should be helpful for students to be prepared for the class and to be interactive. English teachers’greeting should be simple and creative. For instructive directives, suggestions about the sentence structures and the time and amount are presented. For preaching, suggestions about the tone, teaching speed, sentence structure and features are presented. For questioning and feedback, more suggestions are presented for senior high school English teachers to improve their English teacher talk.