A Study Of Teacher Talk In Middle School English Classroom From The Perspective Of CDA

The philosopher Foucault claims that discourse contains power. Classroom discourse is the mirror of the power relation between teachers and students. Teacher talk is a language variety used by teachers when they are in the process of teaching. It can not only instruct students to finish foreign language acquisition, but also show teachers’position in the classroom. This dissertation is to study the teacher talk in middle school English class from the perspective of CDA. It aims to prove and explain that English teachers take use of teacher talk to construct powerful position and play a role of authority.Based on the SFL and the CA, by using classroom audio, issuing questionnaires, this dissertation selects the discourse extracts from6English classes in a middle school of Huhhot and the author carries out a quantitative and qualitative analyses of the extracts from the perspectives of modality realizations, amount of teacher talk and adjacency pair. CDA is the framework of explanation for the social and cultural factors that lead to imbalanced power relation.It is found that:1) The median-value modality realizations are most frequently used of all; then the high-value ones and the low-value modality realizations are least used. It shows that in the teachers’speech, they express greater subjectivity and confidence in their powerful position. Therefore, compared with the students, they have more power.2) The amount of teacher talk time is larger than that of student talk time. It means during the process of teaching and learning, the teachers control more turns, while the students just passively receive the opportunity to talk.3) The teachers are the first part of the question-answer sequence. The answers to most of their questions are restricted to only one or two options. This kind of questions can reflect the teachers’higher power.The analysis of TT in this thesis is just an elementary analysis and it needs a lot of improvement.