Teacher Talk In Students’ Knowledge Construction

As a major kind of teachers’ behaviors, teacher talk (TT) plays quite an important role inclassroom teaching and knowledge learning. Since1970s, more and more research has beendone concerning about TT. However, most of the traditional analyses and studies tend tostudy TT itself, such as the types of TT, the structure of TT, the function of TT and so on.Though some researchers have done some studies on TT in the field of SLA, such as Ellis andMa Xiaoyan, few researchers have paid attention to the significant role of TT in guidingstudents to do collective thinking and to construct knowledge jointly and actively in Englishteaching.According to the theory of Mediation in Sociocultural Theory (SCT), especiallyMercer’s point of view about TT as a kind of mediation, the process of learning is a kind ofinteractive process comprising of learners, more capable person and symbolic tools given bythe society. Mercer has done specific research about the mediational role of TT in students’knowledge construction. According to him, TT as a special kind of mediation is not only thetool of thinking and communication but also the tool of students’ knowledge construction.And under the guidance of TT, language learners could think collectively and constructknowledge cooperatively.This study seeks to apply the theory of Mediation, especially the theory of teachers’language in students’ knowledge construction put forward by Mercer to the study of TT inEnglish majors’ classroom teaching. It aims to explore thoroughly the effect of TT in learners’knowledge construction.The teacher in this study is an experienced English teacher for English majors in Collegeof Foreign Languages of Shandong Agricultural University (SDAU). The classroom teachingtaken as the special case of the current study is American Literature where the teacher and herstudents as well as students themselves interact with each other frequently. The research takesthe interaction between the teacher and her students as the research focus. It aims to answertwo questions:(1) What types of teacher talk are there in classroom teaching?(2) How doesthe teacher use teacher talk to guide students to construct knowledge? To answer the twoquestions, the author collected and transcribed classroom recordings and did classroomobservation as the source of the research data. After data collection, the author used Mercer’stheory to analyze the classification and use of TT in helping students construct knowledge.The data about TT and the effect of it were treated with the research method of Sociocultural discourse analysis proposed by Mercer in2004with the specific purpose of analyzing the roleof language in classroom teaching especially in students’ knowledge construction.The results show that there are mainly three types of TT, namely, TT to elicit knowledgefrom learners, TT to respond to what learners say and TT to describe significant aspects ofshared experience, of which the type of TT to respond to what learners say is used with thehighest frequency, the next is TT to elicit knowledge from learners and TT to describesignificant aspects of shared experience is used least. To fulfill the aim of guiding students toconstruct knowledge, the teacher mainly uses some kinds of techniques:(1) direct elicitationsand cued elicitations are used to elicit knowledge from students and to inspire them to thinkindependently and construct knowledge actively;(2) techniques of confirmations, repetitions,elaborations and reformulations are quite helpful in encouraging students’ participation inknowledge construction by responding to what learners say;(3) with the help of techniques of‘we’ statements, literal recaps and reconstructive recaps, the teacher could lead students todescribe significant aspects of shared experiences so as to construct knowledge throughconnecting the known knowledge with the current learning. Meanwhile, the technique ofconfirmations in the second type TT is used relatively much more, but the variety of it is toomonotonous with little flexibility and diversity. Therefore, it couldn’t be made full use of inguiding students’ knowledge construction. And the thorough analysis of the case showsconvincingly that TT is the mediational tool of collective thinking as well as the mediationaltool for students’ knowledge construction. Therefore, teachers should use TT to help studentsdo collective thinking and construct knowledge consciously.