Analysis Of Attitude In Teacher Talk In EFL Classroom

Discourse analysis (DA), in which classroom discourse analysis (CDA) is more popular, has drawn much attention of many domestic and foreign linguists for a long time. The present study has closely focused on the analysis of teacher talk (TT) in English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom. At present, there are lots of studies about teacher talk, but little attention is paid to the influence of the interpersonal meaning and the attitudinal factors of teacher talk on the interaction between the teacher and the students as well as on the teaching process and teaching effect.Appraisal theory by J. R. Martin is a new lexico-grammatical framework, which is derived from the interpersonal meaning of the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The theory is composed of three systems:Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. Each system can still be divided into its own subsystems. Appraisal theory has been a new and hot issue for researchers nowadays. However, it is found that not many studies about teacher talk have adopted the Appraisal theory as a guiding theory. Based on the Attitude system as the general framework, and adopting both quantitative and qualitative research methods, this research analyzes the Attitude resources embodied in the teacher talk of ten oral English classes delivered by five excellent English teachers and aims to find out how the attitude resources are used by the teachers in EFL classroom to shorten the distance from students, inspire their motivation, and create more active class atmosphere for better teaching effect.The paper consists of five chapters. The first chapter is a general introduction to the background, purpose, significance and organization of the research. The second chapter is a review of the previous studies on teacher talk and Appraisal theory, in which the current research status is presented and the research gap is also pointed out. The third chapter is, apart from a brief introduction to the background and an overview of Appraisal theory, the detailed introduction to the theoretical framework of Attitude and its three systems:Affect, Judgment and Appreciation. The fourth chapter is a detailed analysis of the attitude resources in teacher talk in ten classes given by five excellent oral English teachers, in which the total amount of the sentences which embody attitude, its three systems, and the subcategories of each system, together with the frequency of these resources, will be presented sequentially and respectively, followed by a detailed explanation of the possible reasons. Meanwhile, adequate examples sentences embodying each system and subsystem of Attitude will be presented to show how these five teachers use these Attitude resources to inspire students’motivation, and achieve more active class atmosphere for better teaching effect. Chapter four is the main part of the thesis. The last chapter is a conclusion of the chief findings, with the limitations pointed out and future plans provided.Through a comparatively detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis, some conclusions are drawn in this thesis:(1) Attitude resources are widely distributed in teacher talk.(2) As a whole, the frequency of Affect, Judgment and Appreciation resources changes systematically, with frequency of Affect the lowest, that of Judgment second, and that of Appreciation the highest. Meanwhile, the frequency of each subcategory among Affect, Judgment and Appreciation resources is very different.(3) Affect subcategory resources, Dis/inclination, Dis/satisfaction, In/security and Un/happiness, are used by the teachers to express their own feelings and opinions; Judgment subcategory resources, Capacity, Tenacity, Propriety, Veracity and Normality are used to evaluate students’ abilities and characteristics; Appreciation subcategory resources, Reaction are used to evaluate students’ performance while Composition and Valuation are to evaluate the teaching content.(4) The teachers utilize positive Attitude resources to praise students in an explicit way, with negative Attitude resources to criticize them in a mild or implicit way. In this way the students will be encouraged to take part in the class activities more actively.Appropriate and effective teacher talk results in the harmonious atmosphere in class and friendly relationship with students for better teaching effect. Not only this study can enrich the application of the Appraisal theory in teacher talk, but more importantly it can rouse teachers to more thinking about their evaluative clause on students in their teacher talk in classroom and how to take good use of Attitude resources to better interact and form harmonious relationship between teacher and students for better teaching effect, which is beneficial to the development of language teaching. It is expected that this research will be pedagogically significant as a guiding reference for teacher talk.