A Case Analysis Of Teachers’ Talks Of English Teachers At Primary Schools In Shanghai

The class is an important setting where second language learning takes place. For many L2learners, it is almost the only place where they have regular contact with the target language, which is much the case in China. Teacher talk as external conditions for language learning plays an important part in yielding favorable linguistic environment for learners to engage themselves in. Within the classroom research setting, L2class is usually described by analyzing both its linguistic characteristics and its interactional characteristics. However, recent research literature is somehow biased toward interaction analysis and ignores input analysis. Based on these understandings, my paper intends to describe the input features of teacher talk in English class at Chinese primary schools.My thesis describes linguistic features of English teachers’talk in class in terms of five areas:amount of teacher talk, rate of speech, turn-taking, functional distribution of teacher talk and syntactic features.By analyzing classroom observations, the study gets to the following conclusion:The results of the study reveal that the situation in which teacher talk takes more class time is changed. Students are given more opportunities for communication in the target language. In addition, rate of speech tends to be slowed down in order to facilitate learners’comprehension, but it still appears to be a little fast for the beginners. It shows apparent differences in turn-taking among teachers and students in different schools. Teachers tend to simplify their language by using shorter sentences.The result of my paper can illuminate pedagogy. Teachers are expected to have more self-awareness of their speech and try to create optimal language environments through improving their classroom talk.