Teacher Talks Of Student Teachers And Experienced Teachers In Secondary School English Classrooms: A Corpus-based Study

Teacher talk, as an important part of classroom analysis, has drawn muchattention from many applied linguistic researchers. However, most of the studiesconcentrate on the analysis of in-service teachers, but little attention is paid to thestudy of pre-service teachers. The study between experienced teachers and studentteachers is even fewer. Thus, the present study tries to find out the features ofexperienced teachers’ and student teachers’ talk. Specifically it examines four majorfeatures of classroom talk: the amount of teacher talk, the types of questions, teachers’feedbacks and the interactional modifications by analyzing the data from the NENUClassroom Discourse Corpus. Based on the analysis, the study finds:1) the talks ofboth experienced teachers and student teachers are still teacher-centered: there is moreteacher talk than student talk; display questions make a larger percentage thanreferential questions and the main modification tactic is comprehension checks.2)compared to that of student teachers, the talks of experienced teachers are orientedtowards student-centered pedagogical practice: they raise more referential questionsthan student teachers; they give more positive feedbacks than negative ones and thepraises are various and in accordance with the students’ performance with specificcomments.3) experienced teachers correct student errors more implicitly whilestudent teachers do it more explicitly; experienced teachers are more fluent in teachertalk and give students more chances to produce language output and involve studentsinto class interactions, giving them more opportunities to conduct two-waycommunication and negotiate meaning.Based on the findings, some implications are given as follows:1) bothexperienced teachers’ and student teachers’ classes should be more student-centered:control their teacher talk and let the students have more chances to talk in class; askmore referential questions than display ones; use more confirmation checks andclarification request.2) student teachers can learn from experienced teachers from thefollowing aspects: be more fluent in teacher talk; give students more positivefeedbacks, which are not mechanical and general praising words but comments inaccordance with students’ performance; try not to correct students’ errors explicitlyand use more modification tactics to make the classroom communication two-way rather than one-way.