An Investigation Of Teacher Talk In Senior High School English Classrooms

Teacher talk has widely attracted both teachers and researchers’ attention and itdeserves a closer look. Teacher talk functions as the basic way to enhance theinteraction between the teacher and the students as well as the indispensable channelto obtain input for students in class. Since the New Curriculum Standard came intoeffect, the problem on how to improve teacher’s teaching and how to cultivate thestudents’ learning has become the focus in the language classroom and teacher talk isone of the key factors influencing senior high school students’ classroom languagelearning process. It is through teacher talk that the students can obtain certain amountof input which consists of the students’ major language learning resources. Therefore,it is very significant to investigate the teacher talk in senior high school Englishclassroom.Based on the previous studies, it shows that teacher talk determines the success orfailure of the teaching plans to a great extent. However, in China, a majority of theprevious researches are restricted in the university settings; to date, few of them focuson the teacher talk in senior high school English classroom interaction. Thus, thepurpose of the present study is to explore the features of teacher talk based on anatural senior high school setting from the following aspects: the amount of teachertalk and student talk in senior high school English classroom, the frequency of displayquestions and referential questions, and the frequency of positive feedback andnegative feedback.In the present study, the subjects involved are210Senior Two students and4teachers in a key senior high school of Yichun in Jiangxi. The subjects are chosen atrandom. Three instruments were used to collect data, that is, classroom observationand tape-recording, students’ questionnaire, and teachers’ interview. Each of the fourteachers was recorded one period of their teaching processes in class and interviewedby the researcher after class. Then, the recorded materials were transcribed.210Senior Two students from4classes of the four observed teachers were asked toanswer the questionnaire on senior high school English classroom teacher talk. Thestudent questionnaire adapted from Zhou Xing&Zhou Yun (2002) is composed of16 items. And results of the returned questionnaire were presented through SPSS17.0together with the discussion of the teachers’ interview analyzed in support of the datacollected by the classroom observation and transcription.The present study has yielded the findings as follows:Firstly, the amount of teacher talk far outweighs student talk in senior high schoolEnglish classroom. And most of teacher talk is mechanical repetition resulting in littleinteraction between the teacher and students. Secondly, the teachers prefer displayquestions to referential questions. Meanwhile, the teachers are inclined to direct thequestions to the whole class instead of individual student. Thirdly, the teachersfrequently give simple praise among positive feedback; in terms of negative feedback,the teachers are more likely to provide elicitation among corrective feedbacks.Some implications are concluded based upon the above results of the Englishteaching of high school. The practical suggestions are put forward to enhance theclassroom interaction teaching and to steer the teachers and students in the rightdirection, such as providing students with comprehensible input as much as possibleinstead of the mechanical repetition, maximizing the students’ participation andsuccess in classroom, etc.