Analyzing The Ecological Features Of A Successful High School English Teacher’s Classroom Discourse

As an important part of discourse analysis, classroom discourse analysis arose out of a variety of disciplines, say linguistics, sociology, psychology and anthropology. It has drawn a great attention in recent years and proves to be an effective way to study classroom teaching.From the perspective of ecology, this paper analyzed the discourse of five reading lessons of a successful high school English teacher. Recording, transcription and questionnaire were carried out to collect and analyze the data. This analysis was conducted in three stages:question types, proportional distributions of the discourse, mismatch in students’ answers and modality. The major findings of the research show the features of this successful teacher’s class, which can be described as follows:students have more opportunities to do oral practice by answering questions in chorus; secondly, when students’ silence occurs, the teacher often reframes the questions based on students’ life experience, which will produce real interaction. Besides, when confronted with mismatches in students’ answers, the teacher is likely to assume that every student’s answer makes sense and makes unexpected statement become a tool for thinking and learning rather than stick to the expected script; lastly, the teacher tends to use more expressions of medium and low modality values to cultivate students’ self-confidence and self-regulation.It is hoped this thesis can be of some reference value to high school English teachers as well as for future researchers.