A Study Of Teacher Talk In The Higher Vocational College English Class

In recent years, teacher talk (TT), as a medium for teaching and also one of main sources of learners’language input, has been valued gradually. Researches on teacher talk have been focused mainly on undergraduate universities, and relevant TT analysis studies focusing on higher vocational college English classroom are rare. With the purpose of finding out the features of TT, the author selects five English teachers from Sino-Australian College in Xi’an Polytechnic University as research subjects. Through classroom observation, tape-recordings, questionnaire and teachers’interview, the author makes an investigation and analysis on teacher talk from the aspects of TT amount, methods of teachers’ questioning, teachers’feedback as well as teacher-student communicative interaction etc.The research results indicate that in the higher vocational college English classroom, the amount of TT reaches70%-80%, which is much higher than that of the previous studies. And through an analysis of target language and mother tongue use in TT, namely the quantity of English and Chinese, it is shown that the use of mother tongue takes up a slightly lower proportion than that of English, in some classes even equal to the use of English. Teachers’questioning in display questions is much higher than that of referential ones, which reaches92.65%; what’s more, the students’ questionnaire result also proves that the greater part of students prefer in-chorus answering. Meanwhile, teachers’ feedback is statistically found in the higher vocational college English classroom, the positive feedback of "simple praise" has the highest frequency. More than half of students prefer that teachers correct their mistakes or errors, as a matter of fact,36.25%ones also expect to self-correct with their teachers’guidance. And71.25%students approve of leaving enough waiting time before they make a response. In addition, among three modes of interactive adjustment, the comprehensible verification is adopted frequently by teachers, while the clarifying request mode is barely used. Finally, the author discusses the influential factor through classroom observations, that is, students’turn silence in the teacher-students’interactive turn-taking process, aiming at proposing how to improve students’turn-taking skills. Some pedagogical implications are also provided to promote interaction between the teacher talk (TT) and students talk (ST) in the higher vocational college English classroom.