Attitude Resources Of The Awarded College English Teachers’ Talks From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Teachers’talk exerts a great influence on promoting teaching results, foreign teachers’talk, however, has its own features. It is not only a tool by which teachers use to conduct the class, but also a significant resource for students’language input. With a large number of domestic and international researches on the Appraisal Theory as well as foreign language teachers’talk, particularly college English teachers’ talk, the scholars’studies vary from the Appraisal Theory itself, its advantages and disadvantages to the application of the theory. As for the studies on foreign language teachers’ talk, the scholars mainly touch on the teachers’ voice, rate of speech, asking questions and students’feedback, etc. But generally, these researchers focus on the analysis and description about the teachers’talk in the classroom without concerning about the emotional influence of it on the development of the whole class as well as the relationship between teachers and students. This paper attempts to study teachers’ talk by using a theoretical framework-Appraisal Theory. Through analyzing the attitude resources of classroom talk of four teachers who won the first and second prize in the1st National College English Contest (Among the four, there is one first prize and three second prize), this paper aims to identify the percentage of appraisal resources in their talk, analyze how these resources affect the effectiveness of classroom teaching, and how the teachers encourage students successfully to create a harmonious relationship between teachers and students.Appraisal theory was put forward by the functional linguist James Martin in the1990s and it is the further development about the interpersonal meaning under the framework of functional linguistics. This theory consists of three sub-categories: Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. The Attitude system is further divided into Affect, Judgment and Appreciation. For studying the Attitude resources in the teachers’ talk, quantitative and qualitative methods are combined in this paper. First, the author selects the attitude resources in the teachers’talk, second, the author calculates the proportion of each resource, and then analyze each clause to display how the teachers arrange a class and how they stimulate the students’interest.The research results show that, in the teachers’talk, Affect occupies the lowest proportion, followed by Judgment, while the Appreciation ranks the highest amount, which signifies the interpersonal meaning and emotional influence of college teachers’ talk and illustrates that college English teachers who follow the student-centered teaching principle comply with the modern education concept. The research results also set a typical example for college teachers about how to encourage students’ thinking and answering, how to make negative comments without dampening their enthusiasm and how to build a better teacher-student relationship by using proper teachers’ talk.The limitations of this paper lie in that, first because of space constraint, only four award-winning teachers’talks are selected and analyzed, so, it is not widely representative. In addition, contest differs from real classroom after all, which makes the analysis not comprehensive enough. Finally, some Appraisal resources might be overlooked because of the imperfection of the theory itself. But this paper attempts to test the feasibility of applying Appraisal Theory to the study of teachers’ talk and will be of some use for future researches in this area.