A Study Of Teacher Talk Of College English In The Universities For Nationalities

The past decades have witnessed a prosperous development in English as Second Language Teaching, among which, many focuses are stressed on the relationship between instructors and learners in the language classroom and how teachers’behavior influences the learner’s language outcomes. Specially, teacher talk as the branch of classroom talk is closely investigated and a large number of findings are achieved by the diligent researchers.Based on the theory of Krashen’s Input Hypothesis, Long’s Interaction Theory and Swain’s Output Hypothesis, this thesis studies the teacher talk from the model classes organized by State Ethnic Affairs Commission of the People’s Republic of China, there are eight teachers involved in the classes who are from seven different universities. The results will be displayed in the amount of teacher talk, teacher questions, styles of teacher feedback and the discourse markers in the teachers’ classroom discourse. Through the analysis of language transcriptions and the application of corpus, this study finds:1. All the model English classes are still teacher-centered; students are passive in the classroom and have little opportunity to participate in classroom activities to practice the target language. The amount of teacher talk occupies half or even three quarters of the whole class time.2. All the teachers raised much more display questions than referential questions, and the questions that can arouse students’interest or imagination are not enough. Most display questions are around the understanding of the reading material.3. Teachers’feedback is so vague and general,"good" is the easiest and quickest access for most teachers to give comments on the students’performance.4. Discourse markers are underutilized, and this phenomenon is very common among the eight teachers. They always resort to "OK" when making transitions, pauses..Inevitably, there are some limitations in the present study, because of unavailable research instruments as well as limited research competence of researcher. After all, the present study shed some lights on the foreign language teaching in the universities for nationalities.