A Study On Teacher Talk Of Young College English Teachers In Intensive Reading Courses

In recent years, with the prevalence of “student-centered teaching mode”, the study on teacher talk has attracted many scholars’ interest. As we all know,teacher talk is of great importance in foreign language teaching because it is not only the crucial instrument for teachers to transmit information, organize classroom activities and implement teaching plans but also the major source for language learners to access target language input. The famous scholar Hakansson(1986) ever pointed out that the quantity and quality of teacher talk directly influences or even determines the success or failure of teachers’ classroom teaching. However, relevant domestic studies on this issue didn’t come into being until the end of 1990 s and most of them paid much more attention to the reviews of western studies instead of some empirical investigations on the features of teacher talk,in particular young college English teachers’ speeches,in English classrooms. In view of this, it is of great theoretical value and practical significance to make empirical studies on teacher talk of young English teachers in the real EFL classrooms in the Chinese context.The present study, under the theoretical framework of Language Teaching Theory,Krashen’s Comprehensible Input Hypothesis and Swain’s Comprehensible Output Hypothesis, randomly chose six young teachers of 25-45 years old and 256 non-English majors in their six classes in Xi’an Polytechnic University as the research subjects and made a quantitative and qualitative analysis on the features of teacher talk of young college English teachers in Intensive Reading Courses from the following four aspects:classroom discourse structure, teachers’ questioning, teachers’ feedback and teacher talk time through a series of methods such as classroom observation and audio recording,audio transcription, questionnaires and interviews for both observed teachers and students.The results of the present study can be listed as follows: 1) There exist three kinds of discourse structures in the classes under investigation: IRF discourse structure,discourse structure less than three moves and discourse structure more than three moves,among which the rigid IRF structure plays a dominant role. 2) Display questions raised by young teachers far exceed referential ones and teachers’ average wait-time after raising a question is only 2.2 seconds. 3) Positive feedback especially “praise +repetition of S’ response” is preferred by young teachers. As for error correction, “direct correction” is much widely used. 4) Young teachers tend to speak more in classes and less class time is remained for students to practice target language. Besides, the Chinese used by young teachers is slightly higher than the English use.