A Study On Teachers’ Interactive Discourse In Higher Vocational College English Teaching

Teachers’ interactive discourse, as a major teaching language carrier, can provide students with more opportunities and impetus to input and output language; and can effectively facilitate the discourse interaction between teachers and students in foreign language class. Under the teachers’ guidance with interactive discourse, students are able to participate in classroom activities in a positive mind, which plays an important role in promoting students’ communicative competence. Accordingly, the foreign language teachers should pay attention to their teaching behaviors in class; and they are supposed to organize the classroom teaching with interactive discourse. It is significant for English teaching to do a study on classroom discourse interaction between teachers and students. A number of scholars at home or abroad have noticed the importance of teachers’ interactive discourse in achieving students’ language acquisition and have been engaged in such studies in or outside classes. A number of productive findings have been obtained, which have taken a strong influence on foreign language teaching. While, whether these study results can be applied into the English teaching in higher vocational and technical colleges has not been confirmed and it still needs further study. Hence, this thesis is designed to analyze the present status of English teachers’ classroom discourse in higher vocational colleges and explore the optimization measures for promoting the interactiveness of English teachers’ discourse.Following the objective stated above, this study is done on the basis of second language acquisition theories including Language Input Hypothesis, Language Output Hypothesis and Interaction Hypothesis. This study investigates a higher vocational college- Songshan Shaolin Wushu Vocational College based on the previous research. The method of “Naturalistic inquiring” which is considered as one of the most scientific approach in describing what is going on in English class is adopted during the whole research process. The main study methods such as classroom observation, questionnaire survey and interview are involved. A total of four questions are discussed which include:(1)What problems does the English teacher’ interactive discourse in higher vocational and technical college have?(2)What kind of teachers’ classroom discourse is preferred by students?(3)What are the characteristics and superiorities of teacher’ interactive discourses in helping students acquire the target language?(4)What measures will the researcher propose for optimizing English teachers’ interactive discourse? The study subjects include 6 full-time English teachers who have more than three years teaching experiences and 284 students from various classes in Songshan Shaolin Wushu Vocational College. They are in a teacher-student relationship. The researcher goes deep into the actual classrooms personally and takes a period of observation to each teacher’s class without informing them the purpose of the research previously. Each period lasts 90 minutes and the researcher does the job of describing the performance of teachers’ discourse well with the help of a digital voice recorder and taking notes. Afterwards, the author analyzes five aspects which have a close relationship with teachers’ interactive discourse. These five aspects include the ratio of teacher-student discourse amount, teachers’ questioning types, teachers’ feedback types, meaning negotiation times, situations of turn-taking. In addition, to get more authentic data, the researcher interviews these 6 teachers after classroom observation and makes questionnaire survey to these 284 students.By means of qualitative and quantitative analysis, the empirical research reveals the features of English teachers’ discourse in higher vocational college which includes:(1) The discourse amount ratio between teachers and students does not entirely conform to the modern teaching idea. Most teachers speak more than students in class. Moreover, the teachers excessively use Chinese in English language teaching, which goes against the principle of students’ language acquisition.(2) The display questions proposed by teachers in class appear to be much more than referential questions, which is of no benefit for improving students’ communicative ability. Students expect that they can be given more open questions other than mere appraisal of their memory for new words and language knowledge.(3) After students make responses to questions, the teachers can provide positive feedback in general, but their praise words show to be too simple, mechanical and sweeping. The feedback with teachers’ illustration or detailed remarks is favored by students.(4) The method of meaning negotiation interaction between teachers and students is rarely used to deal with communication obstacles; and the teachers use much more comprehension and confirmation checks than other initiation approaches such as clarification requests and initiation modification which are considered to be the best efficient interactive ways. Students also express their aspiration for communicating with teachers.(5) The classroom interaction demonstrates a one-way mode with teachers’ topic initiation followed by students’ responses and then teachers’ feedback, which means the IRF structure still occupies the most important position. While, students require to be given more learning autonomy. Referring to the results of data analysis to the teacher subjects and student subjects’ aspiration, the researcher suggests that the English teachers should try to:(1) combine their beliefs with actual teaching actions;(2) foster students’ motivation of learning English and maintain it;(3) lower students’ learning anxiety;(4) develop the interactive discourse strategies;(5) improve their teaching reflective competence.