Research On Novice English Teacher Talk In Senior School

Teacher talk, as an important part of classroom research, is not only teachingmeans for teachers to impart information and organize activities, but also the essentialway for students to get language input. In view of its importance in languageacquisition and language teaching, many domestic studies on English teacher talksprang up, however, most of which focuses on experienced teacher talk and studentteacher talk while few research concentrate on novice English teacher talk.Novice English teachers are the new emerging force of Chinese English teaching.To some extent, the amount and quality of their classroom talk influence teachingefficiency and teachers’ professional development. So this study selected six noviceEnglish teachers from four different senior high schools in Nan Chang and about300students as research participants, aiming at finding out features of novice Englishteachers’ classroom talk, helping them to have a better understanding of teacher talkfunction, improving their classroom teaching and pushing their professionaldevelopment. Referring to existed research theories and framework, this studyanalyzed novice English teacher talk from two dimensions—input and interactionalfeatures of teacher talk. To be specific, seven aspects of novice English teacher talkwere analyzed, that is the amount of the target language used by the novice Englishteacher, syntactical features of novice teacher talk and input adjustments, amount ofteacher talk and student talk, types and distributions of teacher questioning, ways ofteachers’ feedback and interactional model between teachers and students.This study adopted naturalistic inquiry method to observe, record andaudio-record six novice English teachers’ class and made questionnaire survey for300students to supplement the limitation of naturalistic inquiry in class. The authoranalyzed the recording and marked the transcription attentively to make sure thatthese current transcriptions have good grounds to illustrate the input features andinteractional features of novice English teacher talk mentioned in the researchquestions. Descriptive statistics is employed to examine and calculate the percentageof target language usage, the distribution of sentences type, the amount of teacher talkand student talk, the distribution of each type of teacher questioning and teacherfeedback. Combining the results of questionnaire, the author mainly took qualitativemethod to discuss and analyze statistical results. The major findings are as follows:As to the input features of novice English teacher talk：1. On the whole, theamount of target language used by novice English teachers is a few, averagepercentage is39.4.2. Novice English teachers tend to frequently use simple sentencesin class. Sentences types are declarative centered while the amount of declarativesentence is much more than interrogative sentence. But comparing with traditionalclasses, novice English teachers are inclined to adjust classroom atmosphere andactivate students’ learning initiative.3. Novice English teachers often adopttranslation, explanation and repetition as strategies to adjust input according tospecific situations. In terms of interactional features of novice English teacher talk：1. The amountof novice English teacher talk is far more than student talk and other activities.2.There are misbalances among novice English teachers’ questions types. Thepercentage of close-ended questions is much higher than open-ended questions whilenovice teachers gave proper wait-time for students to think about questions afterraising questions. Concerning the way of teachers questioning, answering in chorus isoften adopted by novice English teachers.3. As for the ways of novice Englishteachers’ feedback, the positive ones are welcomed and favored by both teachers. Thetotal amount of positive feedback is much more than negative feedback. And mostteachers take repetition or repetition plus complement as their positive feedback. Butrepetition with praise or comment is seldom used by novice English teachers in thisstudy.4. Although interactional model of novice English teachers’ classes is various,the TST is the main model. Novice English teachers dominate classroom interaction.The results of this study have some pedagogical implications on novice Englishteachers’ foreign language teaching and professional development. On one hand,novice English teachers are supposed to improve their language competence, enrichchoices of language and pay more attention to effects of their talk on students’language learning; changing dominative role in class and improve students’ learninginitiative with student-centered class; optimizing teachers’ questioning and feedbacktechniques so as to increase classroom learning efficiency. On the other hand,increasing pre-service and in-service training, strengthening theories study onlanguage teaching and learning and combing teaching and researching are good waysto push their professional development.