A Study Of Excellent Teacher Talk In Senior High School English Class

Teacher Talk is a language adopted by teachers during the teaching process. In English teaching classroom, Teacher Talk is not only a tool for teaching knowledge, organizing classroom teaching and carrying on teaching plan, but also an important channel of students’ language input. English is foreign language in China, and as a result, it is difficult for students to find more effective and comprehensible inputs after class than the effective input provided by teachers in the classroom. Therefore, Teacher Talk plays an important role in English teaching and learning. However, Teacher Talk haven’t got enough attention for decades, since many researchers and teachers focus on teaching methods and teaching contents rather than the actual teaching process. Since the late1990s, the study of Teacher Talk has been introduced into China, but most researchers still center on the study of the related theories and literature review in the West and the empirical study of the researches of Teacher Talk is relatively rare. Therefore, it is necessary to strengthen the empirical research of Teacher Talk in Chinese English classrooms.The current research is based on Krashen’s Comprehensible Input Hypothesis, Swain’s Output Hypothesis and Long’s Interaction Hypothesis. Through exploiting corpus data collection and watching the teaching videos of excellent high school English teachers attending The Eighth National Senior High School English Teachers’ Teaching Demonstration and Research Competition, the researcher tries to answer research questions from three aspects:lead-in time and methods used by teachers in class, the types and frequency of question language and those of feedback language. A computer is used to watch and study the teaching videos, and Microsoft Excel is used to collect and analyze the data. The results are as followings:Firstly, the teachers’ lead-in time is between3to5minutes. The form of lead-in is multiple, but the amount of lead-in forms exploited by the four teachers is just between2to3and they all choose multimedia and questions to do the lead-in activities.Secondly, teachers’ questions are usually stimulating students to maximize their output of target language. Wh-questions used by the four excellent teachers account for61.35%, far higher than other questions.Lastly, the four excellent teachers prefer positive feedback to negative one in class. In terms of positive feedback, Short and simple praise is the majority which accounts for46.16%; for the negative feedback, giving students clues to make it easy for students to answer questions accounts for49.29%.On the basis of the research, some pedagogical enlightenment is suggested:Teachers should control lead-in time span and choose the appropriate ways to do it. A good balance should be kept between Wh-questions and other questions when asking questions and appropriate and positive feedback should be used more often then negative feedback. Teachers should be fully aware of the importance of classroom Teacher Talk on students’English learning. Teachers should offer students more opportunities to participate in class activities and improve the teaching efficiency by paying more attention to their own talk.It cannot be denied that there are some shortcomings existing in the current study:first of all, the class teaching is not completely authentic, since the teachers and students have prepared very fully for the class presentation. Next, the researcher has no chance to interview students in these four classes and fails to understand the student’s real experience. Finally, four teachers are all from the developed areas, with no excellent teachers from less developed areas.There are some suggestions for future researches:besides the three aspects studied here in this study, future researches may focus on the tempo of Teacher Talk and the students’ability to understand Teacher Talk. Besides, interviews should be conducted to study Teacher Talk from the perspective of students themselves.