A Comparative Analysis Of Pre-service Teacher Talk Before And After Teaching Practicum

With the rapid development of globalization, how to promote Englishcommunication competence becomes a significant issue for English education inChina. EFL teachers’ target language input plays a crucial role for students to learnEnglish. For most English learners in China, teacher talk in English class is themain source of target language input. Concerning the importance of teacher talk, itis necessary to do empirical and interpretive observation of teacher talk. However,most researchers focus on the talk of in-service EFL teachers, and few on thepre-service teachers or student teachers, who are advanced English learners andnovice teachers. For lack of studies on this interesting category, this study sets outto present their teacher talk. Furthermore, being pre-service teachers, Microteaching classes and teaching practicum classes provide them with opportunities tomove from students to teachers. They may encounter many problems or difficultiesand their teacher talk may present different characteristics in the Micro teachingclasses and teaching practicum classes. This investigation tries to make comparativeanalysis of their teacher talk in Micro teaching classes and in teaching practicumclasses from these four aspects: quantity of teacher talk, choice of language,teacher’s question and teacher’s feedback.This investigation carries out a case study of three pre-service teachers. Basedon the naturalistic inquiring, classroom observation with video-recording andinterview will be the most suitable tools for the research.Through analysis of the transcription, it finds that pre-service teachers mainlyuse English to teach (except for one teaching practicum class), which providesstudents with enough target language input. Besides, the pre-service teachers usemore display questions than referential questions. As for the feedback, all thepre-service teachers frequently use positive feedback to stimulate students’ interestsin learning English. All the observed classes are mostly teacher-centered, and students have few opportunities to speak English.Moreover, through comparative analysis, it finds that pre-service teachers talkmuch, choose more Chinese, use more display questions and negative feedback inthe teaching practicum classes than that in the Micro teaching classes.The reasons for the above mentioned differences are that pre-service teacherslack of teaching experience; they are not skillful for teaching management andstudents’ English proficiency are different in these two types of classes.The results of this study can, on the one hand, help pre-service teachers haveintrospection of their teacher talk, which will be a great help for their improvementof teaching capability in the future. On the other hand, it tries to offer insights intolanguage teacher education programs in Chinese normal universities. SpecifiedEnglish-teaching courses should be strengthened, and some important implicationswill be given to teacher educators.