Analysis Of Teacher Talk In Online Open Courses Of Harvard Positive Psychology From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Teacher Talk is essential in teaching activities, which attracts the scholars at homeand abroad to study deeper and deeper from various areas. With the development ofInternet technology, online open courses become more and more popular in recent years.However, rare research on Teacher Talk is in this new kind of courses. As a result, thispaper adopts Martin’s Appraisal Theory as theoretical framework to analyse HarvardPositive Psychology, in order to explore the features of Teacher Talk and how itaccomplishes interpersonal functions during the classes.This thesis adopts qualitative and quantitative method to analyse ten lectures ofPositive Psychology for the sake of studying the distribution of the three resources,analysing their features and exploring reasons of the phenomenon. It is discovered that theAttitudinal resources are used most, followed by Graduation, and the relatively least usedis Engagement resources. The distribution of the three Appraisal resources are utiliseddifferently in various classroom activities. The possible reasons are that this course isabout psychology which is much concerned with Affect, Judgement and Appreciation; theuse of Engagement resources could enhance the credibility of teacher’s remarks, andcultivate critical and divergent thinking style of the students; Graduation resourcespenetrate into Attitude and Engagement resources, the more Force resources activate theatmosphere of the class. The three kinds of resources work together in different classroomactivities to strengthen the interest of the lectures and improve the interpersonalrelationship between the teacher and the students.This paper widened the research scope of Teacher Talk, and proved the strongexplanation of Appraisal Theory in the newly-developing online open courses, as well asthe guiding significance on teaching. Due to the limitation of time and space, the thesisonly analysed one kind of online open courses. As a result, the research area is narrowwith not enough persuasion. Therefore, it is not mature enough, which still needs morescholars to enrich and complete this research.