Features Of Novice Teacher’s Teacher Talk In Senior Middle School English Classroom

Teacher talk is increasingly becoming an important part of second language acquisition and teaching. It’s the language used by teachers to organize, manage and implement teaching plans. Furthermore, teacher talk can help develop learner’s acquisition, because it is the major source of comprehensible input for students.In China students only have chance to learn English in the classroom, and they seldom communicate in English in real situation after class. In particular, novice teachers are usually not good at questioning, interacting with students or giving feedback. Therefore, doing research on teacher talk can help novice teachers improve the English classroom teaching quality and set up an efficient classroom.This thesis aims to summarize the features of novice teacher’s teacher talk in senior middle school English classroom in terms of discourse quantity, teacher’s question type, teacher-student discourse interaction pattern and teacher’s feedback manner.It’s found that teacher talk, rather than the student talk, dominates the classroom discourse. Students are not exposed enough to the target language. As to the question type, display questions are obviously more than referential questions, though novice teachers will adjust their language according to different lesson types. Speaking to the interaction pattern, novice teachers always use B-IRF the most and use C-IRF the least whether in lead-in class or in reading class. In terms of teacher’s feedback manner, teachers prefer negative feedback to positive feedback. That is because novice teachers usually ignore student’s mistakes or correct student’s mistakes directly, which both belong to negative feedback. When giving positive feedback, novice teacher often give short and simple praise or repeat student’s discourse.This thesis hopes to find out the existing problems and provide some feasible suggestions to improve the quality of teacher talk. At the same time, this thesis still has some limitations. Some other aspects need to be studied further.