A Pragmatic Analysis Of Teacher Talk Of Primary School English Teachers

Teacher talk is the language used by teachers in classroom setting when they are in the process of organizing and teaching. In classroom setting, teacher talk serves both as media language to achieve this purpose and the content and goals in classroom teaching. It can be said that the quality of teacher talk has immediate bearing on the output of learners’ target language. This is particularly true in elementary schools, where teacher talk may be one of the greatest and most reliable sources of the learners’ input. Therefore, teacher talk of primary school English teachers must be concise, standardized and can be imitated. However, during the six years of teaching practice and reflection, the author found that there are still some problems existing on teacher talk in the teaching process and their languages haven’t received enough attention they deserves, which greatly reduce the efficiency of the classroom teaching and the learners’ language acquisition.Take six lessons which have been awarded the first prize on the teaching competition of “one teacher one excellent class” from Pingshan County as research subjects and by analyzing and researching their language used in classroom, the author has summarized the characteristics and problems of the teacher talk. Classroom English: the sentence patterns of classroom English are relatively single and fixed thus reduce the interests of the students and vividness of the class so as to make students have a sense of boredom. Instruction English: the use of the teacher talk is repeated and nonstandard and lack of comprehensible input thus it is not helpful for students to form good oral habits. Many teachers have the awareness of lesson plans, so they can’t give the students sufficient “wait time” to think after asking questions just in order to catch up with the progress. Teacher-student interaction: the classroom questioning is generally monotonous, the questions and their settings are lack of gradations and there is a lack of connection between some of the questions. Teacher feedback English: the use of the positive feedback is much more than the negative feedback and the simple praises occupy overwhelming majority of all the feedbacks. The use of the negative feedback is far below and the forms are simplified.What’s more, there are also some suggestions and strategies put forward in the thesis. First, primary school English teachers should enhance their language awareness and improve their language literacy. Second, primary school English teachers should adjust the teaching concepts and transform the teaching mode. Third, primary school English teachers should improve the teacher talk and raise teaching efficiency. It is the author’s sincere hope that this study can improve the language awareness of primary school English teachers, and further improve their language literacy, so as to improve the quality of English teaching in primary schools.This thesis gives the background. Based on literature review, it mainly introduces the general idea of teacher talk, as well as their characteristics and classification; in addition, it also includes the present situation on teacher talk abroad and in China. It mainly analyzes the data collected from the classroom recordings. It gives the analysis and discussion on distributions of teacher talk and students talk, the characteristics and problems of teacher talk which include analysis on the characteristics and problems of classroom English, instruction English, teacher-student interaction and teacher feedback English. At the end, it gives the teaching implication and limitations as well as suggestions for further study.