A Survey Of Senior-high-school English Teacher Talk Based On Relevance Theory

Teacher talk is an important and necessary tool for classroom teaching especially for English teaching. When it comes to language teaching, the significance of teacher talk is prominent. Teacher talk is not only the medium of teaching, but also the major resource of comprehensible target language input that learners are likely to receive. Therefore, the study of teacher talk is beneficial to see real situation of language teaching, then to improve teaching effect. In English classroom teaching, teacher talk is regarded as one of the crucial factors of teaching efficiency. As a result, more and more researchers and teachers have put emphasis on teacher talk, which makes it become one of the most important and productive areas of research in SLA.Early research has focused on the phonological and syntactic features of teacher talk and teacher questions. This paper intends to analyze teachers’ questions and feedback from the perspective of cognitive pragmatic under the framework of Relevance Theory, and as a result, to provide some pedagogical implications for successful teacher talk.The subjects of the research are 4 English teachers and 220 students from Weixian No.1 Middle School. The author adopts classroom observation, questionnaire and interview to conduct the study. The questionnaire is designed based on Zhou & Zhou’s(2002). And the author makes some changes according to the Relevance Theory to make it suitable for the present research objectives and the students. There are 19 items in the questionnaire, among which item 1 to item 11 are related to teachers’ questioning and item 12 to item 19 are related to teachers’ feedback. As for interview, the author interviews teachers and students respectively. The classroom observation lasts for two and a half months in a senior high middle school.The findings of the research indicate that in senior school teaching, English teachers language should be clear and definite. At first, teachers should take into consideration that if the information of the question could change students’ cognitive context, that is to say, what teachers said should enable students to connect the new information with the old information which have already existed in students’ minds. Teachers should design different levels of question in accordance to students’ different cognitive context. In addition, teachers should provide some relevant information when students can’t answer the question correctly. Finally, teachers’ feedback should be positive and timely. As we all know, teachers’ feedback is an important factor in classroom interaction, positive feedback can arouse students’ desire of communication and enhance their confidence in the process of communication. And teachers also should point out students’ mistakes and praise their correct answers to seek optimal relevance, that is to say, through teachers’ feedback students can correct their mistakes with less processing effort. The author also provides some suggestions for seeking successful classroom communication and improving English teaching and learning.