Research On Classroom Dialogues In Senior High School English Teaching

With the reform of English teaching, to improve students’thinking and expressing ability in English has become a common concern. And high-quality dialogues in English classrooms can provide space for students to improve their thinking and expressing ability in English. The research, based on the most classic discourse structure IRF, shows the attributes of classroom dialogues in English lessons in senior high schools from the following four aspects:questioning, waiting time after questioning, ways of responding, and ways of giving feedbacks, attempting to provide a perspective for research on teaching English as a foreign language in senior high schools and education of English teachers.The subjects of this research are four senior high school English teachers at different levels in School C, who are one expert teacher, one key teacher, one ordinary teacher and one new teacher. I used the four teachers’20 daily lessons of five different basic English lesson types as samples, that is, each teacher videoed a reading lesson, a vocabulary lesson, a grammar lesson, a listening and speaking lesson and a writing lesson.I collected data from the 20 lessons with a data collecting form and gave the data and the other materials like lesson plans both quantitative and qualitative analyses mainly by means of classroom observation and text analysis. Findings show that the classroom dialogues in English lessons in senior high schools are usually carried on in English. In the aspect of questioning, the quantity of questions on average is quite large and the questions cover all the six types. There also exist a few following-up questions. But on the whole the questions the teachers raise, especially those raised by the ordinary teacher, need only a small amount of thinking, and can’t in particular lead the students to think creatively. In addition, the waiting time after questioning is short on the whole, especially that after the questions which need high level thinking, and therefore the students don’t have enough time to think in class. However, the expert teacher’s and the key teacher’s waiting time is longer than the other teachers. In the aspect of responding, senior high school English teachers tend to ask individual students or the whole class to answer questions. But there also exist cases where the teachers answer the questions themselves after raising them. Instead, there are few cases where the students volunteer to answer questions. The expert teacher and the key teacher tend to ask individual students to answer questions more often. As for feedbacks, English teachers in senior high schools have a comparatively open attitude towards students’answers and often give them feedbacks by repeating or paraphrasing the answers. But there are only a few comments on students’answers in terms of content rather than form. All these make it difficult to stimulate students’ thinking and promote their expression in English.The factors that influence the classroom dialogues in English lessons in senior high schools are mainly from the teachers themselves, the students they teach and some factors outside the classroom. Senior high school English teachers can improve the quality of their classroom dialogues by initiating more appropriately, waiting a little longer after questioning and giving feedbacks more effectively.