A Research On Teacher Talk In Senior High School English Class

Teacher talk plays multiple roles in English teaching. It is the content of teaching,the medium language used by teachers to teach knowledge and the source of students’ language acquisition. The success of students’ language acquisition is closely related to teacher talk and teacher talk is also the key factor to achieve the goal of teaching. The quantity and quality of teacher talk affects the teaching result. In the senior high school effective teacher talk can not only give students standard learning material but also stimulate the interaction between teachers and students, which greatly improve students’ second language acquisition. Therefore, teacher talk has become one of the hot topics of academic research in recent years.In the past several years, some domestic scholars have done several exploratory researches on teacher talk, but these researches mostly choose college English classroom as research object, rarely involved in the category of teacher talk of senior high school English teaching class. For the reasons mentioned above, this thesis intends to have analysis on teacher talk of senior high school English teaching class and state out the present problems. The following three questions are to explored:(1) In class,what is the proper scale of teacher talk and student talk?(2) What kinds of expressions will make teacher talk more comprehensible for students to understand?(3) What is the proper way for teachers to react to the students’ making mistakes during class? The related theories quoted in this thesis are Krashen’s Input Hypothesis, Swain’s Output Hypothesis, Long’s Interaction Theory and other former researches on teacher talk. This thesis analyzes the general features of teacher talk from the aspects of the amount of teacher talk and student talk, teachers’ questioning behavior and teachers’ feedback.This research chooses six classes of grade one in Luoyang No. 1 Senior High School as research samples. The methods employed in this research are class recording,interview and questionnaire. The daily English teaching of six classes are recorded and the recorded material are transcribed for analysis. A questionnaire is designed and handed out to eight English teachers respectively to obtain the English teachers’ view of teacher talk. In addition, 300 questionnaires are handed out to 300 students of grade one as research samples.The findings are summarized as follows:(1) In class the amount of teacher talk is larger than the amount of student talk.(2) The usage of mother language is too much.(3)The amount of display questions is larger than the amount of referential questions.(4)Positive feedback is more than negative feedback and it is inflexible.(5) Teachers can’t adjust teacher talk according to students’ real requirement. According to the analysis results, it is clear that although the new curriculum emphasizes that the classroom types should be transformed from teacher-centered to student-centered, in the real teaching process teachers often play the main roles and students rarely have chances to speak during class. Although many teachers have been aware that they should give class time to students, in the actual operation of the process the result is not ideal.Therefore, based on the research findings, the Input Hypothesis, the Output Hypothesis and the Interaction Theory this research tries to provide some suggestions for senior high school English teaching:(1) Teachers should decrease the amount of teacher talk and give more chances to students to talk.(2) Teachers should try to improve the quality of teacher talk.(3) Teachers should pay attention to the way of asking questions.(4) Teachers should make the waiting time longer to ease students’ anxiety.(5) Teachers should try to use more kinds of feedback.