Understanding Operational Curriculum In Junior High School English Classroom

Teacher talk is not only a primary way of transmitting information to learner but also an important means of controlling learners? behaviors. Since much of what teaching process involves is teacher talk and teacher talk in classroom will greatly affect the learning process of students, an objective analysis of how teacher talk works in classroom discourse is critical for understanding the teaching process, the teachers themselves and, to some extent, gives insights to the learning process. Aware of the important role of teacher talk playing in the teaching and learning process, researchers at home and abroad have achieved a lot in studying teacher talk in the aspects like characteristics and multimodality. While words and verbalisms may be the preferred symbols of classroom instruction, they do not represent the only means of instructing. Nonverbal behavior and clues like gesture, gaze, facial expressions, postures, proxemics etc. represent elegant signs for conveying and receiving information.In view of the multimodal features of teacher talk, this paper firstly analyzed the core concepts, then designed the corpus, and made the corpus construction procedure. Through videoing classroom instruction and classroom observation data were collected from eight real classroom teaching of a junior middle school English teacher, and following the established corpus construction procedures, the teacher?s multimodal discourse was transcribed and annotated. Corpus software and complex network visualization software were used to analyze the teacher?s vocabulary collocation, sentences, teacher?s micro operational curriculum genre and classroom location and movement, and discourse of space. At last, the conclusions and deficiency of the research were discussed.The study reached following findings: the speed of English used by teacher A in the classroom was slow and reached the speed of 79 words per minute; and the type and token ratio is 7, far lower than the existing research on teacher discourse; the largest part of speech of the vocabulary teacher A used in the classroom were verbs, followed by nouns; teacher A used declarative sentence frequently, followed by interrogative and exclamatory sentences, average sentence length is 6.18 words per sentence; teacher A used interactive metadiscourse 891 times, 35.3% of all the metadiscourse, and used interactional metadiscourse 1630 times, 64.7% of all the metadiscourse; teacher A used disourse of content most of the time, 411 seconds, in the instruction of the first period of Unit 9, followed by disourse of question,310 seconds; three spaces in the classroom were the most commonly used by teacher A, they were the left of the blackboard, the right side of the blackboard and the front space of the blackboard, the time were 625 seconds, 395 seconds and 214.1 seconds, respectively. In this study found that: in the curriculum implementation, the teacher acted as mediation between the curriculum and students, teacher?s language was the statement of the knowledge, in the process of the use of discourse, the teacher obtained power. "Curriculum standard" was the goal which the students wanted to achieve, was the task which the teacher needed to complete. The classification the teacher?s micro operational curriculum genres were made by the types of disourses the teache used. The time, place, and content of teacher?s and students? curriculum in the class had been been arranged properly before the the beginning of the activity. To arrange the time "prudently" was of great help for the formation of school discipline and also disciplining students and teachers as well. At this time the teacher was disciplining students as well as was being disciplined. The school had set up a system to ensure a norm of instruction, keep the number of students, maintain the number of teachers, to ensure the quality of instruction. In this way, a kind of administrative and political space was formed in the school by virtue of an educational space. A multimodal corpus approach to the analysis of teacher discourse provides a new perspective for classroom research, and makes the analysis of teacher discourse at different levels possible.