Teacher Talk In Integrated English Classes Of Vocational Colleges From The Perspective Of SLA Theories-an Empirical Study

Teacher talk, running through the entire class, is not only the tool for teachers to implement teaching task and manage the class but also one important source of language input learners receive. Whether the class teaching is successful or not depends on the quality and quantity of teacher talk to a large extent. Therefore it is of great importance to make a study on teacher talk.In view of this, the author chooses9 teachers from 4 vocational colleges in Guangxi wherethe faculty of English has been established and 278 students are chosen as research subjects. Based on the class observation and video transcription and some theories related to second language acquisition, including Input Hypothesis, Output Hypothesis and Interaction Hypothesis, the author makes an analytic research on the four aspects of teacher talk's functional feature(the amount of teacher talk, questioning, interactional modification and feedback). In addition,a questionnaire as a supplementary tool is designed to collect the relative data about students' attitude towards English teaching classroom and teacher talk.The result of the present research shows that the amount of teacher talk is appreciably beyond that of student talk in majority of classes and the target language(English) is the most important language used by teachers; as to questioning, teachers preferto raise more display questions than referential questions; and then comprehension check is used most and clarification request, which facilitates two-way interaction between teachers and students, is rarely used;finally, teachers are inclined to offer students positive feedback. Concerning error treatment, teachers prefer “providing a clue and expecting students' self-repair” and “asking other students to answer instead” in general. Accordingly,the resultssuggestthat the classes under investigation are still teacher-dominated.Finally, in virtue of some practical difficulties in the life, only 9 teachers and 278 students are chosen as research subjects. The size of the samples of class recording is too small to reflect the full picture of teacher talk. A further research on larger scale is needed to get more specific data for checking the correctness of the results obtained in the present study.