Study On The Classroom Interactive Behaviors Of English Teachers From Rural And Urban Junior Middle Schools

Classroom interaction between teachers and students means that in the process of classroom teaching, teachers and students can influence each others' minds and behaviors. Junior middle school English teaching, as a part of the compulsory education, should be conducted to improve the classroom interaction for enhancing students' learning ability and teachers' professional skills.In this study, the supporting theories include communication theory, constructive learning theory, input and output hypothesis and interaction hypothesis. By analyzing the junior urban and rural English teachers' interactive behaviors, characteristics, time allocation for classroom interaction as well as the students' interactive behaviors' characteristics, the author then have a better understanding of the current state of teachers' interactive behaviors. Then the author discusses the potential differences and analyzes the main reasons that caused the differences. In general, this paper contains 5 parts. The first part mainly introduces the background of the study, the significance of the study and the structure of the paper. The second part mainly introduces theoretical basis and the current state of teachers' interactive behaviors at home and abroad. The third part includes the research questions, subjects, instruments and data analysis. The forth part mainly analyzes the data from the questionnaire. It also analyzes the main reasons that caused the differences of teachers' interactive behaviors and the fifth part contains the conclusion and the limitation of this study as well as some suggestions for further research.In the study, the author adopts "Questionnaire on the Teacher Interaction (QTI)" which was designed by Xin Ziqiang, Lin Chongde and Yu Guoliang, and investigated 90 English teachers from junior middle schools of Jixian county of Shanxi Province. Then, the author observes 6 teachers' lessons by using the "Classroom Observation Scale of the Interactive Time between Teachers and Students in Junior Middle Schools". At last, by making an analysis of the urban and rural teachers'interactive behaviors, the author draw the following conclusions:1. In the aspect of interaction time allocation, urban teachers mainly adopts the pattern of interaction between teachers and the whole class. While rural teachers adopts the pattern of interaction between teachers and individual student.2. In terms of the 8 teachers'classroom interactions, there is no significant difference among the urban and rural English teachers'behaviors of leadership, understanding and admonishing behaviors. But urban teachers have higher mean scores than rural teachers. However, there are significant differences in authorizing, helping, dissatisfaction, the strict and the hesitation behaviors. And rural teachers have higher scores than urban ones. In addition, according to the characteristics of teachers interactive behaviors, the author divides urban and rural teachers into two categories, namely "Cooperation-Dominance" and "Opposition-Submission". There are more "Opposition-Submission" teachers in rural areas than that in urban areas.3. In terms of verbal and nonverbal interaction, there are differences in urban and rural teachers in the verbal interaction, while there is no significant difference in the nonverbal interaction. In addition, the above 2 kinds of interaction are further divided into the positive and negative emotional interaction. In the aspect of positive emotional interaction, there is no significant difference in verbal interaction, while there are significant differences in nonverbal interaction, and urban teachers are better than rural teachers in this aspect. As to negative emotional interaction, there are obvious differences in urban and rural teachers in verbal and nonverbal interactions, and rural teachers are better than urban teachers.4. The main reasons that caused the differences between urban and rural teachers' interactive behaviors include the factors of the faculty members, working pressure, training of teaching skill, textbook handling and students'different English proficiency.Finally, this paper points out some limitations and shortcomings of the study, such as in the process of questionnaire survey, the sample subjects are limited. Besides, some research variables are not properly controlled, which might influence the validity of the data.