A Study On Senior High School English Teachers' Language Output In The EFL Classrooms

Communication between teachers and students in the EFL classrooms is vital to language learning.And teachers' language output is the primary medium of classroom communication.To some extent,teachers' language output in the EFL classrooms determines not only how information is communicated to students,but also the efficiency of language teaching.Moreover,teachers' classroom language output serves as one of the most important language learning resources for students.Therefore,it is quite necessary to study teachers' language output in the EFL classrooms.At present,teachers' classroom language output has been widely studied in linguistics and pedagogy researches.It includes the language(both Chinese and English)used by teachers to organize teaching activities,to interpret language points,to evaluate students' performance,to communicate with students,etc.In this paper,the author studies English teachers' classroom language output from three dimensions: language characteristics,language functions and interactive features.The research methods of this paper are classroom observations,questionnaire investigation and face-to-face interview.6 senior high school English teachers and 235 students from Yantai No.1 middle school are chosen as the research participants and the results findings are generalized as follows:(1)In general,teachers' language characteristics including authenticity,logicality,normalization and repetitiveness of teachers' classroom language output,are satisfactory.Teachers' pronunciation and intonation are clear and accurate and they seldom make grammatical mistakes when speaking English.(2)The quantity of teachers' classroom language output covers more than 80% of the total amount of classroom language output,which is much more than that of students'.(3)Teachers ask far more display questions than referential questions.(4)Teachers do not often make interactional modifications.Among the three kinds of interactional modifications(comprehension checks,confirmation checks and clarification checks),comprehension checks are used mostly.(5)Teachers' lead-in language cannot fully arouse students' learning interests,and teachers' lead-in time is not enough and the lead-in methods are monotonous.Based on the findings of this study,some suggestions are given.Firstly,teachers should keep good balance between display questions and referential questions.Secondly,more chances of speaking should be offered to students so that students can participate more in classroom activities.Thirdly,more meaningful negotiations and communication between teachers and students should be carried out since language abilities can be improved only through communication.