A Study On Teacher Talk In English Classes In Senior High School

As the applied linguistics gradually develop,a great number of researches begin to pay their attention on studying teacher talk in the foreign language classes,and teacher talk is being a hotspot in the field of teaching and learning a foreign language.Teacher talk,known as teacher's language,teacher's utterance or teacher's speech,etc.,stands for the speech and language that a foreign language teacher employs in the foreign language classes when they are teaching.Since it is the main source of comprehensible input for learners,the amount of teacher talk is an important issue,which would have a significant effect on foreign language teaching and learning in the class.Due to teacher talk attaches importance to foreign language teaching in class,many scholars have made a lot of researches on it.But at home there are still not enough researches about teacher talk.Under the framework of classroom discourse analysis,using three kinds of theoretical foundations,this thesis aims to investigate the teacher talk in English classroom at a senior high school.This study based on classroom teaching and tried to discuss following three questions:Firstly,what are the distinctions between the experienced and novice teachers in the aspect of the quantity of teacher talk in foreign language class?Secondly,what are the distinctions between the experienced and novice teachers in the aspect of leading in,teacher questioning,interactional modification and teacher feedback?Thirdly,what roles do two types of English teachers play in EFL classroom respectively?The research adopts the way of naturalist inquiry----four English teachers from Liaoyang No.2 Senior High School are chosen as subjects,the data are collected based on the author's classroom observations.All together 40 classes were recorded and observed,each of which was 45 minutes.In order to investigate the students' attitude and expectation to the teacher talk,all the 240 students in classes of four teachers were involved in the survey of questionnaire.A total of 238 feedbacks from students were collected which were all valid.The voice materials and written materials,which is considered as data in this research,are displayed and deeply analyzed from five aspects: the amount of teacher talk,lead in,questioning,teachers' feedback,interactional modification and the roles of two types of teachers respectively.The research arrived at the following conclusions.First of all,in terms of discourse quantity,the amount of teacher talk is more than the amount of student talk,which indicates the shift from teacher-centered to student-centered has not been fullyimplemented.However,some disparities still exist in both teacher talk and classroom atmosphere.In regard to leading in,novice teachers are more inclined to use those kind which are easiest and comprehensible for students,while experienced teachers give more chances to students to think and say.As for the questioning types,the experienced teachers tend to raise more referential questions and accordingly,the novice teachers are prone to propose display questions.In aspect of the interactional modification,both two pairs of teachers do not favor confirmation checks.Novice teachers employ more comprehension checks;while experienced teachers employ more clarification requests than novice teachers.Concerning feedback manner,discourse feedback is employed in higher proportion by expert teachers while novice teachers prefer to adopt evaluation feedback.In summary,the aim of this thesis is to make foreign language teachers be aware of the present circumstance of teacher talk in senior high school.It is necessary for the experienced and novice teachers to learn teaching skills from others.Therefore,some implications are concluded for English teachers' development and senior high school English teaching.