A Case Study Of Teacher Talk In Junior Middle School English Classroom

As a main source of comprehensible language input and a major tool of classroom teaching,teacher talk has a great impact on the organization of classroom teaching and learners' language acquisition.As Hakanssion(1986)claims,the amount and the quality of teacher talk directly affect the success or failure of classroom teaching.Therefore,it is of significant importance to investigate teacher talk in the process of language teaching.At present,studies of teacher talk mainly focus on universities while teacher talk towards junior middle schools is largely ignored.Therefore,the present study takes the Input Hypothesis,Interaction Hypothesis and Output Hypothesis as the theoretical framework,attempting to reflect on the features of teacher talk in junior middle school English classroom with specific purpose of providing tentative approaches for the problems existing in teacher talk.In this thesis,ten teachers and 320 students from two junior middle schools in Jinhua,Zhejiang province are selected as subjects.Ten classes are audio-recorded as the analysis data.Combined with the notes of classroom observation as well as the results of students'questionnaire and teachers' interview,the features of teacher talk are analyzed and discussed respectively from four aspects,namely,the amount of teacher talk,questioning,feedback and interactional modification.The main results are summarized as follows:(1)The amount of teacher talk in junior middle school exceeds the amount of students talk and teachers dominate the class.(2)In the aspect of questioning,the proportion of two types of questions is not balanced and most of the teachers employ a lot of display questions while referential questions are seldom employed.In the aspect of wait-time,most of the teachers could provide students with enough wait-time.(3)Among the three types of interactional modification used by English teachers in their classrooms,comprehension check ranks the first,followed by confirmation check,while clarification request is the least frequently adopted.(4)In the aspect of teacher feedback,teachers prefer to give positive feedbacks rather than negative feedbacks to students' answers.In positive feedbacks,teachers tend to give simple and mechanical positive feedbacks to students while lacking of concrete evaluation of their answers.In negative feedbacks,teachers' leading students to self-repair is the most frequently used.Based on the above results,four approaches are provided to further improve the quality of teacher talk with the aim of facilitating students' language acquisition:(1)To allocate the amount of teacher talk reasonably by shifting teachers' roles.(2)To promote more students' output by encouraging more classroom interaction.Teachers raise more referential questions to enhance learning motivation and promote meaningful communication.Teachers use varied interactional modifications to promote more meaning negotiations and enhance classroom interaction.(3)To use feedbacks flexibly by focusing on students' affective factors.(4)To enhance teachers' awareness of their own talk by self-reflection.