Teacher Talk In The EFL Classroom:A Comparative Study Of Experienced And Novice Teachers In Junior High School

Teacher talk,as one of the crucial elements,is of great importance in foreign language teaching and learning.As Nunan(1991)commented,teacher talk is not only a teaching tool in organizing classroom teaching,but also an important source for students' language learning.The literature review reveals that domestic researches on teacher talk are conducted later than that abroad.Therefore,it is inevitable that the researches at home have their own imperfections.And most studies are conducted in the context of university while there are few studies in junior high school.Therefore,this study,taking junior high school as a sample category,tries to compare teacher talk of experienced and novice teachers,hoping to provide some practical suggestions for foreign language teaching and learning.The present study chooses three experienced teachers and three novice teachers from the same junior high school as the research subjects.By employing classroom observation and video-recording,the whole classroom instructions are transcribed into textual data,which are used to analyze the differences and similarities of teacher talk between experienced and novice teachers from the perspective of teachers' questioning,interactional modification and syntactic property in junior high school.Therefore,three research questions are posed.(1)What are the differences and similarities in teachers'questioning?(2)What are the differences and similarities in interactional modification?(3)What are the differences and similarities in syntactic property?Based on data analysis,the main findings are concluded.Firstly,as for teachers'questioning,there are three aspects being studied including questioning types,waiting time after questions and distribution places of questions.For example,both experienced and novice teachers use more display questions than referential questions,experienced teachers spend longer time waiting for students' answers than that of novice teachers and both these two groups have preference for students in the front part and middle seating,etc.Secondly,considering the interactional modification,three types including comprehension checks,confirmation checks and clarification checks are analyzed.For example,the comprehension checks are used with most frequency in novice teachers'instructions while experienced teachers tend to keep a balance among three types of interactional modification,etc.The last is about syntactic property,there are also three aspects being studied,namely,the length of utterance,the syntactic structure and the distribution of sentence types.For example,experienced teachers averagely use more words in utterance than novice teachers,and use more simple sentences than novice teachers while novice teachers tend to use more complex subordinate sentences.And both experienced and novice teachers averagely use declarative sentences with most frequency.According to the findings,some suggestions are derived.Firstly,teachers should attach great importance to their questioning and facilitate students' intake more comprehensible language input and generate more meaningful language output.Secondly,teachers should pay more attention to classroom interaction and encourage more students to participate in classroom activities.Lastly,teachers should appropriately employ different difficult levels of syntax with different sentence types according to teaching purposes and teaching content.Limitations and future study suggestions are also conducted,hoping more comprehensible and deeper future researches.