A Study Of Teacher-student Interactive Verbal Behaviors In College English Classroom

Teacher's and student's verbal behaviors in college English classroom play an important role in classroom teaching organization,the effective transmission of teaching content,and teaching effect.Teacher's and student's verbal behaviors not only affect T-S interaction,language input and output,but also influence teacher's teaching psychology and student's learning psychology.The major teaching procedures in College English classroom include class organization of teaching,warming-up activity,lead-in,presentation of new knowledge,practice and consolidation of new knowledge,summary and homework.In these teaching procedures,teachers and students.produce a number of interactive verbal behaviors,such as greetings,raising questions,answering questions,evaluation and feedback,etc.Since class hours have been reduced,some teaching procedures are not able to be fully conducted.In view of this,the thesis only take class organization of teaching,warming-up activity and presenting new knowledge as examples to analyze 9 types of verbal behaviors,namely,greetings,praising and encouraging,accepting ideas of students,comments,lecturing,close-ended questions and open-ended questions,student's responding and initiating questions.In the process of analyzing verbal behaviors,theories like input and output hypotheses,speech act theory,and high-context cultures are used.Besides,documentary method,observational method,case analysis method,comparative analysis and recording analysis,and the revised table of FIAS are also used.12 English teachers are investigated and their classes are observed.These teachers are divided into three groups according to their teaching ages:young teachers(5-10 years),middle-aged teachers(10-15 years),and elderly teachers(>20 years).The investigation aims to find the similarities and differences among these English teachers' verbal behaviors,and then provide them with some strategies and suggestions to improve classroom interactions,and finally improve College English teaching quality.The observation results show that the three groups of teachers have similarities and differences,strengths and weaknesses in terms of frequencies and ways or strategies of performing each type of verbal behavior.In terms of the number of verbal behaviors,there is no significant difference in most types of verbal behaviors but in asking open-ended questions(P<0.05)among the three groups of teachers and students.In terms of ways or strategies of performing verbal behaviors,the three groups of teachers all performed well in praise and encouragement,accepting ideas of students,lecturing,and asking closed-ended question.For example,young teachers' lecturing is humorous and is with a sense of contemporaneity,middle-aged teachers'lecturing is focused and highlighted,and elderly teachers' lecturing is logical,rigorous and step by step.In the aspect of greeting students during class organization of teaching,young and middle-aged teachers greet student with great care by asking questions related to their holiday or to the whether.However,in the aspect of commenting on students' speeches,designing open-ended questions,and stimulating inactive students to respond and initiate,elderly teachers demonstrate their rich experience and charm in terms of selecting evaluation content,questioning objects and strategies of inspiring inactive students to respond and initiate questions,in which they are better at applying theories and methods than young teachers.After research,analysis and comparison,the paper explored the causes of the differences in the three groups of T-S interactions,including differences in teachers' application of theories,teaching experience,preparation for lessons,working attitudes,student's level,and active and passive students.These differences will affect the effectiveness and quality of college English classes.Based on the above comparison,we have put forward relative suggestions and strategies for reference,including being good at applying cross-cultural communication theory,interaction hypothesis and output hypothesis,and speech act theory,helping and guiding young teachers to learn more theories,and promoting teachers' theory and humanistic qualities.