A Study On English Teacher Talk In Lead-in Of New Lessons In Senior High School

Foreign language teaching is one of the key words at present.In foreign language classroom teaching,teachers inevitably resort to their talk for better management of activities and higher classroom efficiency.Teacher talk is one of the key means of language input in foreign language classes,which has triggered an astronomical number of empirical studies.As an indispensable part of teacher talk,teachers’ questioning is the principal driving force to facilitate teacher-student interactions in the lead-in section,and it is also the primary source of students’ language output.However,few attempts have been made to explore the features of English teacher talk in the stage of lead-in of a new lesson.Thus,in order to enrich and expand the existing study of teacher talk,this paper is a preliminary effort to give a brief account of characteristics of teacher talk in lead-in analyzed from these four aspects: the quantity of teacher talk,the types of questioning,the strategies of questioning and the forms of feedback.This study is to investigate and describe the marked features of teacher talk in the section of lead-in with the purpose of helping high school teachers to better gain insights from their classroom talk.This paper is based on the theory of input hypothesis and output hypothesis.By adopting the method of naturalistic inquiry,all of the data was collected through the instruments of classroom recordings,students’ questionnaires and teachers’ interviews.After the empirical research on the four English teachers’ talk and 177 senior one students in Chengdu Gaoxin Experimental Middle School,the thesis comes to the conclusion as follows:First,the amount of English teachers’ talk is higher than students’ talk in the initial stage of a new classroom lesson.So that teachers are able to provide students with more language input related with the new contents.Second,the English teachers spend more time on referential questions in comparison of display questions.That means that more and more teachers begin to develop their roles as promoters and participants to encourage students to communicate in English in the first teaching procedure.Third,probing and promoting are the most commonly questioning strategies applied in new lessons’ lead-in.That is to say that teachers try to create a more natural and comfortable environment where students have less risk of initiating English on their own and interpreting the incorrect answers.Fourth,during the initial stage of a new lesson,it is more likely for students to receive more discourse feedback than evaluative feedback from their English teachers,so they are motivated to engage in the interactive activities in a rather relaxed learning climate.In summary,by means of investigation about features of the English teacher talk in introductions of new lessons,this paper aims at helping teachers better realize what the lead-in section is going on in real classroom teaching environment.Therefore,teachers are able to achieve the efficacy of the lead-in of new lessons,and gain some further implications in reaching their teaching objectives.