A Comparative Study Of Teacher Talk Between Novice Teachers And Expert Teachers In English Classroom Of High Schools

Teacher talk has always been a popular field among foreign language teaching studies.This is because teacher talk is not only a tool for teachers to carry out their teaching plan,but also a main source of students' language input(Nunan 1991:189).Previous studies indicate that researches on teacher talk at home started later compared with studies abroad and most of them were conducted in college English classrooms.Only few studies were set in primary and secondary schools.Thus,it is necessary to compare teacher talk between different types of teachers in primary and secondary schools.And this study hopes to find some advice for teachers' professional development.This thesis is based on Krashen's Input Hypothesis,Swain's Output Hypothesis,and Long's Interaction Hypothesis.The participants of this research are three expert teachers and three novice teachers from Number One High School of Linwu,Chenzhou,Hunan province.This study aims to address four research questions:(1)In terms of discourse quantity,what are the differences between novice teachers and expert teachers?(2)In terms of question types,what are the differences between novice teachers and expert teachers?(3)In terms of interactional modification,what are the differences between novice teachers and expert teachers?(4)In terms of teacher feedback,what are the differences between novice teachers and expert teachers?This study mainly adopts three methods,namely,audio-recording,questionnaire,and interview.The six classes the author observed are recorded,transcribed,and analyzed during the experiment.Students'questionnaires are delivered after their classes.Also teacher interview is taken as a supplement.The findings of the research are as follows:(1)there are significant differences in discourse quantity and teacher native language talk time between two groups of teachers.Novice teachers use more native language;(2)significant differences exist in the total amount of questions and referential questions between two groups of teachers.Expert teachers ask more referential questions while novice teachers tend to repeat their questions meaninglessly;(3)novice teachers employ significantly more comprehension checks while expert teachers prefer to construct their classes in a meaningful way through various adjustments;(4)expert teachers provide significantly more feedback than novice teachers,especially specific evaluation feedback.Two groups of teachers have different preference for specific evaluation.Novice teachers tend to give affirmation first and then evaluate.Besides that,expert teachers can further enlighten students' mind.Limited by short time,small sample size,research instruments as well as personal ability,some drawbacks also remain in this study.