A Contrastive Study Of Interpersonal Meaning Of Teacher Talk Between Student Teachers And Model Teachers In High School English Class

Teacher talk(hereafter 'TT')in EFL class is a main source of input for language learners,whilst its interpersonal meaning manifests a teacher's identity,status,role,attitude,motivation,emotion and judgment.A dual identity integrated by teacher and student may reside in TT of a student teacher whose insufficiency of teaching experience and contact with students construct special teacher roles and teacher-student relationship.However,relevant previous studies were conducted in the domains of sociology and pedagogy instead of discourse analysis.Aiming to reveal teacher-student relationship and concretize teacher roles embedded in TT,based on Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics(hereafter 'SFL'),the thesis adopts quantitative and qualitative approaches to make a contrastive study between student teachers and model teachers in high school in terms of mood,modality and person system.The model teachers are selected from first-prize winners of a recent National English Class Observation Seminar of Senior High School,while the student teachers are full-time schooling pedagogy postgraduates of English.After transcribing,marking,classifying and calculating relevant linguistic items,the thesis illustrates:first,mood types,including declaratives,interrogatives and imperatives;second,modality,including type,value,and orientation;third,persons associated with teachers and students.The major findings are as follows:As for mood,both types of teachers have the highest frequency of declaratives,and they seldom employ imperatives.However,student teachers have a larger proportion of declaratives,which indicates they tend to provide information unilaterally.Modal teachers have more imperatives,which implies that they demand more responses from students.Regarding modality,both types of teachers are inclined to employ median and low value of modal expressions,but on the whole,student teachers tend to utilize higher value modal expressions.In respect of persons,both types of teachers prefer to use second persons,but model teachers have a larger proportion.Student teachers employ first persons more frequently than model teachers.The above findings indicate the following interpersonal meaning and roles:first,multiple roles of teachers like organizers,participants,facilitators,cooperators have been illustrated in terms of mood,modality and person of TT.However,within specific teaching contexts,more multiple roles have been scrutinized,such as emotion educators,situation creators and thought communicators,which reflects dynamic variation of roles and teacher-student relationship.Second,the thesis has distinguished the roles by their inclination,while their distinction of interpersonal meaning lies in the distribution of the three linguistic items.In general,model teachers tend to establish equal teacher-student relationship and create student-centered classes that have more interaction.They are friendly but discreet.Meanwhile,they value students' emotion and critical thinking,and understand students.As for student teachers,having some merits above,they share more traits in common with students.They tend to deliver input to students unilaterally and ignore their emotion and thoughts.Besides,they are inclined to apply higher value modal expressions than model teachers,which indicates that their TT have smaller negotiability than model teachers.This may hinder students' motivation of communication,and model teachers establish better teacher-student relationship.The thesis has illuminated teacher-student relationship,teacher roles and their difference residing in TT through a contrastive study of interpersonal meaning between two types of teachers.It is an application of SFL to the illustration of TT.The author hopes it can offer objective basis and reference for establishing teacher-student relationship and building teacher roles for novice teachers to adapt to the new era.