| As a typical interactive language phenomenon,great attention is increasingly paid to teachers' classroom discourse in junior middle school in recent years.Classroom discourse is the primary method for EFL teachers to conduct teaching.Analysis of excellent EFL teachers' classroom discourse is conducive to teachers' retrospection and reflection on their instruction language so as to improve the problems existing in their discourse.It can also help to enhance the effectiveness of classroom discourse,and improve teaching quality.Relevance theory is a theoretical innovation to investigate language use.Its starting point is to probe into human communication from a cognitive perspective.Being a special form of communication,language teaching explains the interaction in its own way.Teacher-student interaction is not only a simple discourse process but also a complex psychological activity which touches upon encoding,transmitting,and decoding the teaching message between the teacher and students.Therefore,the deeper interpretation of the mechanism of this interaction assists teachers in comprehending the essence of classroom interaction to create an optimum language learning environment for students.Hence,from the perspective of Relevance Theory,the author selects twelve excellent EFL teachers in junior middle schools in Jiangsu Province as research subjects to analyze the characteristics of their classroom discourse.The study aims at opening up a “cross-domain” research route of classroom discourse and providing a new way of thinking for this kind of research.Based on Relevance Theory and Constructivism,the present research focuses on the analysis of the RT-based discourse markers,the characteristics of both of questioning discourse and feedback discourse of the observed teachers' classroom discourse in order to discuss how these excellent EFL teachers use classroom discourseto contribute to classroom interaction.The author adopts the hybrid research method with the qualitative method as the dominant one,with the help of Microsoft Word 2010 and Microsoft Excel 2010 to analyze the relevant data received from the transcription to obtain the conclusion of the research.And the supplement of qualitative analysis of the related excerpts of the transcription is utilized to get a better illustration of the research results.The present study intends to probe into four research questions as follows:(1)What is the nature of teacher-student interaction in junior middle school English classes from the perspective of Relevance Theory?(2)What are the factors that affect EFL teacher-student interaction from the angle of cognition?(3)What are the distribution features and the pragmatic functions of the Relevance-Theory-based discourse markers employed by the investigated excellent EFL teachers in junior middle school?(4)How do the observed twelve distinguished EFL teachers utilize the types of questioning and the types of feedback to facilitate classroom interaction?On the foundation of the study,this research comes to the following conclusions:(1)From the perspective of Relevance Theory,teacher-student interaction in junior middle school English classes by nature is a process of searching for optimal relevance and ostensive-inferential communication between teacher and students.(2)From the perspective of cognition,the mutual manifestness of teacher and students' cognitive environments,students' contextual effect,students' processing effort,and relevance are the main factors that affect EFL teacher-student interaction.(3)The observed excellent EFL teachers in junior middle schools tend to employ simple discourse markers,and the most frequently used discourse markers are ok,so,and.The pragmatic function of these discourse markers is to introduce the contextual implication.In addition,the application of DMs can also strengthen the existing assumptions of the students about the teacher's previous utterances.(4)According to the observation,Understanding questions and Application questions that belong to questioning at the low cognitive levels take up the main part of teachers' questioning discourse with the percentage of over 70% which followed by Evaluation questions at the high cognitive level.As for the characteristics of teachers' feedback discourse,theobserved research subjects mainly conduct the feedback type of PPF(promoting positive feedback)and FE(feedback with elicitation).Besides,they never employ the type of SNF(simple negative feedback)and DRA(teachers directly replace students to answer).The application of these questioning strategies and feedback strategies is conducive to students' meaning comprehension and knowledge construction.At last,the author puts forward several pedagogical suggestions on the basis of the conclusion of the study.Boosting the quality of EFL teachers' classroom discourse is the cruxes of accomplishing effective classroom interaction.Therefore,in-depth research on excellent teachers' classroom discourse bears some reference value.The significance of this study is principally embodied from the following two perspectives.In a theoretical sense,this research further probes into the essence of classroom interaction,elements that influence teacher-student interaction in the sphere of cognitive pragmatics,or rather,Relevance Theory.It not only serves as a complement of the application of Relevance Theory in teachers' classroom discourse,enriching the existing research fruits but also endows the studies on EFL teachers' classroom discourse with a brand-new research perspective.In practical terms,the findings of this study benefit our comprehension of the language features of the excellent EFL teachers' questioning language and feedback language and the pedagogical tact that encompassed in their classroom discourse.More specifically,with the goal to facilitate the interaction between the teacher and students,it provides some references for how to utilize proper questioning and feedback strategies to prompt the rationality of teaching language and optimize teaching effect. |
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