A Case Study Of Transitional Discourse In Junior High School English Classroom

The paper attempts to analyze the characteristics and the main functions of teacher’s transitional discourse in middle school English classroom,offering some implications for teachers,use of transitional discourse in their teaching.This study observed six exemplary lessons of Teaching Contest for Secondary School Teachers held in**City in 2017.After transcribing the videos and using relevant theories of Ruth,the author analyzed different excerpts,and compared them with the classification of the framework of Kangyan to draw conclusions.The study focused on what types of transitional discourse teachers use in teacher-student interaction stage,organizing activities stage,and classroom management phase.The study also aimed to analyze their functions.The results show that in the macro function of interaction between teachers and students,lead-in,question conversion,approval,extension are more common,and the remaining micro-functions are rarely used.In organizing activity part,instruction and metastatement are more familiar,we also need the help of roll call,summon and stimulate.Almost all teachers will use turn一taking marker function when they want to connect different links in the classroom.In addition,they may also use comprehension check function in classroom management part.The teachers prefer to combine more complex micro-functions together when using transitional discourse,which makes the classes more efficient and natural.And the main sentence pattern is the combination of the turn-taking marker and the instruction.The study offered some implications for teachers.A good transitional discourse plays a key role in attracting students’ attention.This requires teachers to constantly analyze the content and the classroom stages,seek appropriate teaching methods,organize their words,and make the classroom atmosphere lively.They should strengthen the professional knowledge of transitional discourse.Due to lack of different samples,there is a lack of further analysis of teachers’ transitional discourse.It is hoped that further research be done in the future.