A Comparative Study Of Teacher Talk Between Novice And Expert Teachers In High School English Class

Previous studies on teacher talk were chiefly involved in college English class,while few studies have been conducted on it in high school.In addition,previous researches on novice and expert teachers were primarily compared in aspects of teaching behavior,knowledge structure and teaching efficacy from the field of psychology,which were descriptions of the experience and theoretical studies,lacking empirical researches,especially comparative studies of teacher talk between novice and expert teachers in the real classroom teaching.Based on the basic framework of analyzing teacher talk from Liu Xuehui(2006),this thesis intends to analyze differences of teacher talk between novice and expert teachers in high school English class,in terms of the amount of teacher talk,questioning,feedback manners and interactional modification.The research questions of this thesis are presented as follows:(1)What are the differences between novice and expert teachers in the amount of teacher talk?(2)What are the differences between novice and expert teachers in questioning and feedback manners?(3)What are the differences between novice and expert teachers in interactional modification?With Krashen's Input Hypothesis,Swain's Output Hypothesis and Long's Interaction Hypothesis as theoretical foundations,this thesis chooses two novice teachers and two expert teachers teaching in grade two from high school affiliated to Guangzhou University as research participants.The classes of four teachers are observed and recorded for more than two months.Three reading lessons of each teacher lasting 120 minutes are transcribed,which are used to compare the differences and similarities of teacher talk from various aspects between novice and expert teachers.Then semi-structured interviews with four teachers are conducted for half an hour respectively,which are made to analyze factors leading to differences of teacher talk between novice and expert teachers.Major findings of the present study are concluded as follows:(1)As for the amount of teacher talk,the expert teachers' talk time is less than novice teachers' talk time in class.They could allocate the time of teacher talk and students talk reasonablyto provide students with more opportunities of language output,which creates a relaxing and harmonious classroom atmosphere.(2)As for the questioning,both novice and expert teachers tend to raise more display questions.The expert teachers raise more referential questions than novice teachers to arouse students' learning interest and develop their creative thinking ability.Furthermore,the expert teachers give students more thinking time to prepare for the referential question than the novice teachers.As for the feedback manners,both novice and expert teachers mainly adopt the positive feedback for protecting students' self-esteem.The expert teachers use more specific positive feedback than novice teachers.With abundant strategic knowledge,they comment specifically on students' answers to provide students with more comprehensible language input.(3)As for the interactional modification,novice teachers adopt more comprehension checks to check whether students have grasped the language knowledge,while expert teachers use more clarification requests to promote the meaning negotiation.There are more interaction between teachers and students in expert teachers' classes.This study will help teachers to understand the impact of teacher talk on students' language learning from various aspects,which leads them to constantly adjust their talk in accordance with students' classroom reaction and understanding level to suit students' language level for promoting comprehensible language input and comprehensible language output.Furthermore,teacher talk experience of expert teachers has certain implications on novice teachers' training and professional development.