An Analysis Of Teacher Talk Of Outstanding English Teachers In Senior High Schools

Teacher talk refers to the language used by English teachers in the classroom teaching,which is of vital importance for both students' language acquisition as the main source of language input and classroom teaching organization as the medium to implement the teaching plan.Classroom is the main place to learn English for most senior high school students in China,so researching teacher talk of English teachers is rather important.In recent years,researchers at home and abroad have conducted numerous research on teacher talk and gained abundant achievements.However,those studies are mostly concentrated in college English classrooms.There is rare research looking into the teacher talk in senior high schools.The research subject focuses on foreign teachers or general English teachers in China.Research looking into teacher talk of outstanding English teachers in senior high schools can be hardly ever found.Based on Krashen's comprehensible input hypothesis,Long's interaction hypothesis and Swain's comprehensible output hypothesis,this study was conducted by analyzing the video recordings of the six outstanding English teachers who presented their model classes in the 10 th Senior High School English Teaching Seminar held by NAFLE.The purpose is to explore the characteristics of outstanding teachers' classroom discourse in terms of syntax,teacher talk quantity,classroom questioning and teacher feedback.The results are shown as below: as far as syntactic complexity is concerned,the six teachers used simplified discourse so as to enhance students' comprehension.However,their teacher talk is inclined to be oversimplified,which might have great disadvantages for students' language learning in the long run.As far as the quantity ofteacher talk is concerned,the average teacher talk time of these teachers accounts for45% of the total classroom time,which is significantly lower than the data obtained by prior scholars.In terms of classroom questioning,both referential questions and display questions are adopted and more referential questions are found than display questions in their classes.Most of the questions are raised in the form of “wh-” and students are possible to answer questions with individuality based on their own understandings of the contexts.As for the teacher feedback,praise plus comment and praise plus repetition are more frequently used by the six outstanding English teachers.Based on the above findings,some suggestions are also put forward for most senior high school English teachers to perfect their teacher talk so as to improve teaching effects.