A Case Study On Teacher Talk Of A Superfine English Teacher In Senior High School

Teacher Talk refers to the language that teachers used in classroom teaching situations.At present,the English class is still the main place for most Chinese high school students to learn English.In the language class,teacher talk is a bridge for connecting teachers with students,and also,it is an essential way for students to acquire language knowledge.Therefore,teacher talk plays an exemplary role in the process of teachers' teaching and students' learning of target language.Its quantity and quality will directly affect or even determine the success or failure of classroom teaching.However,though it is especially important to study the teacher talk in the classroom,there are many middle school teachers who still lack the necessary understanding of the importance of teacher talk in the face of heavy task and pressure for English teaching.Therefore,high-quality teachers plays a leading and demonstrating role in the field of secondary education,beacuse the teaching level of the instructor is higher and the coaching concept is newer.By studying the teacher talk of quality English teacher,it can provide inspiration and guidance for English classroom teaching.The study is based on Krashen's comprehensible input hypothesis theory and Long's interactive hypothesis theory.It is a case study of teacher Jia,a superior-grade senior teacher of Jilin No.1 High School.The author firstly observes and records four English classes of Teacher Jia,and transfers recordings into text by means of comupter.Then combining the methods of students' questionnaire and teacher's interview.At final,the author will analyze the characteristics of the superfine teacher's talk in the class from the aspects of the types of teacher's question,the ways of teacher's feedback and the teacher's interactional modification.The main findings are as following:(1)Teacher's questioning types: the teacher's reference question accounts for 56.7% of the total questions in the classroom,which is much higher than the reference questions in the classroom of ordinary English teachers.The proportion shows that teacher pays more attention to the questions which inspire students to think.(2)Teacher's feedback ways: the teacher use positive feedback so frequently much more than negative feedback.As for the positive feedback,the feedback method with praise and comment is used most frequently,which accounts for 56.6%,followed by the feedback method of repeat and praise;the feedback method of general simple praise(such as good,excellent,etc.)has the lowest frequency of use which is only6.5% on average.(3)Teacher's interactional modification: confirmation checks are uesd most when the teacher and students have interactional difficulties,which takes up 44.9% averagely,followed by the clarification requests which accounts for 30.7%,the least used method is comprehensive check.It indicates that teacher Jia indeed pays lots of attention on the real information exchangebetween teachers and students.According to the above case study,the author concludes several pieces of advice for high school English classroom teaching:(1)Put forward reference questions as more as possible,take advantage of reference questions to stimulate students' thinking,and give importance to shape students' language thinking and comprehensive ability.(2)In appropriate circumstances,adopt a feedback strategy of praise plus comment or repeat plus praise to better improve students' enthusiasm for learning.(3)Try to use confirmation checks as more as possible to confirm and verify the meaning of the students' requests,giving students equal opportunities for communication and promoting a real “information exchange” between teachers and students.