An Analysis Of Teacher Talk In Lead-in Of High-Quality English Reading Classes In Senior High School

Teacher talk is the basic means for teaching and an important source of language input for students.As the initial link of classroom teaching,lead-in directly influences the effect of the whole class.Teacher talk in lead-in,achieving its functions,can help teachers accomplish teaching goals.The purpose of this study is to summarize the features of teacher talk in lead-in of some high-quality English reading classes in senior high school in order to provide suggestions and references for English teachers to improve the effectiveness of lead-in.This study takes the teaching videos of 16 periods of the 9th national high-quality English reading classes of senior high school as research subjects.Classroom observation method,recorded discourse analysis method,and case analysis method are used.Based on input hypothesis,affective filter hypothesis,interactive theory,and initiation-response-feedback theory,the writer makes qualitative and quantitative analyses on the transcribed texts.The research is carried out to reveal:(1)The formal features of the researched teacher talk;(2)The functional features of the researched teacher talk.The results of the research can be concluded from the following two aspects:(1)In terms of formal features of the teacher talk,the writer finds that the type-token ratios range from 0.35 to 0.68,which indicates that all the 16 teachers use abundant and diverse vocabularies;the teachers use many pauses to attract students' attention,give students time to think and emphasize important contents;declarative sentences are most frequently used,followed by interrogative sentences,imperative sentences and exclamatory sentences;the teachers often use interrogative sentences with interactive subject “you” to promote interaction;(2)In terms of functional features of the teacher talk,the writer finds that referential questions raised by the teachers are more than display questions;self-explaining strategy,prompting strategy,probing strategy and redirecting strategy account for half of the questions.Redirecting strategies are used most frequently.Discoursal feedbacks are more than evaluative feedbacks;the teachers give almost positive feedbacks with some neutral ones and there is no negative feedback.In positive feedbacks,repetition is most often used,followed by praise with repetition,guiding,restatement,simple praise and praise with comments.In communication,the teachers and students make interactive modifications by confirmation checks and comprehension checks.Clarification requests are not used.The writer hopes to provide first-line teachers with some references on the use of discourses in lead-in so as to promote future English classroom teaching and teachers' professional development.At the same time,it's a supplement to the research of lead-in of English classes;therefore,it is of certain theoretical significance for senior high school English teaching research.