A Corpus-based Study Of English Classroom Discourse Of High School Interns

As a necessary part of English classroom analysis,English teacher talks have attracted a large amount of linguistic researchers' attention.However,almost all the researches focus on the in-service teachers,paying little attention to the student teachers.What's more,the recent research methods are classroom observetion,questionnaire and interviewing,with little concentration on corpus methods.Therefore,with aims to improve student teachers' professional ability and provide some helpful enlightenments for normal universities,this study adopts a corpus based approach and analyzes some English student teachers' classroom practice of senior high school in the Corpus of Secondary School English Classroom Discourse in Dongbei Normal University.In addition,some experienced English teachers' classroom discourses are used as reference discourses.Based on the four examining aspects,the amount of teacher talk,the types of questions,teachers' feedbacks and the interactional modifications,the study finds: 1)the classes of student teachers are still teacher-centered.Student teachers talk much more than students.2)display questions take up a large proportion instead of referential questions.3)comprehension checks are the main modification tactics.4)student teachers prefer to give more positive feedbacks to motivate students to learn,but the ways of praises and error corrections are simple and mechanical.In terms of the findings,this study draws the following implications for the student teachers: 1)student teachers should talk more fluently and make their classes more student-centered,providing more opportunities for students to talk in class;2)in order to promote more language output of students,more referenial questions should be asked;3)adding more confirmation checks and clarification requests properly to obtain two-way communication are important modification tactics;4)student teachers should not only praise students but give specific comments in line with students' performance.As for the errors,student teachers should give a clue to let students correct them by themselves,which enables students to produce more words and phrases.