A Study Of The Attitude Resources Of Teacher Discourse In Senior High School English Classes

Classroom discourse has always attracted the attention of researchers at home and abroad.Teacher discourse as resources of language input as well as providing guidance to students’ learning is an important part of classroom discourse and has attracted more attention.At present,many studies of teacher discourse focus on the proportion,types of questions,functions of feedback and so on.However,in the study of teacher discourse,few scholars have conducted in the interpersonal meaning of attitude resources in teacher discourse and its influence on teaching effect.In view of this,this thesis tries to use the Appraisal Theory to study the attitude resources of teacher discourse in senior high school English classroom.Appraisal Theory is a new development of interpersonal meaning under the framework of System-functional Linguistics.There are three systems of Appraisal Theory,which are attitude,engagement and graduation.The most important system of Appraisal Theory is attitude system,which consists of affect,judgment and appreciation.Based on real classroom videos of ten English teachers in a senior high school in Linfen,Shanxi Province,the author uses the ten teacher’s utterance as the research corpus.The author applies the Appraisal Theory to analyze and mark the attitude resources in the corpus,mainly studies how teachers use attitude resources to shorten the distance between teachers and students,motivate students’ learning interesting and improve the teaching effect.The following questions are the research questions of this thesis.(1)What kind of attitude resources are included in the classroom discourse of senior high school English teachers? What are the distribution characteristics?(2)What are the functions of attitude resources in the senior high school English teacher’s classroom discourse? How do attitude resources achieve the interpersonal meaning between teachers and their students?The main findings of this study are as follows:(1)There are abundant attitude resources in the discourse of high school English teachers,among which judgment resources are the largest,followed by appreciation resources,and finally affect resources.At the same time,the number of positive attitude resources is far more than that of negative attitude resources.(2)High school English teachers often use Affect resources to indirectly express their intentions to students,such as their requirements or expectations of students,and at the same time establish an equal relationship between teachers and students;Judgment resources are used to evaluate students’ abilities and qualities,among which ability resources are the most,which indicates that teachers pay more attention to the evaluation and feedback of students’ abilities in order to increase students’ confidence in their ability;Appreciation resources can be used to evaluate students’ performance and textbook content,among which ability resources are the most which are always used to praise the performance of students,greatly enhance students’ self-confidence,enable students to actively participate in classroom activities and improve learning efficiency.Attitude resources in teacher discourse can realize the interpersonal meaning between teachers and students.Proper use of attitude resources in teacher discourse can help to close the relationship between teachers and students,create a good classroom atmosphere as well as achieve better teaching effect.This research not only provides a new perspective for the study of teacher discourse but also makes easier for the majority of English teachers to be aware of the function of the attitude resources so as to use the attitude resources in teacher discourse to communicate with the students better,provide feedback to students,thus promoting interpersonal relationships between teachers and students and creating a good classroom atmosphere.