| It contains teaching contents and provides the necessary language input for students’ language studies.Since the 1980 s,thanks to the great advancements in the theories of teacher talk,the research on teacher talk has experienced rapid achievements.The current research on teacher talk has mainly centered around exploring the numbers of teacher talk,teachers’ questioning skills,teachers’ classroom feedback as well as their potential impacts on the effectiveness of classroom instruction.However,fewer studies have been conducted to investigate teacher talk through the lens of interpersonal meaning and affective factors.Moreover,the present studies on teacher talk tend to focus on primary school and middle school at the compulsory educational stage,yet not enough attention has been paid to teacher talk of college teachers at the higher education level.As a new theory developed from Systemic Functional Linguistics to explore interpersonal meaning,the attitude system in appraisal theory is composed of three dimensions,namely affect,judgement and appreciation,which provides a new theoretical framework to analyze teacher talk.With the lens of the attitude system of appraisal theory,this study aims to explore the attitudinal resources in teacher talk in college English classrooms through classroom observation and video records.Three college English teachers in a provincial university in Jiangsu province were recruited as the participants and twelve teaching periods of the participants’ talk were recorded and the collected data were utilized to construct the thesis’ s corpus.With the purpose of investigating the distribution of attitudinal resources in teacher talk so as to make the further exploration of the functions and effects of different attitudinal resources,two research questions were put forward as follows:(1)What types of attitudinal resources can be identified in the college English teacher talk? And how are these different attitudinal resources distributed?(2)What are the functions of different attitudes in college English teacher talk? How do different attitudes achieve interpersonal meaning between teachers and students?The collected data were transcribed,coded and analyzed for the distributions and features of teachers’ attitudinal resources.The research findings indicate that:(1)Various attitudinal resources were identified in the teacher talk,with appreciation resources being the most predominant types(50.75%),followed by judgement resources(31.79%)and affect resources(17.46%)respectively.(2)Concerning teachers’ affect,euphemistic expressions were most frequently adopted to convey teachers’ requirements or expectations on students.In terms of teachers’ judgement,teachers were more likely to evaluate students’ performance through judgmental expressions in the classroom,while capacity resources(45.49%)accounted for the largest proportion.As for teachers’ appreciation,teachers’ reactions(65.11%)were the predominant feedback to students’ answers.With regards to the functions of teachers’ attitudinal resources,the euphemistic affect could help to achieve an equal teacher-student relation and shorten the distance between teachers and students.Positive capacity resources are helpful to increase students’ confidence.Positive reactions in teacher appreciation resources contribute to the construction of a good classroom atmosphere and active participation in classroom activities by boosting students’ self-confidence,resulting in an enhanced effectiveness of classroom instruction.This study explores the attitudinal resources in college English teacher talk from the perspective of interpersonal meaning.The research findings can offer insightful pedagogical implications that English teachers in colleges should wisely design their talk and choose the appropriate attitudinal resources in order to strike a harmonious teacher-student relationship as well as to achieve the effectiveness of classroom instruction.Theoretically,this study advances the research on teacher talk in foreign language classrooms with a new theoretical perspective and promotes the application of appraisal theory in the context of Chinese college English classrooms. |
