Teacher Talk In Bilingual Classroom-A Case Study In An MBA Classroom

Teacher talk is the instrument for the teacher to implement the teaching plan and the main source for the student to obtain the input of knowledge. Bilingual teaching of subject course is aimed to improve the students'subject knowledge and language proficiency by teaching subject knowledge through both English and Chinese. The present study examines the talk of two subject teachers who carried out bilingual teaching in an MBA classroom in Chongqing University. It explores the characteristics of the teachers'talk in a bilingual teaching classroom and makes a description about what languages the teachers use and how they use these languages in the bilingual classes. An ethnographic approach was adopted in the study to collect data in the real classroom setting and also a functional analysis of the L1 and L2 discourse was used to facilitate the description and interpretation of the data. The investigation indicates that in the bilingual subject course, the teacher occupied most of the class time and made modifications in L2 in their talk so as to make the input to the students comprehensible. The modifications are mainly made in terms of speech rate, vocabulary, syntax and repetition. The functional analysis of the teachers'talk reveals the differences between the L1 and L2 discourse they produced. Their L1 discourse was often used for the purpose of helping the students comprehend the subject content knowledge, while L2 discourse was used for the immediate presenting of the subject knowledge. The findings also indicate that concerning the students'and the teachers'English proficiency, it is difficult to achieve the goal of acquiring the subject knowledge and developing in English at the same time.