Investigation And Analysis Of Teacher Talk In Integrated English Class Of English Major In Vocational Colleges

English language teaching and learning in the classroom is an extremely complicated process, and in this process , teachers played decisive roles .Teacher Talk(TT) serves not only as a tool of accomplishing teaching goals, but also as a resource of students'acquiring language. The quality and quantity of TT directly affected the failure or success of students'language learning. A systematic study on TT will contribute to the English teaching and learning practice. Therefore, TT has drawn more and more academic attention. Currently, most of studies on TT are only limited in the background of ordinary colleges and universities, and the study subjects are often English teachers of non-English major. While the relevant studies in Vocational colleges are comparatively fewer, especially taking teachers of English major as its study subjects are even scarcer. Therefore, the research on TT in this article selected eight teachers of English major from three main Vocational Colleges in Inner Mongolia. All of them are teaching sophomores Integrated English. The writer conducted an investigation and analysis of their TT in the Integrated English class.According to some scholars (Hu Xuewen, 2003), TT has two features: the formal features and the functional features. The later one refers to the features of the language that teachers use to organize and control classrooms, which includes the following aspects: the quality and quantity of teacher talk; the questions teachers use; teachers'feedback and interactional modifications. The amount of TT has been a controversial issue. Many scholars insist on decreasing teacher talk time (TTT) in language classrooms and the student-centered class is highly valued by the educational reform.. Teachers'question serves as the principal way in which teachers control the classroom interaction. Referential questions can facilitate language learning better than display questions. In order to facilitate the negotiations with learners, teachers always use three kinds of interactional modifications: comprehension checks, confirmation checks and clarification request. Teachers'feedback is an important aspect of teaching and it has two kinds: positive feedback and negative feedback. This research just focuses on four aspects of the functional features: the amount of teacher talk; teachers'questioning, teachers'feedback and interactional modifications.At present, although there have been an increasing number of studies on classroom teacher talk, there is a shortage of empirical studies concerning the four aspects of TT mentioned above in China. Especially, in the Integrated English class of English major in Vocational Colleges, how about the functional features of TT? Namely, what is current use of the amount of teacher talk? How about teachers'questioning type and the questioning style? What kind of the feedbacks does the teacher use? and how about their interactional modifications?This research selected eight English-major teachers from Inner Mongolia Normal University, Youth Political College,Hohhot Vocational College,Inner Mongolia Economical and Trade Vocational College. The teachers'teaching processes were tape-recorded and transcribed into written materials to be used for analysis. Meanwhile, 331 sophomores from ten classes the teachers are teaching were asked to respond to the questionnaire on their English teachers'talk. After careful analysis of the data collected, the results are as follows: 1) the amount of TT accounts for 49% -85%, slightly lower than Xiao-Hong Zhao's (1998) survey 65% -90%. Student survey results show that 66.2% of the students thought that in the Integrated English class, the amount of TT accounted for 65%