A Study Of Linguistic Features Of Teacher Talk In EFL Classroom Of Chinese High Schools

The classroom is an important setting where second language learning is expected to take place. For many of L2 learners, it is almost the only place where they have regular contact with the target language, which is much the case in China. Teacher talk as external conditions for language learning plays an important part in yielding favorable linguistic environments for learners to engage in. Within the classroom research setting, L2 classroom is usually described by analyzing both its linguistic characteristics and its conversational (interaction) characteristics. However somehow, recent research literature is biased toward interaction analysis, and input analysis is lacking, which needs to be remedied. Confronting this shortage, the present study intends to describe the input features of teacher talk in Chinese high school English classroom.The present study describes linguistic features of English teachers' classroom talk in terms of six areas, namely, amount of teacher talk, functional distribution of teacher talk, rate of speech, vocabulary range in teacher talk, syntactic features and modifications in discourse.By using classroom observation, the study yields the following findings: Teacher dominates the classrooms; taking up most of the talking time in class, supplying little opportunity for the students. The ratio of mother tongue and target language in teacher talk is unstable. The range of the functional distribution in teacher talk is limited and the speed varies greatly. The type-token ratio is low with an average of 0.18, which indicates a limited range of vocabulary use; the average utterance length is 7.41, which indicates a relatively low level of grammatical complexity, while in terms of accuracy, the teachers make few mistakes as full sentences is concerned. So generally speaking, the linguistic features in terms of input quality is satisfactory so far as the comprehension is concerned. However it is not satisfactory to the language acquisitions of the students as it contains less varied and less complicated input, which does not conform to the comprehensible input theories (i+1).Also teacher vary their language according to the content of the lessons. Teachers act differently depending on the teaching content.The result of the present study can on one hand illuminate pedagogy, namely thatteacher are expected to have more self-awareness of their linguistic features in their speech and try to create optimum language environments through optimizing their classroom talk. On the other hand, the results are able to prove that the classroom is a productive place for the investigation of teacher talk, especially for the linguistic features of their speech. For sure it is a fruitful place for us to cultivate and get the first-hand data to improve the prevailing situation of teaching.