| Discourse analysis has been studied extensively and has become a topical focus in the field of linguistics and educationalists. Although there has been an increasing amount of studies on classroom discourse in the world, little has been conducted in China to examine the characteristics of discourse structures and discourse patterns in Chinese context. Classroom discourse analysis is an objective approach to classroom research, which aims to describe the teaching and learning processes and illustrate the joint contributions of teachers and students.However, the traditional analyses of classroom discourse tended to put focuses on the features of teacher talk only for language input purpose, namely, instructional purpose. The focus was on tempo of speech, pause, intonation, stress and adjustments on the level of vocabulary, syntactic structure and text (Chaudron, 1988). Furthermore, what these researches investigated were teacher-fronted classrooms. There exists a shortage of empirical studies concerning the following aspects of teacher talk: discourse structure of English teacher talk, turn-taking, interaction and question.For the reasons mentioned above, the current study aims to explore the features of teacher talk in EFL classrooms in China, with the specific purpose to provide some pedagogical suggestions to the Chinese English teachers on what types of teacher talk would be beneficial to learner's language acquisition and therefore would be employed in classroom teaching. It also aims to shed some light on teacher training and development.The subjects involved were two experienced high school English teachers who won the first prize in the third national English teaching contest. The teacher's teaching processes were audio-recorded and the recorded materials were transcribed into written record to be used for analysis. Meanwhile, also involved in this study were 186 students from 6 classes in my working school. They were asked to respond the questionnaire on English classroom teacher talk. This questionnaire was composed of 13 items and was administered to collect information on the use of teacher talk in classroom, attempting to lend some support to the results of the transcription analysis. The findings are summarized as follows:With regard to the discourse patterns, the classroom discourse structure are very complicated though IRF and IRFR structure still exist, and the complicated structures usually lead to efficient interaction between teacher and students.In term of turn-taking, the teacher and students almost have the same amount of turns and the students' turn length is a little longer than that of the teacher's in good classroom talk. Concerning the interaction in classroom, the study demonstrates that almost all the students will attend classroom activities and classroom interaction usually occurs in two ways: between teacher and individual student and between one student and another.The results concerning question reveals that the teacher uses referential questions more frequently than the display ones. In addition, the teacher, usually organizes the classroom activities by nominating a speaker and asking his students to answer in chorus. The students' voluntary respond to questions is often seen in good English studying circumstance.The findings of the study provide us with some useful insights on EFL teaching in high school in the Chinese context. Based on them, some advice is given in the above four aspects.Limitations and suggestions for the future research are also discussed in the study. For example, due to the practical difficulties involved in the task of audio-recording and investigating the teacher processes other places in China, the samples were chose only in the fixed district. In addition, multiple techniques for data collection should be used to get more accurate results. Consequently, the results obtained in the present study leave much to be verified and improved. It is hoped that overall and more accurate results would be obtained in the future research.
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