A Study Of Input Features Of Chinese English Teacher Talk In Northeast County Senior High School Classroom

Teacher talk is one of the most important parts of classroom talk. The quantity and quality of teacher talk has a great influence on classroom teaching and even determines class pedagogic effect, Hakansson(1986). Nunan (1991) also pointed out teacher talk is not only an instrument which teachers use to implement the teaching design, but also an important source of student language input. In view of the importance of teacher talk as the comprehensible input, the study of formal features and functional features of teacher talk plays a crucially important role. Recently, there are many studies of teacher talk in China, and these studies mostly focus on teacher talk of college teachers, but English teacher talk in primary and secondary schools is rarely studied. Therefore, in the present study, I try to find out the features of teacher talk in county senior high schools and provide some suggestions for teaching and studying and teachers professional development in county senior high schools.In the present paper, I report a study by using the data from the project of School of Foreign Languages of Northeast Normal University. I analyze four units of teachers talk by using the video taped and transcribed data. AntConc is employed for statistic analysis, and discourse analysis is used to analyze the input features of teacher talk. The purpose of the study is to find out the input features of teacher talk which include the formal and the functional ones. The formal input features of teacher talk are composed of the speech rate, the type and token ratio and the sentence types, and the functional ones comprise types of question raising, the amount of teacher talk and the choices of language.The findings show that the speech rate per minute is 62, which is rather low. And the type and token ratio is 0.14, which is also lower than the precious empirical study. Among the sentence types, the interrogative sentences are used most by the four teachers. They prefer to use display questions rather than referential questions, the amount of the teacher talk takes two-thirds of the time, and they use Chinese (61%) more than English (39%).Some suggestions are provided for senior high school classroom instructions. Teachers should firstly promote their language level and focus on effects of their talk on learners. Secondly, teachers should focus on their speech acts and improve the quality of their talk so that those whose first language are Chinese can be offered as much English input as possible.