An Investigation Of Teacher Talk In English Classrooms In A Vocational College

Teacher talk is of crucial significance for classroom activity construction and L2 learning process. How to organize and manage the classroom becomes very important because the success or failure of the teaching plans results from the teacher's language to a great extent. With regard to acquisition, teacher talk is also important because it is probably the main source of comprehensible target language input the learner is likely to receive. The amount and type of teacher talk is even seen as a key factor of success or failure in classroom teaching.Moreover, a great number of scholars and researchers at home or abroad have made lots of empirical researches on it. It shows that teacher talk plays an extremely important role in second language teaching. However, little has been conducted to examine the features of teacher talk and classroom interaction in the context of the vocational colleges. Thus, the current study aims to explore the features of teacher talk in college English classrooms in vocational colleges and then provide some practical suggestions to vocational English teachers on what types of teacher talk would be beneficial to learner's language acquisition and therefore would be employed in classroom teaching. This study will analyze the amount of teacher talk and student talk in English classrooms, the frequency of display questions and referential questions, the frequency of interactional modifications and teacher feedback from classroom recordings, students'questionnaire and teachers'interview. The subjects involved were 4 teachers and 280 vocational college students from Software School of Nanchang University. The sample was chosen by random sampling. Each of the four teachers was recorded one period of their teaching processes in class and interviewed by the author after class. Then, the recorded materials were transcribed. At the same time, 280 vocational college students from the 4 teachers were asked to answer the students'questionnaire about teacher talk in English classrooms. The questionnaire, based on Zhou & Zhou (2002), was composed of 22 items and was administered to collect information on the use of teacher talk in class, aiming to lend some supports to the results of the transcription analysis. The findings are concluded as follows:With the amount of teacher talk and student talk in the four English classrooms under investigation, there is a priority for teacher talk over student talk and the teachers use more native language than the students expect. As to the frequency of the use of display questions and referential questions, it is reported that display questions are used far more frequently than referential questions. In terms of the frequency of the use of comprehension checks, confirmation checks and clarification requests in this study, it shows comprehension checks are far much more frequently used than confirmation checks. More surprisingly, none of the teachers uses clarification requests in class. Concerning the frequency of various types of teacher feedback, the study indicates that all teachers and students like more positive feedback than negative one, and simple praise takes the largest part of the total number of praises in classroom recordings. With regard to the treatment of errors, it is apparent that the teachers prefer correcting immediately once the students'errors occur, or leading students to self-repair.Some implications have been drawn from the results of the study of teacher talk in English classrooms in a vocational college. Based on these results, the thesis also provides some suggestions for English teacher talk in class such as giving the students more time to talk in English, providing more referential questions, etc.