A Study On The Classroom Discourse Of College "Comprehensive English"

Arising out of a variety of disciplines, such as linguistics, sociology, psychology, and anthropology, discourse analysis has built a significant foundation for itself in descriptive, and latterly, applied linguistics. As a vital part of discourse analysis, classroom discourse analysis has received an enormous amount of attention in recent years.Aiming at finding out some major discourse features of English classrooms in China so as to be of assistance to college English majors and their teachers, the present study, by following a four-part process of Recording, Viewing, Transcribing and Analyzing, has made some detailed study on the classroom discourse of three top-quality Comprehensive English classes. And according to the major findings of the present study, the features of those selected top-quality CE classes and their implications can be described as the following: in those top-quality CE classes, there still exists some rigid Initiation-Response-Feedback structure in classroom teaching; the students do cherish the opportunities of expressing their own ideas and strengthening their language competence, so they are frequently inclined to adopt self-selection in turn-taking; with regards to the amount of teacher talk and student talk in the selected classes, teacher's has apparent superiority over the student's; It seems teachers are likely to ask more referential questions than display ones in China context. Based on these findings, the author tried to figure out the feasible reasons and the implications of the results. And some suggestions are also made for the teachers and the students to improve their teaching and learning practices.The whole thesis is composed of six chapters: the first Chapter mainly introduces the necessity of this experiment and significance of the study on the classroom discourse of the Comprehensive English classes; Chapter two is the part of literature review, the relative studies and theories on classroom research, discourse analysis, and classroom discourse analysis are introduced in this part, besides, some comments made by the author are also been presented in this section so as to be of help in putting forward the purpose and outline of the present study; Chapter three focuses on the research design of this study; Chapter four presents the readers with lots of evidence aiming at describing and analyzing the classroom discourse patterns and features of the Comprehensive English classes; Based on the studies in previous chapters, in Chapter Five, implications of the present study are introduced and some strategies for language teachers are put forward; In the last part, Chapter Six, a conclusion has been made to state the results and its significance in helping college teachers and students to improve their teaching and learning process. Meanwhile, in order to spark more research in this field so as to benefit college English teaching and learning, some suggestions for further study has also been proposed in this section. Of course the limitations of the study will also be presented in the ending part.