The Analysis Of Teacher Talk In English As A Foreign Language Classroom-An Appraisal Approach

Discourse analysis (DA) has drawn much attention of many linguists both in China and abroad for a long time and classroom discourse analysis (CDA) is more popular among them. The present study is paying close attention to the analysis of teacher talk (TT) in English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom. Through the brief review of the studies on teacher talk in English as a foreign language classroom, the author finds that the previous studies on teacher talk mainly concentrate on the amount of teacher talk, the types of teacher's questions, the functions and features of teacher talk and so on. Most of these studies are restricted to the perspective of second language acquisition (SLA), but few scholars have studied teacher talk in EFL classroom from the perspective of Appraisal theory (AT).Appraisal theory is a new lexico-grammatical framework, which is developed from the interpersonal meaning of the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Appraisal theory includes three subsystems:Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. Every subsystem consists of several branches and can be subdivided. The present study will adopt the new framework of Appraisal theory remodeled by Professor Liu Shizhu and here the two systems of Attitude and Engagement will be used to analyze the Appraisal resources in teacher talk in EFL classroom. Five college English comprehensive classes are recorded randomly and all the recordings are transcribed into written materials. The author annotates Attitude and Engagement resources in the corpus and does data analysis by using computer. At the same time detailed explanations and discussion have been made on the data. The aim of this study is to discover the distributions of Attitude and Engagement resources and their characteristics. Meanwhile, the author finds out some reasons that decide these characteristics of the distributions. Thus the findings show that college English teachers can make good use of Attitude and Engagement resources in teacher talk to achieve better effect of classroom teaching. It is expected to find the guiding role of Appraisal theory in teachers in EFL classroom and the promoting role in the classroom teaching effect. Through a comparatively detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis, some conclusions are drawn in this thesis:Attitude and Engagement resources are widely distributed in teacher talk in EFL classroom, but the frequencies are different. First of all, in the corpus Attitude resources are 526 in which Affect resources are 125 with its percentage of 23.76%; Judgment resources are 401 with its percentage of 76.24%. This shows that in Attitude aspect English teachers prefer to employ more Judgment resources because more interactions between the teachers and the students are demanded in EFL classroom and in the course of interactions teachers may make all kinds of objective or subjective judgments about the students'performance, which are more likely to belong to Judgment resources. Furthermore, the data analysis also shows that Engagement resources are 693 in which dialogic expansion resources are 391 with its percentage of 56.42%. Among dialogic expansion resources, entertain resources are used most frequently and its percentage is 51.52% in the whole Engagement resources. Dialogic contraction resources are 302 with its percentage of 43.58% in the whole Engagement resources. The reasons that decide the characteristics of the distributions of Engagement resources may be concluded like this:in EFL classroom, English teachers prefer to employ dialogic expansion resources to open up the dialogic space so as to interact with the students actively. Especially, the wide employment of modality in entertain resources sufficiently reveals that the teachers show their respect to their students by providing more chances for the students to express their possible different opinions. In this way too absolute viewpoints of the teachers can be avoided and the students will be encouraged to take part in the class activities more actively. This will ultimately help to establish a more friendly relationship between the teachers and the students and a more harmonious classroom atmosphere will be formed.