A Study Of Correlation Between Teachertalk Norms And Student Learning Proficiency In Senior School English Classrooms

The classroom is viewed as a place where interactions of various kinds take place, affording learners opportunities to acquire the foreign language. Therefore, English teachers play a crucial role because he or she not only serves as the resource provider of the input of the target language which learners are supposed to acquire, but the controller of the quality of language input. Suhomlinski, the famous Russian educationist once said:"The teacher's language literacy, to large extent, determines students'efficiency of their mental labor in the classrooms."Teacher talk is an art where the teacher's professional knowledge and language competence can be fully displayed as well as a major approach to imitation and learning English. Hence, the teacher has to use an adequate and precise language, while ambiguous and vague teacher talk will be least favorable for the students'accurate comprehension and language acquisition. What's worse, it also goes against their formation of a good language habit. The present thesis focuses on teacher talk norms in the current classroom context and puts emphasis on whether teacher talk obstructs or constructs the students'learning acquisition. Additionally, the thesis still tries to explore what effective teacher talk strategies teachers in senior high schools should take to stimulate classroom teaching under the circumstances of the new curriculum revolution.This thesis aims to investigate the role of teacher talk and present a clear picture of some main features of teacher talk by reviewing some fundamental research studies or theories as well as conducting the related experiments. Based on the input hypothesis, the output hypothesis, the interaction theory and the main findings of the previous researches abroad and domestically about major features of teacher talk, the thesis chose 8 teachers and 104 students in Jinan High School as the subjects and adopted several naturalistic methods, including video-recording, questionnaire, and pre-test and post-test experiments.The cooperative principle concluded by Grice(1975) provides the solid theoretical foundation. The cooperative principle is elaborated as four criteria, that is, the maxim of Quality:try to make your speech one that is true, specifically: (i)do not say what you believe to be false (ii)do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.The maxim of Quantity: (i)make your speech as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange. (ii)do not make your speech more informative than is required.The maxim of Relevance:make your speech relevant. The maxim of Manner:be perspicuous , and specifically : (i)avoid obscurity; (ii)avoid ambiguity; (iii)be brief ; (iv)be orderly.To further find out the direct correlations between the level of teacher norms and the students'learning results, pre-test and post-test between the experimental class and the control class were carried out to test the hypothesis that the higher level in teacher norms teacher talk has, the better learning result students will gain. During the experiment, the CC was given the class first with no any particular attention paid to teacher talk, while the EC was given the same class with corrected teacher talk which was modified carefully and sound. In the meantime, the CC adopted the nine guidelines suggested by George.W(1989)and Grice's cooperative principle. Eventually, the hypothesis was proved.The findings are summarized as follows: 1) Teachers are expected to reduce the amount of teacher talk with the ideal percentage of 15% to 30% of the whole class time and try to reduce the speed of the teacher talk with the ideal rate of 100w.p.m;2) Enhance the quality of the teacher talk and try to normalize the teacher talk with the appropriate grammar and well-organized teaching procedures. Meanwhile, negotiation of meaning and diversified methods of questioning and feedback are encouraged to adopt in classes; 3) Under the circumstances of student-oriented teaching mode, teachers should change the teaching role from a dominator to a consultant or a guide to provide enough opportunity for students to learn by themselves. Therefore, foreign language teachers'professional development should gain much attention and great support from all circles in the society, in turn, teachers can improve their professional skills more scientifically and in a sustainable way to make sure that the foreign language teaching in China will develop vigorously.