A Study On Gender Difference Of Teacher Talk In Comprehensive English Course For English Majors

Teacher talk plays an important role in English language teaching and learning, not only because it is a tool to carry on teaching plans and activities, but also because it is one of the main sources of language input for English learners. Recently there have been numerous researches reporting on the characteristics of teacher talk, but the studies of features and differences of male and female teachers’talk are rare. In order to improve the quality of teacher talk and facilitate the English language teaching as well as enrich the studies of gender language, the present research aims to study the gender differences of teacher talk in comprehensive English course for English majors.The participants of this study are eight teachers (four male teachers and four female teachers) with their223students in the foreign language school of a normal university. The method adopted for the research is naturalistic inquiry, including classroom observation, questionnaire and interview. Through classroom observation, the author analyzes the differences between male and female teachers’ talk from the aspects of amount of teacher talk, teacher questions, teacher feedbacks and teacher directives. Besides, information about students’ preferences for the corresponding aspects of teacher talk is gained by means of questionnaire and interview.The results of the collected data show that there do exist gender differences of teacher talk between male and female teachers. It’s found that male teachers produce larger amounts of teacher talk than female teachers. More questions are employed by male teachers rather than female teachers. With regard to the teacher feedbacks, female teachers produce more pieces and adopt more techniques of giving positive feedbacks than male teachers. Male teachers employ more techniques of giving negative feedbacks than female teachers. As for teacher directives, female teachers mainly use suggestions while besides suggestions, male teachers also use requests and explanations a lot. For students’part, research findings indicate that students hope to have more opportunities to practice their English in class, receive more referential questions rather than display questions and get more feedbacks like praise plus comment, cued elicitation, guided self-repair, supportive feedback and so on.The outcomes of the present research are expected to be noticed by not only teachers lecturing comprehensive English course but also other teachers undertaking the English language teaching so as to improve the quality of teacher talk and promote the English language teaching in tertiary education in China.