A Tentative Research On The Lexical Use In Teacher Language Of China’s College English Teachers

College English has long been a compulsory course in almost alltypes of higher educational institutions in China. However, comparedwith the efforts our country has put into it, achievements are far fromremarkable, arousing a lot of researchers’ concern. Among all thefactors on which the success of teaching depends, that of teacher isconsidered extremely important. As the medium through whichclassroom activities are organized, and also a main source of targetlanguage input, teacher language can, to some extent, provide a clueto how good a language teacher’s quality is. In the present thesis,China’s college English teachers’ language becomes the focus of study.English lexical use, as an important constituent of English language, isdescribed and discussed to give some insights into the status quo of thelanguage used by teachers of college English in China, or theircomprehensive quality as a whole.Research subjects are20college English teachers with differentprofessional titles, different educational backgrounds, teaching indifferent types of universities and teaching students in differentsemesters.20videos of these20teachers’ classroom teaching arecollected from their respective university websites, which are all madepublic as materials for fine course construction. These videos aretranscribed into scripts, which are further converted into data bycomputer. Based on the data, results are obtained as follows:1. The speech rate of college English teachers is quite low, with anaverage of108words per minute (wpm). That of male teachers is91wpm, much lower than114wpm of their female counterparts.2. The average number of net words per minute is16, which meansthat in one minute, though a gross of108are uttered, students are onlyexposed to16different words. Most of the words are repeated again and again.3. Lexical richness:(1) the average Lexical variation is15.0%,indicating that85%words are repeated ones.(2) The average lexicaldensity is54.3%, indicating that more than half of the words teachersuse are lexical words.(3) Teachers tend to use89.5%of words belowCET-4level. Words of CET-6level are used fewest, even fewer than thoseabove CET-6level. Only7.4%are of CET-4and CET-6levels.4. The amount of English proper nouns used by each teacher differsgreatly, varying from1to0.05per minute if divided by the time length ofteacher language, with an average of0.38.5. College English teachers’ co-ordinative medium language (CML)is quite limited. When introducing to their students a new lesson, some ofthem use none of the words appeared in the new word lists of thepresent unit or the previous one.Although not without limitations, implications of the above findingsmay be taken by college English teachers to reflect on their ownlanguage proficiency and teaching, and then make improvements,and also by others in this field to be aware of the status quo of collegeEnglish teaching in China and take some measures to improve it, oreven China’s English teaching as a whole.