A Study On Teacher Talk In Translation Class Of English Majors

Since the1990s,“teacher research” has aroused awareness among western linguists, andteacher talk and teachers’ classroom behavior in language teaching have gained an increasingrecognition. Especially after the appearance of “learner-centered” teaching model, more and moreresearchers are laying stress on teaching process in language teaching and the roles teachers play init. An increasing number of language teachers have begun to reflect the impact of teacher talk onstudents’ language acquisition. Teacher talk, as a major factor of teacher behaviors, refers to thelanguage that teachers use to organize and manage the second language or foreign languageclassrooms and implement teaching. Teacher talk is of crucial importance for the organization of theclassroom and the process of acquisition because it is through teacher talk that teachers succeed orfail to implement teaching. From the perspective of acquisition, teacher talk plays an important rolebecause it is probably the major source of comprehensible target language input the learner is likelyto receive.In recent years the translation teaching research mainly stresses on translation teaching method,translation courses, translation testing and translation textbooks, with rarely attention to translationteachers, let alone teacher talk in translation class. The studies of teacher talk in L2classroomprovide insightful guides concerning the aspects and study methods of teacher talk in translationclassroom. The present study aims to analyze the features and functions of teacher talk in translationclassroom and its impact on learners’ translation learning from the four aspects: the amount ofteacher talk, teacher question, teacher’s feedback and interactional modification. The subjectsinvolved eight translation teachers and three hundred and thirty junior students of English majorsfrom three different universities in Shandong province. The sample was chosen by a way of randomsampling. The selected translation teacher’s classes were audio-recorded and then the recordingmaterials were transcribed into written materials. Meanwhile, both teachers and students wererequired to respond to the questionnaire, the data gained was analyzed with the help of SPSS16.0,and the selected teachers were interviewed respectively.The results reveal that the translation classroom nowadays is still teacher-centered, the amountof teacher talk is much higher than that of student talk, and translation practice is paid muchattention to instead of translation theory; display questions are more frequently used than referential questions, questions about vocabulary, grammar and stylistic rhetoric are asked more than thoseabout discourse and context, teachers prefer to use chorus-answering when students respond toquestions, all teachers give positive feedback to encourage them, and simple praise is the mostfrequently used; among the three types of interactional modification, the study shows a significanceuse of comprehension check, while clarification request is least frequently used.Based on the results mentioned above, some tentative suggestions are provided on teacher talkin translation classroom, that is, decreasing the amount of teacher talk and eliciting that of studenttalk, combining translation practice with theories, making fair use of native language, improvingquestion skills to create more interaction, providing positive and effective feedback such as praisesfollowed by comments, employing more confirmation checks and clarification requests to initiatestudents to do more meaning negotiation and thus increasing motivation of translation learning.Finally, the present study aims to provide some pedagogical suggestions on what types of teachertalk would be beneficial to students’ translation learning in translation classroom and thereforewould be adopted in translation classroom teaching.