A Comparative Study Of Discourse Difficulty Between Novice And Proficient Teachers In The Primary Comprehensive Class

As a kind of teaching method to organize, manage and instruct language classroom activities, teacher talk plays a crucial role in students’language acquisition. The difficulty of teacher talk will directly decide the degree of students’understanding, thus affect the effect of classroom teaching. In general, if the difficulty of teacher talk is appropriate, the students are more likely to understand and absorb, and then they can internalise it as their own language knowledge to improve their language level; On the contrary, if teacher talk is difficult, the students may feel difficult to understand and anxious, their study enthusiasm can be reduced. Therefore, the difficulty study of teacher talk will help and guide teachers to choose an appropriate level of language difficulty to provide students with the "i+1" comprehensible input, and then promote students’language acquisition.But for now, the research of teacher talk difficulty is still in its infancy, and there’s only few related articles to be found. As we know, there are a lot of differences between novice and proficient teachers’teaching methods in Chinese as a foreign language classes due to the limited factors such as teaching experience. Is there any difference between novice and proficient teachers’discourse difficulty? Is the difficulty of teacher talk appropriate? What adjustment strategies do teachers use to adjust discourse difficulty? It is worthwhile to explore these issues. Therefore, this article will compare the discourse difficulty between novice and proficient teachers in the primary comprehensive class through empirical study, to discuss the reasons of the differences, and then further analyze the difficulty adjustment strategies teachers adopted.This paper adopted a combination research method both quantitative and qualitative. For quantitative research, this article selected two novice teachers and two proficient teachers, and then recorded their classes for6class periods respectively through video and sound recording. The total duration is1200minutes, and the transcription text is more than170000words. Then we divided the factors that influence the difficulty of teacher talk into seven types from the perspective of the pronunciation, vocabulary, sentence level:voice speed, pause, vocabulary difficulty level, the mean length of utterance, degree of grammar difficulty, discourse repetition, amount of foreign language usage. We compared similarities and differences respectively between novice and proficient teachers’discourse on every influence factors through the the statistics of transcription text, and then we analyzed the reasons of differences combined with interviews. For qualitative research, we had a semi-structured interview with four teachers about1hour each, and the interview recording transcription text is more than40000words. We summed up5discourse difficult adjustment strategies for teachers:voice speed strategy, repetition strategy, converted statement strategy, code strategy and body language strategie. According to the classroom records and interviews, we analyzed each strategy with examples.The study found that novice teachers’ discourses were not appropriate for the students’ language proficiency due to the reasons such as lack of teaching experience, inadequate preparation before class, insufficient understanding of students, and their discourse were partial easy or difficult. While skilled teachers can choose more appropriate dicourses according to the language level of students, and they had a relatively clear understanding of their own utterance difficulty. In addition, the use of adjustment strategies varied from person to person when discouses were difficult, however, there was a situation that several kinds of strategy were used simultaneously. The objective of adjustment was to decrease the difficulty of discourses to help students to understand.This study will help teachers know better of the influences that discourse difficulty had on students’ language learning from different angles, and guide teachers to adjust their discourse difficulty constantly according to students’classroom response and understanding degree, so as to adapt to the students’Chinese level, strengthen the comprehensible input. In addition, the skilled teacher’s experience in choosing and adjusting discourse difficulty is also reference for training of novice teacher and their professional development.