An Analysis On English Teacher Talk Of Middle School

Teacher Talk refers to the speeches that teachers speak to students in classroom in thecourse of undertaking teaching activities，which is always considered as an important subjectin the field of foreign language teaching by some scholars at home and abroad. Some studiesindicated that quality and quantity of Teacher Talk could affect teaching effect, evendetermine teaching’s success or failure. In the second language classroom, Teacher Talk playsmultiple pragmatic functions. Apart from as a tool of organizing classroom activities, TeacherTalk is still an important channel of inputting the target language, which involves closelystudents’ acquisition on the second language. Therefore, it is very significant to explore thissubject.Since1960s, some scholars at home and abroad carried out a series of theoretical andempirical studies in this field of language teaching from some perspectives like psychology,linguistic, pragmatics, etc, in which many results have been achieved. Among them, researchresults of some foreign scholars like Sinclair (1982), Chaudron (1988) and Nunan (1991),who studied Teacher Talk from the angles of discourse analysis, corpus analysis, linguisticand pragmatic respectively, made great influence on Chinese “teacher-centered” teachingmodel. Some domestic researchers also put forward some valuables views. For instance,Wang Yinquan(1999) and Zhao Xiaohong(1998) pointed out proportion of Teacher Talk in thecollege classroom was too high up to between65%and90%, moreover, interaction activitiesbetween teachers and students are very insufficient, so classroom teaching can not attain thegoal of training communicative competence of students. In the study of Zhou Junping (2006),it showed Teacher Talk has functions of both increasing opportunities for students to take part in classroom activities and hampering students to participate in classroom activities.This thesis takes English classroom of middle school as research object to analyzeEnglish Teacher Talk from the perspective of pragmatics. Totally, there are six parts in thisthesis, including introduction part, four chapters of main body and conclusion part.Chapter One mainly concerns about objectives and significance of this study. It firstlyintroduces definition and classification of Teacher Talk. Teacher Talk is divided into twocategories in this study according to their different functions in teaching: The first one playsteaching functions, and the other plays auxiliary functions. And this study only concernsabout the part of Teacher Talk occurring in teacher-student interaction. Significance of thisstudy lies in enriching people’s linguistic knowledge and making people understandpragmatic functions of language, also arousing teachers’ awareness of professional languageand serving for English teaching by improving their speeches in classroom.Chapter Two presents a brief review of literature, in which current research situations ofTeacher Talk at home and abroad are introduced. A lot of studies around Teacher Talk, withapplication of some knowledge such as linguistic, sociology, cognitive psychology, pedagogy,computer science and technology to study and investigation of categories and quantity ofTeacher Talk, and its functions as well, have been done by some domestic and foreignscholars, and their research results showed Teacher Talk plays a crucial role in the process ofteaching, even directly determines whether teachings are successful or not. However,domestic studies in this field are very insufficient，and this subject needs still further study.Chapter Three lays theoretical basis for this research, in which the speech act theory andthe face theory will be presented. The speech act theory, a hypothesis of speech act, foundedby Austin (1962) and developed by Searle (1969), is considered as one of the major theories in the study of language in use. Austin thinks each speech performances three kinds of speechacts, i.e. locutionary act, illocutionary act and perlocutionary act. Later Searle raised thehypothesis of indirect speech act, which inherited and developed Austin’s view as well asstrengthened interpretation power of speech act theory on some language phenomena. TeacherTalk in classroom contains three kinds of speech acts in the same way, so appropriateness ofTeacher Talk can impact teaching effect greatly. Face theory, an important pragmatic theory, isa face-saving theory founded by Brown and Levinson. Teacher could create a soundclassroom atmosphere to improve teaching effect by adopting some adequate politenessstrategies of saving faces for students.Chapter Four deals with research design, including the subject of this study, the adoptedmethods of research, gathering data as well as research questions. This study takes openclasses of nine English teachers of certain middle school as the object, and it employsliterature method and classroom observation method, and gathers data by observingclassroom and transcribing video data into written data to do research. In total, threeproblems will be answered in this research:1) What typical characteristics does the presentEnglish Teacher Talk have?2) What pragmatic functions does English Teacher Talk have?3)How to optimize Teacher Talk to improve teaching effect in English classrooms afterresearch?Chapter Five is devoted to discussion and analysis of all types of Teacher Talk. Firstly, itsorts out all data and makes detailed statistics on distribution of Teacher Talk, then sums upthe typical characteristics of the present English Teacher Talk. For instance, overuse ofdirectives and questions; no setting aside time and opportunities for students to express theiropinions; there are too many display questions; overuse of mother tongue as well, etc, then itmakes elaborate analysis on functions of all types of Teacher Talk. At last, some feasible suggestions of optimizing Teacher Talk are offered, attempting to find out a path of perfectingTeacher Talk to serve for English teaching.Major findings, implications and limitation of this study are included in conclusion part.