A Study Of The Complexity Of Teacher Talk In High School English Class

In China, English, as a compulsory second language for learners is mainly acquired inEnglish class. Therefore, the English class is extremely important for English learners. Andlinguists at home and abroad have attached much importance to it. English teachers, as themain organizers and controllers of English class, play a crucial role in class teaching.Meanwhile, their language is the main source of learners’ language input. Hence, the qualityand the level of Teacher Talk have a great effect on learners’ language acquisition.Teacher Talk refers to the language which teachers employ in class. Recently, anincreasing number of researches on Teacher Talk focus on the interactional features ofTeacher Talk, which include the amount of Teacher Talk, the amount of mother tongue, thepattern of questioning, the mode of interactional modification and feedbacks. Most ofresearches focus on college English classes while there are relatively few researches on highschool English classes. This study is based on the English classes from high schools in Linfen,Shanxi Province. The author records the classes and transcribes them into text, aiming toanalyze the linguistic features of Teacher Talk and expecting to get some research resultswhich can be of a high reference value and offer some guidance to teachers in high school.This study analyzes the complexity of Teacher Talk from the following two aspects. One is lexical complexity and the other is syntactic complexity. The former is examined throughthe type-token ratio, the hieratical features of words, the mean length of words, and the latteris measured through the proportion of complete sentences and incomplete sentences, thedistribution of subordinate clauses, and the distribution of simple sentences, coordinatesentences, complex sentences and complex-compound sentences. Meanwhile outstandingfeatures and differences in the use of these sentences are discovered. The findings of thisstudy are as follows: the mean length of words is4.5; the average of type-token ratios is0.2;most of the words in Teacher Talk are contained in the Base List One in the software Range32, which contains basic and simple words. These data reveal that teachers’ lexicalcomplexity is low. Much more incomplete sentences are employed than complete sentences;the proportion of the use of simple sentences is higher than that of other three types ofsentences; the proportion of the use of subordinate sentences in complete sentences is muchlower, among which object clauses, adverbial clauses of condition, time and reason are usedmost frequently, but the conjunctions in the subordinate clauses are monotonous.What’s more, the factors which affect the results of the lexical complexity of Teacher Talkinclude teachers’ educational background, especially the first degree, while the influence fromteaching experience is not so obvious. Teachers’ first degree and teaching experience affectthe syntactic complexity to some extent.According to the research, the lexical complexity of Teacher Talk is not high, but it issuitable for students’ learning. However, teachers should increase their syntactic complexityand improve their own language competence at the same time. Only in this way can theyprovide learners with a better English acquiring environment and can the English class bemore helpful to learners’ language learning.