A Study Of EFL Teachers’ Explanatory Talk From The Relevance-Theoretical Perspective

As we know most of pedagogical functioning is realized through teachers’ speech acts, among which explanatory talk is an important one. The teachers’ explanatory talk in L2classroom involves conveying information about language knowledge and language learning strategies. This study, as classroom discourse analysis, taking the perspective of Relevance Theory (RT) examines teachers’ explanatory talk in EFL classroom, especially how teachers achieve the effect of students’ understanding of the explanations.RT proposed by Sperber&Wilson (1986) claims communication as ostensive-inferential process and it especially values the role of context in comprehension. Context, or rather cognitive context in RT, is a psychological construct, which involves existing knowledge mutually manifest to communication parties, and dynamic knowledge continually replenished in communication. RT also holds that human cognition tends to be geared to the maximization of relevance.Thus teachers need to give full consideration to students’ cognitive context and strengthen the context through conversational interaction, rather than neglect their own knowledge and resort to one-way knowledge transmission.The present thesis is focused on how students’ cognitive context is utilized and strengthened in teachers’ explanatory talk in EFL classroom so as to achieve comprehension effect. The data for study was mainly obtained from online videos of Jiangsu provincial exemplary high school English classes. The author selected the episodes related to teacher explaining and transcribed them. During the data analysis, the author tried to find out features and effect of teacher explanatory talk with RT perspective. The major findings are as following:Firstly, the teachers achieved relevance and make explanations effectively understood by relating the new information to students’ cognitive context mainly through activating their original knowledge, creating new ostensive stimuli and updating their cognitive assumptions. Cognitive contexts built up in students’ mind have a great effect on their understanding on teacher’s explanatory talk, and during the process of explanation, the optimal relevance is achieved and the new knowledge is to be conveyed.Secondly, it is more favorable for students’understanding of the target item when teachers involve them in dialogic interaction and have them participate in explanation, instead of explaining by means of monologue only, as during interaction, the teacher would detect the cognitive gap in students’ mind, so that he can complement the necessary new information and dynamically strengthen the context. What is more, the information conveyed through negotiated interaction itself functions as a comprehensible input, which benefits L2acquisition.Thirdly, we found various devices used by the teachers to strengthen ostensive stimuli, including using visual information or physical situations, audial and prosodic techniques such as stress and rising tone, and what is more, the verbal devices and strategies such as direct definition, exemplification, using contrast and analogy, and negotiation indirectly, such as are exemplification, using contrast and analogy and negotiation. With the strengthened ostensive information, students are more able to infer the intended information and achieve better comprehension.Last but not least, it is not only to establish relevance by taking advantage of students’ cognitive context, it’s also important for teachers to cut off the mistaken relevance, for example, by contrasting easily confusing synonyms can teachers better help students organize the related knowledge.