A Study On Teacher Talk In EFL Classrooms Of Chinese Junior Middle Schools——Case Study

Foreign language teaching classroom has a remarkable characteristic, namely the language is both an instrument of organizing teaching and controlling classroom, and it is also the main content of teaching at the same time. With the appearance and promotion of the "student-centered" teaching mode, more and more theoretical research begins to pay close attention to the role of teachers in the classroom and the teaching process of middle school English classroom. The study of classroom teacher talk is a vital aspect of research on the teaching process. Teacher talk, which points to the language the teachers use in the foreign language/second language classrooms for organization and engagement of teaching, is an important ingredient of teacher behaviors.The author conducted the research on teacher talk by the use of videotape classroom observations in order to:(1) summarize the characteristics of teacher talk in English classes of middle schools; (2) find the effect of teacher talk on students’English learning in this paper.The research chose one English teacher in Shuiguohu Junior Middle School as the research subject, aiming to investigate teacher talk in EFL classrooms. The research questions are as follows:Question 1:Amount of displayed questions and referential questions.What are the distribution of displayed questions and referential questions, and other activities in a whole class period? How does the distribution of the two kinds of questions influence students’ foreign language learning?Question 2:Teacher feedbackWhat is the frequency distribution of positive feedback and negative feedback? Does the positive feedback have variant forms?Question 3:Teacher explanationIn what ways the teacher gives explanation of right answers?Question 4:How does the teacher stimulate the students to participate in class activities?After analyzing the data collected, it was found that there was a preference of teacher talk over student talk, referential questions were less frequently used than displayed questions and the teacher prefers positive feedback to negative feedback. So there are still some problems existing in teacher talk of the teacher. Based on the results of the research, some suggestions on how to improve the teacher talk of the teacher were given.