An Analysis Of Teacher Talk In High School English Class Based On Attitude System

The interpersonal meaning of language not only reflects how people establish and maintain appropriate social relationship with each other in the process of communication, but also shows speakers’social identity and status. The interpersonal meaning in the English class mainly refers to the effective interaction between teachers and students. Through conveying interpersonal meaning, teachers stimulate the students’ learning motivation and create a harmonious classroom atmosphere. In the1990s, Professor Martin and his colleagues put forward the appraisal theory, which provides a new tool to the study of language interpersonal meaning. The attitude system is the core of the appraisal theory, which includes three subsystems:affect, judgment and appreciation, each of which has positive and negative meaning.The paper employs both quantitative and qualitative research methods. The corpus roots respectively in two cases from the7th and the8th National Competition of High-quality English Classes in high schools. In addition, the author selects two open junior classes and two senior classes in a high school of Fujian province. All of the eight classes are reading class,4in junior grade2and4in senior grade2. After transcriping the teacher talk in the eight classes, the author analyses the attitude resources in teacher talk carefully, calculates the frequency and the proportion of each sub-system in the attitude system, and then tries to find similarities and differences of teacher talk between high and junior school English classes. In order to guarantee the validity of the research, the author makes a survey of questionnaire and randomly selects200students from the four classes in Fujian province.By studying, the paper finds that, there are some similarities and differences in resources of the attitude system in teacher talk of junior and high school English classes, and the distribution of attitude resources is consistent with the students’affective needs. Firstly, both in junior and senior high school English class, distribution of each subsystem of the attitude appraisal resources is the same. The number of the judgment words is the least, the affect words takes the second place, and the appreciation words occupies the largest. The proportion of the appreciation resources is far more than the affect and judgment resources, nearly takes half of the total. Teachers attach great importance to the appreciation resources and prefer to give more positive evaluation to students’ classroom behavior. Secondly, in terms of attitude resources, teachers in senior high school English classes employ more attitude resources than those in junior high school,321times and265times respectively, which means senior students’cognitive level and psychological development are higher than juniors. Within three sub-systems, the frequency of affect resources in teacher talk are84times and101times respectively, accounted for31.37%and31.37%of total attitude resources, which shows senior high school teachers use more affect resources than junior high school teachers. As the judgment resources,21.51%and18.38%of the total attitude resources tells that senior high school students’cognitive level is higher than junior high school students’, and senior students can not be satisfied with simple right or wrong judgment, teachers should pay more attention to senior students’ knowledge construction process. Thirdly, the results of questionnaire are consistent with the results of statistical analysis of the study, which shows that high school students prefers teachers’positive and objective evaluation, such as praise, affirmation, encourage, etc. to the negative evaluation, such as denying students’ability in a direct way or criticism.Based on the above research results, the study puts forward some teaching enlightenment: while teaching adolescent students, English teachers should consciously apply the evaluation resources of affect, judgment and appreciation to teacher talk, and appropriately evaluate the students and positively guide them to enhance the effective interaction between teachers and students. It is necessary for high school English teachers to understand and master the evaluative language so as to calm the nerves of students, stimulate students’ intrinsic learning motivation, establish a good relationship between teachers and students, and create a harmonious classroom environment. Learning and mastering the appraisal theory will help high school English teachers improve their evaluation strategy and promote their professional growth.