A Contrastive Analysis Of "Responses To Students’ Answers" Between Novice And Experienced Teachers

With the development of curriculum reform, the effectiveness of classroom and teachers’professional development are focused a lot. Especially in (EFL), classroom interaction and teachers’discourse play an important role in the successful language learning. The most important form in classroom interaction is "Question and Answer". The last step of this process "Teachers’Responses to Students’Answers" (TRSA) has been researched specially, which is the need of effective class and teachers’professional improvement.Recently, related researches on experienced teachers and novice teachers have emerged endlessly for about 20 years. In this paper, the author chose the "TRSA" as a topic to make a comparative study on new teachers and proficient teachers. The author selected two kinds of reading lessons taught by 4 novice teachers and 4 experienced teachers respectively. With the help of observation scale offered by scholars, the author recorded the specific "TRSA" behaviors by classroom observation, and mainly analyzed the characteristics of "TRSA", teacher’s attitude towards "TRSA" and the differences between novice teachers and experienced teachers in "TRSA". Besides, the author did statistics on question numbers and types that should be considered as factors to influence "TRSA". At last, the author tried to list some reasons by interviewing the teachers and doing questionnaire investigation. Based on the comparative statistics and questionnaire results, the author come up with some suggestions for novice teachers to optimize their "TRSA" skills to narrow the gap, and promote experienced teachers professional growth and realize career transition.Through comparative analysis, there are main findings:In daily teaching, "TRSA" seldom is given conscious attention by many teachers, and they haven’t understood the importance of "TRSA" in English class and known the basic knowledge and strategies about "TRSA". In English reading class, both kinds of teachers prefer to design high-thinking questions, but novice teachers are weak in utilizing different types of developmental questions to develop students’critical thinking. For "TRSA", teachers mainly adopt "Verbal Response", of which the "Developmental Response" and "Diagnostic Response" are mostly utilized. Experienced teachers are skillful in "Incentive Response" while novice teachers tend to adopted "Objective Response". In addition, positive responses were adopted more by experienced teachers. Experienced teachers adopted "TRSA" strategies flexibly and proficiently, while the responses from novice teachers are lack of pertinence and hierarchy.From the comparative results, there are some pedagogical implications can be acquired. Teachers should improve awareness of "TRSA", make good presupposition and reflection on it, and adopt appropriate ways to respond in different situations. Experienced teachers should acquire some specific strategies and techniques of Question-Answer. Novice teachers should concentrate on teaching material and students, apply what they have learned in theory to their teaching practice, deepen their understanding of teaching and optimize their behavior of response to students’ answers to enhance the quality of English teaching.