A Study Of Discourse Characteristics In Primary Mathematic Classroom’s Teacher-students Interaction

This study is based on purpose of analysing discourse characteristics of teacher-students interaction in primary mathematic classroom.The thesis explores what characteristics primary mathematic classroom teacher and students present in discourse quantity,discourse power,discourse conflicts,discourse forms and discourse modles, and what differences and similarities different professional degree and different grade teachers have in these discourse characteristics.We select three new normal mathematic classes of grade one, grade three and six from a primary school in Bazhong city,Sichuan Province as a case, record teaching videos and transcript them into classroom teaching texts.Using dicourse analysis and classroom observation methods,this thesis describes discourse characteristics of the primary mathematic classroom from qualitative and quantitative aspects in depth. With focus on analyzing student’s response to their teacher, the research concludes what and how the classroom members do in the structure of “Instructing-Responding-Evaluating”. Analyzing the validity of the classroom discourse in present primary mathematic classroom initially, this thesis gives some advice on how to evaluate the effectiveness of classroom interaction.This thesis consists of five chapters.The first chapter is an introduction of the rationale for this study, the theoretical foundation and research design. The second chapter is the literature review of discourse characteristics at home and broad.The third and forth chapters present results of the empirical study and discussions, which are the core parts of this thesis.The last chaper is conclusions and implications for the primary mathematic education.This research indicates that the primary mathematic classroom discourse takes on these characteristics now:(1)The instructor predominates the discourse both in quantity and who to open,there is absence of students’ discourse power. Although the classroom members communicate frequently, what students say is almost the passive response to their teacher.(2)The main form of teacher’s discourse is asking questions. What the teacher speaks is almost descriptive questions, and its essence is control of classroom knowledge.(3)The main form of students’ discourse is collective and individual response to the teacher by raising their hands. What the students say is almost answering teacher’s questions,and its essence is compliance to power of the instructor.(4)The upper grade students have more communicating conflicts with teachers than lower grade students. The lower grade students conflict with the teacher of discourse power, but the upper grade students conflict more on the specific contents of knowledge.(5)The teacher interacts with students incombination of three ways, namely “one to one”, “one to many” and “none to many”.Teachers of upper grade class are more inclined to choose the “one to one” way than the lower grade teachers. The opportunity of students to interact with teacher in “one to one ”way is not balanced.(6)There is lack of teacher’s freedback utterance, the discourse model in primary mathematic classroom is just “instructing —responding”.