A Study And Analysis Of Grammatical Errors Based On The Talk Of Senior High School English Teachers

Teacher talk is the main source of learners’ input of target language and it is also a major medium and language input of teaching, Teacher talk has a profound impact on the students’ knowledge input, processing, conversation and output. English grammar, an integral part of English language teaching to the students’ communicative competence, has a significant effect on students that we cannot ignore.This study is based on Error Analysis(EA), the Input Hypothesis and Interlanguage Theory, etc. And it uses the natural investigation method with the help of classroom recording to analyze six high school English teachers’ classroom discourses and then to find errors in grammar.The data in this paper is collected from 43 clips of national elaborate courses and 20 regular classes combined with interviews of 2 English teachers and 8 Senior high school students. The author collected these materials and then transferred them into transcripts. After that the author picked out the grammatical errors in the transcripts and categorized them in different groups. Based on Corder’s procedures of EA, the author did a study to find the internal relations among the features and types of errors with several variables such as teachers’ seniority, educational background, age and the location of his or her education. And then the author tried to find out the causes of these errors by means of Contrastive analysis.The result of the research suggests that:1. Indeed, there are many grammatical errors occurring in the senior high school teachers’ speech, and some of them can affect students’ input and cognitive style.2. Grammatical errors in subject-predicate agreement, tense, article and word order appear the most common in the English teacher talk. These errors can be categorized as intralingual errors which mean that they result from language transfer and are caused by learner’s native language. It is also called negative transfer.Some errors are classified into interlingual errors, which result from faulty or partial learning of the target language, rather than from language transfer.3. Different variants affected the nature of errors. Senior high school teachers who come from normal university made fewer errors than those who come from comprehensive universities. Those English teachers who are working in eastern part of China made fewer errors than those who are working in the middle area of China. As for the teaching experiences, the distinction of errors is weaker if the teachers’ career length is longer. Conversely, those new teachers made more errors in their teacher talk.The findings of this research can provide reference data to those English teachers who are teaching English in senior high schools. And it is supposed to be a good reference for improving their teaching. Teachers can judge their own talk and find a proper way to adapt their own style of speaking to students’ understanding.