An Empirical Study Of The Teacher Talk In Senior High School English Classroom

The teacher talk in English classrooms is quite different from that in other subjects' classrooms in that the teacher talk of English teachers is not only the tools to transmit knowledge, but also important target language input materials for students.Nunan once put forward that: The teacher talk is of crucial importance, not only for the organization of the classroom but also for students' processes of acquisition(Nunan, 1991). It is through language that teachers either succeed or fail to implement their teaching plans. In terms of acquisition, teacher talk is important because it is probably the major source of comprehensible target language input the learner is likely to receive.” This dissertation found that the teacher talk was hot years ago, but those researches had limitations on subjects or perspectives. The previous studies focused mostly on teacher talk in college English classes, however were few in high schools. So this study tries to focus on the teacher talk in real English classes in senior high school and tries to reveal the characteristics of the teacher talk in these classes.In the recent five years when the new round of curriculum reform has been implemented, researchers lacked interest in teacher talk. This study hopes to find out that eleven years after the implementation of the new round of curriculum reform the main characteristics and the shortcomings of the teacher talk in senior high school, on the other hand findings of this study can lay the basis for the feature English teaching modification.This study, taking the perspective of SLA, and based on Krashen's Input Hypothesis, Swain's Output Hypothesis and Long's Interaction Hypotheses aims to explore the current functions of the teacher talk in senior high school through recording the teacher talk in classes and through questionnaire.After collecting and analyzing data from recording and questionnaire, this study then focused on the quantity of the teacher talk, the quality of the teacher talk,teacher's questions, teacher's feedbacks, teacher's correcting mistakes and the teacher's interactional modification with students in senior high English classes.This dissertation is composed of six chapters:The first chapter is the introduction of this study, including the research background, the research questions, the research objectives and the research significance.The second chapter is the literature review which introduces the research achievements and shortcomings from home and abroad in the teacher talk field.The third chapter is the theoretical basis, the related concepts of the teacher talk,the influence of the teacher talk to foreign language teaching and the types and functions of the teacher talk. Besides the definition and the characteristics of the teacher talk are also included.The fourth chapter mainly talks about the research method of this study,including research questions, the subject of this study, the research tool and the data collection.The fifth chapter is the research results and the discussion of the results which is mainly from the quantity of the teacher talk, the quality of the teacher talk, teacher's question, interactional modification, teacher's feedback, teacher's correction and teacher's evaluation.The sixth chapter is the conclusion of this research including the findings, the enlightenment for foreign language teaching and the shortcomings of this research.The major findings achieved in this dissertation are as follows:In senior high school English classes, there is a preference of teacher talk over student talk maybe due to the type of these classes. This can easily lead to the students' lack of the output of the target language; The observation of the live English classes can conclude that the English teachers have a good command of English pronunciation, intonation, the choice of English words, English grammar and so on,but the teacher talk in English is highly less than teacher talk in Chinese; the display questions offered by teachers in senior high English classes are less than the referential questions, which could weaken students' thoughts in English or expressions in English; Negative feedback once occurred in the class and students expect teacher's serious listing, praise and their self-correction; in senior high English classes, teachers' comprehension checks in far more than confirmation checks or clarification checks, so students in class lack initiative thinking and learning; the English teachers prefer to use “pointing out the mistake and offering the correct answer” rather than give students opportunity to correct themselves, which make the mistakes leave shallow impression to students; teachers always give confirmation or encouragement to students' performance, but sometimes give dissatisfactory evaluations, which teachers should try to avoid.The findings of this study provide us with some enlightenment for the current English teaching in senior high schools:In order to enhance teachers' teacher talk in classes, teachers should at first stress on the importance of the teacher talk to students' target language learning and often introspect his practical teaching and correct the improper habit in real teaching and use students' feedback and communication to help himself improve; the teacher should give the class time back to students in order to help students express themselves in English; teachers should decrease the amount of Chinese teacher talk and increase English teacher talk; teachers should try to avoid negative feedback to students and avoid to strike down students' initiative; the teacher could try the student-centered classes, and give the initiative of study back to students; when the students make mistakes, teachers should first give students the chances to self-correction; the teacher should use more confirmation and encouragement to assess students.