A Comparative Study On The Difficulty Of Classroom Discourse Between High School English Expert Teachers And Novice Teachers

This study adopts quantitative and qualitative methods and aims to find out the characteristics of novice teachers' discourse difficulty and expert teachers' and discuss their similarities and differences from 4 aspects: degree of grammar difficulty, the mean length of utterance and clausal density, discourse repetition and native language usage, so as to enrich the content of teacher talk research and find out some problems in teachers' discourse difficulty of present senior high school English class.The subjects are 2 novice teachers and 2 expert teachers from a senior high school of Jinan and the research instruments are classroom recording and interview. The classroom recording lasts for 720 minutes, which is composed of 16 lessons of 4 teachers. This study adopts the method of manual input to transcribe the recording material and mainly transcribes the teacher talk of the recording material. Then, the author analyzes the discourse difficulty of the four teachers and summarizes their perspective characteristics, similarities and differences as well.After having collected the statistics, the author conducts a semi-structured interview with each teacher, which lasts for about half an hour. At last, with the help of relevant theories and the interview, the author analyzes the reason why there are differences between the discourse difficulty of novice teachers and that of the expert teachers.The results show that both novice teachers and expert teachers have used grammar out of students' language level and they all have the conscious of reusing the learned grammar, but the expert teachers behave better in both aspects than the novice teachers. As for the the mean length of utterance and clausal density, compared with the novice teachers, the expert teachers' mean length of utterance are longer and their clausal density are bigger. In terms of discourse repetition,the amount of discourse repetition of novice teachers are much more than the expert teachers and their discourse repetition are different in the distribution of lesson type and discourse repetition type. About the native language usage, the amount of the novice teachers' native language usage are also more than the expert teachers and they have differences in the function and the reason of native language usage.This study is innovative in the research content, which enriches the research content and scope of teacher talk and provides some suggestions for the senior high school English teaching.This study also has limitations. The time of classroom recording is short, the number and scope of the subjects is small and the research frame is not systematic. In order to make up for those deficiencies, the following studies should lengthen the time of classroom recording, enlarge the number and scope of the subjects and improve the research frame.