A Comparative Study Of Teacher Talk Between Experienced And Inexperienced English Teachers In Junior High School

Krashen's comprehensible input hypothesis holds that effective language input is a necessary condition for students to learn a language.Chinese students learn English as a foreign language,so for most Chinese learners,the classroom is the main place for them to learn English.Without enough language input,there is no high-quality language output.Teacher talk in classroom plays the role of real language input,and the quality of teacher talk is often the key to the success or failure of classroom teaching.So far,previous research has summarized the characteristics of quantity and quality,feedback and questioning of teacher talk,explored the issues and concerning phonetics,vocabulary and grammar of teacher talk,and conducted comparative analysis of teacher talk between experienced and inexperienced teachers and found that the teacher talk of experienced teachers is more flexible and has a better effect.Therefore,this thesis attempts to compare the teacher talk in the display classes of proficient and inexperienced English teachers in junior middle schools so as to provide reference for new teachers to improve their teacher talk.There are three reasons to justify this study: First,most of the above studies focus on colleges or high school,and there are few studies on the differences of teacher talk between experienced teachers and inexperienced teachers in junior high schools.Second,as Junior years in high school may be critical for second language development and students become more clearly differentiated since then,classroom language input at this stage plays a crucial role.Third,Lian Rong(2008)believes that teacher professional development can be divided into three stages: inexperienced —experienced—expert.Considering that experienced teachers rather than expert teachers are more practical goals for inexperienced teachers,the author chooses to compare the teacher talk of inexperienced teachers and experienced teachers.The present study selected 10 demonstration classes from the national education resources public service platform and three junior middle schools in Jurong city,and collected data through text transcription and classroom observation.Statistical analysis was conducted on the teacher talk quantity,classroom lead-in discourse,teacher's questions,interactive adjustment and teacher's feedback.The results show that inexperienced teachers talk more than experienced teachers.In terms of classroom leadin,the lead-in of experienced teachers' classroom is more authentic,richer in content and more skillfully arranged,which plays a pioneering role in the whole class.In terms of questioning,experienced teachers use more referential questions,ask more heuristic questions and let the students answer more questions voluntarily than novice teachers.In terms of interactive adjustment,experienced teachers can flexibly use three methods,while inexperienced teachers use only a small amount of comprehension verification.In terms of feedback,experienced teachers can make better use of positive feedback such as specific evaluation.Thus,taking the characteristics of English learning in junior middle schools into consideration,the author analyzes the reasons for the differences from the perspective of inexperienced teachers and gives the following suggestions: 1)Pay close attention to and learn the characteristics of experienced teacher talk;2)Reorient themselves and change roles as soon as possible;3)Make adequate preparations before class;4)Write detailed teaching plans;5)Reflect through class recordings when necessary.