A Comparative Study Of Teacher Talk In Petroleum English Classes And General College English Classes

In the process of foreign language teaching,teacher talk plays an irreplaceable part on classroom teaching and learners' language acquisition to a large extent.Therefore,exploring teacher talk is of great significance to promote the quality of English teaching and the application competence of teacher talk in English classes.Recently,the relevant researches at home were mostly concentrated in descriptive researches on a single type of class,while the present research is conducted a comparative research on teacher talk between different class types,namely comparing researches between ESAP and EGP classes.The present research selects 20 periods of class hours as the corpus,analyzes the characteristics and differences of teacher talk between the two types of classes and learners' opinions in terms of the amount of teacher talk,questioning,interactional modification and feedback by means of audio recording,classroom observation and questionnaire.The results indicate:(1)the amount of teacher talk in both types of classes is greater than that of students' talk.And the amount of teacher talk in the petroleum English classes is slightly higher than that in the general English classes.(2)The display questions raised outpaced the referential questions in two types of classes and the frequency of referential questions in petroleum English classes is a little higher than in general college English classes.The self-explaining strategy and prompting strategy are in a great proportion in two types of classes,and the use of prompting strategy in petroleum English classes is slightly higher than that of general college English classes.(3)As to the interactional modification,teachers from petroleum English classes employ less confirmation check and clarification request than in general college English classes,which is contrary to the distribution of comprehension check.(4)Teachers of both types of classes incline to adopt the positive feedback,and petroleum English teachers utilize less short & simple praises and repetition & praise than that of general college English teachers.Based on the above findings,it is hoped that the study will carry some implications for teachers of both types of classes,with a view to improve their teacher talk to promote students' language acquisition.