Comparing Classroom Discourse Behaviors Of Novice And Expert Junior High School English Teachers: A Systemic Functional Perspective

Teacher’s classroom discourse behaviors are always considered a concern which attracts much attention from many foreign language teachers and linguists in the field of Second Language Acquisition(SLA).They are not only a mean for learners to input language,but also a main way for teachers to carry out teaching tasks and achieve teaching objectives.Although there are a lot of scholars at home and abroad have explored different aspects of teacher’s classroom discourse behaviors from various perspectives,few scholars have compared and discussed the possible differences between the novice and expert junior high school English teachers in their classroom discourse behaviors from the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL).In order to provide some practical pedagogical suggestions on teacher professional development and effective teaching,this study adopts the methods of qualitative and quantitative analysis,using classroom observation and classroom recording to compare and discuss the classroom discourse behaviors of 2 novice English teachers and 2 expert English teachers from Lanzhou No.45 Junior High School.The teachers were each voice-recorded for a total of 40 minutes during the ‘text session’ of a same reading lesson.Drawing on Yang’s(2010)model of English Foreign Language(EFL)classroom discourse developed within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics,each teacher’ s class was transcribed and coded in terms of the teacher’s choices of ways of interacting with students,kinds of information exchanged during interaction,and contents of the information exchanged.All instances of the four teachers’ choices were also analyzed quantitatively,which revealed their different classroom discourse features.The major findings from this study are demonstrated as follows: The expert junior high school English teachers can not only use the rich teaching experience and solid professional knowledge to exchange the information types but also integrate and highlight the key and difficult teaching contents.Actually,engaging information can create a friendly atmosphere and lead to a higher degree of participation of students’ effective learning,while keeping a balance among life-experience sharing,language learning and knowledge learning.However,although the novice junior high school English teachers give their students more speaking opportunities but choose disengaging information,which leads to a less and meaningless engagement of classroom interaction and makes students play a passive role in the process of language input and output.Novice teachers,meanwhile,devote their lessons only to the language study that make for a single content and ineffective teaching.Despite its implications and teaching suggestions to the further studies on the professional development of junior high school English teachers and effective classroom teaching,this study has its limitations as well due to the lack of depth interview with the subjects investigated,few samples of classroom observation,single lesson types and the limited competence of the researcher.