A Study On Discourse Features Of Novice Teachers In Junior High School English Classroom And Their Attribution Analysis

Classroom discourse is an important means for teachers to organize teaching and manage the classroom.It plays a crucial role in increasing the input and output of the second language learners and in promoting their language acquisition.In the current English classrooms of primary and secondary schools,teachers’ classroom discourse lacks normalization and effectiveness and teachers still have not realized the important impact of classroom discourse on learners.Novice teachers are inexperienced and lack of lots of professional knowledge.While they also have their own advantages.They are willing to accept new tings and put the new theories into practice,so they are flexible people in all aspects.What’s more,they are the backbone of promoting elementary education reform.Therefore,the study of novice teachers is worth to pay attention.After consulting pertinent literature,the researcher has found that there is little literature about the characteristics of English teachers’ discourse in the primary and secondary classroom,especially on the attribution analysis of why teachers present such discourse features in the classroom.Therefore,this study focuses on the discourse features of novice teachers in junior high school English classroom and their attributional analysis.This research uses the classroom discourse corpus and interview corpus of a novice English teacher in Shihezi X Middle School as the research object.Combining with different research methods—discourse analysis,classroom observation,and interview,this study mainly discusses the following questions:(1)What are the discourse features of novice teachers in junior high school English classroom? To solve this problem,the researcher analyzes the teacher’s classroom discourse from four aspects: Quantity,questioning,interaction and feedback.(2)what are the reasons for the discourse features? In response to this problem,the analysis is mainly conducted from two aspects: external factors and internal factors.The results show that the quantity of teacher’s discourse is higher than that of students.But during the study,the quantity is fluctuating and reducing,which shows that the novice teacher is changing into student-centered classroom teaching mode.When it comes to questioning,novice teachers ask fewer questions in the early stage but more in the later stage.In the type of questioning,the novice teacher will mainly choose display questions,and the referential questions are hardly selected.The proportion of display questions is far higher than that of referential questions.The proportion of both types of questions varies during the study but the proportion of display questions remains at a level of ten times higher than that of the referential questions.As for interaction,the novice teacher uses less interactional modification to interact with students.In the whole research process,the research object uses more clarification requests and confirmation checks than comprehension checks.In general,the novice teacher uses two times more positive feedback than negative feedback,which is different from her thoughts that she will use more negative feedback than positive feedback.More specifically,she uses more praise followed by repetition for positive feedback and more guiding to self-repair for negative feedback.Finally,by combing the observation results with the interview corpus,the researcher has found out that these external factors: society,school,experienced teachers’ guidance and classroom emergencies and these internal factors: novice teachers’ understanding of classroom discourse,teaching reflection,self-learning and personalities can explain why the novice English teachers present such discourse features well.This study hopes to give some suggestions and enlightenment on how to improve the English teaching and promote the development of novice teachers in junior high school.Due to the character of this study and the research methods,this study won’t expect to get the universality of the research conclusions,but to give the novice teachers some instructions and make some contributions to the researches of novice teacher and teachers’ classroom discourse.