A Case Study On The Effectiveness Of English Teacher Talk In Junior Middle School Classroom

English teacher talk is both an important tool for teachers to implement teaching and important source of students’ language input,whose effectiveness has a significant impact on English teaching and learning.Hakansson points out that English teacher talk makes a difference on teaching or even determines whether teaching is successful or not.Effective English teacher talk provides students with comprehensible language input and improve teaching efficiency as well as quality.Existing researches on this topic have explored how to improve the effectiveness of English teacher talk and the factors that influence the effectiveness of talk.While few existing researches focus on the effectiveness of English talk itself in junior middle school and an comprehensive understanding of it is wanted.Therefore,it is significant to explore the effectiveness of English teacher talk.Based on the classroom observation table used to study the effectiveness of English teacher talk and combined with research objectives and theoretical foundation of this thesis,the classroom observation table wanted in this thesis is constructed.The table is not put into use until the reliability and validity test of the table are made and they are reasonable.This thesis mainly employs classroom observation,classroom recording and transcription to collect data and is going to study the effectiveness of English teacher talk in junior middle school from the perspectives of language characteristic,language function and interaction strategy.Based on input hypothesis,language characteristic focuses on authenticity,understandability,logicality and normalization characteristic where English teacher talk is emphasized as students’ language input.Based on scaffolding theory,language function focuses on teaching function,organization function and feedback function where English teacher talk is emphasized as the scaffold to conduct teaching.Based on interaction hypothesis,interaction strategy focuses on interaction model,questioning strategy and negotiation strategy employed by teacher and students as well as the amount of their talk.The purpose of this study is to know about the current situation of English teacher talk in terms of effectiveness and also to arouse English teachers’ attention to the effectiveness of their own classroom talk.Based on the research objectives and perspectives above,this thesis mainly aims to answer the following three questions:1.What language characteristic does English teacher talk show?2.What effectiveness does English teacher talk achieve from the perspective oflanguage function?3.What effectiveness does English teacher talk achieve from the perspective ofinteraction strategy?The research finds there exits gap in terms of the effectiveness of English teacher talk.On the whole,talk of all six observed English teachers is at least almost effective,indicating all English teachers make sure their talk can be used to perform teaching.First,all language characteristics that English teacher talk shows to some extent meet the desired characteristics.Specifically,characteristic of understandability greatly meet the desired characteristic,which means the talk is based on students’ cognition and high-frequent vocabulary and simple sentences are employed with moderate speaking speed and pause,indicating that all English teachers firstly make their talk understood by students.Characteristic of authenticity,logicality and normalization just to some extent meet the desired characteristics where sometimes what is talked or how to talk in classroom teaching is not the ones used in daily life and few teachers’ spoken English and language expressions are not normalized.Besides,logicality of the talk is not desired,implicating that some teachers are expected to improve their language proficiency.Second,from the perspective of language function,talk from all six observed English teachers shows relatively high effectiveness.Specifically,effectiveness of talk in sub-perspective of teaching and organization function is very high,indicating the talk fully plays function of scaffolding and imparting knowledge.Talk in sub-perspective of feedback function is almost effective accounted by the following phenomenons.Firstly,teacher feedback is general,but not specific and directive.Secondly,teacher feedback is not made full use to guide students to correct their mistakes.Additionally,discoursal feedback is not sufficient.These phenomenons implicate English teachers are expected to enrich their teaching experience by many ways and thus to guide teaching to go further.Third,from the perspective of interaction strategy,talk of all six observed English teachers does not show very high effectiveness.Specifically,talk is just almost effective in sub-perspectives of the amount of talk,questioning strategy and negotiation strategy due to the following points.Firstly the amount of talk between teacher and students is almost balanced and it can to some extent reflect two-way interaction.Secondly,the proportion of display question and referential question is almost reasonable and the time left to students to answer questions is basically reasonable.Thirdly,some teachers are able to employ the strategies of further question,question chain,confirm check and comprehension check strategies consciously.Talk in sub-perspective of interaction model shows low effectiveness where the talk is not enlightening and fails to guide students to initiate talk.These findings show the effectiveness of talk in interaction strategy is expected to improve and implicate teachers are expected to improve the effectiveness of their interaction talk through improving the ability to conduct teaching flexibly.