A Study On Senior High School English Teachers’ Strategies For The Uptake Of The Absence Of Students’ Answers

Teachers’ discourse is a teaching means which teachers can adopt,and teachers’ uptake of students’ answers is a kind of teachers’ discourse,which almost runs through the whole class.To stimulate students’ thinking and in the meantime save students’ faces,teachers would adopt appropriate uptake to deal with students’ answers,and possibly the relationship between teachers and students will go better,which would also do good to teachers’ teaching progress and cultivating students’ enthusiasm for learning.The new curriculum reform is carried out successfully and the education level today is greatly improved,the society shows increasingly strict requirements for teachers’ ability to dealing with students’ answers in class.Yet researches about teachers’ in-class uptake of students’ answers mainly concentrated on Chinese and math in elementary school and junior high school,and a few researches which focus on English teachers’ in-class uptake of students’ answers in senior high school are mainly contrastive researches between novice teachers and experienced teachers,which means there is a severe lack of researches about English teachers’ uptake of a specific kind of students’ answering situation in class.Therefore,this study is meant to explore teachers’ uptake strategies when answers are necessary but students don’t give actual answers to teachers’ questions in class,including keeping silent and making “I don’t know” announcements.In this study,teachers’ uptake of the absence of students’ answers in senior high school English classes are selected as the research objects.Based on Speech Act theory,the face theory and politeness principle,IRF structure,the zone of proximal development and scaffold theory,using classroom observation and discourse analysis on written interactive texts between teachers and students from class videos to conduct case study and descriptive analysis,the study explores teachers’ strategies of taking up the absence of students’ answers in senior high school English classes in order to find out how to deal with the absence of students’ answers in senior high school and finally put forward some corresponding suggestions.After research,this paper finds out the following findings: First,according to the classification of Chinese teachers’ language uptake of students’ answers in primary school by Xiang Yang(2008),senior high school English teachers mainly adopt“directly giving answers”,“guiding students to find answers”,“inducing students’ answers”,“turning to others to seek answers” and “enquiring students to get answers”to respond to the absence of students’ answers.Second,senior high school English teachers apply various uptake strategies to cope with the absence of students’ answers:designating students,giving tips,guiding students,repeating questions,enquiring,recommending to seek fellows’ help,directly giving answers,comforting,offering extra minutes,inducing,affirming the difficulty of questions,easing the atmosphere and turning to others.According to the research results,some productive enlightenment rises,and also several constructive guidance is worked out to upgrade the uptake level of English teachers in senior high school when dealing with the absence of students’ answers.First of all,teachers can use the strategy of comforting,affirming the difficulty of the problem and easing the atmosphere in teaching activities to care for students’ mental state,and avoid negative or critical response.Secondly,teachers should give students some extra time to think fully according to the difficulty of the questions and students’ ability.Thirdly,when students have deviations in their thinking direction or encounter difficulties,teachers need to guide students by providing some hints,clues or examples and explore the answers with students to promote the improvement of students’ personal abilities,instead of directly giving students answers or results for everything.Furthermore,the strategies of teachers’ uptake are not invariable,so continuous research and learning of the strategies for teachers’ uptake are necessary.Ultimately,teachers had better increasingly try to combine several single uptake strategies to cope with in-class situations more thoroughly.