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A Case Study of Teacher Talk in Senior High School English Classrooms

Author: WeiDe
Tutor: ZhaoJingChun
School: Yanbian University
Course: Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Keywords: senior high school English classrooms teacher talk EFL teaching
CLC: G633.41
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2010
Downloads: 865
Quote: 4
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Abstract

Teacher talk is of great importance, not only for its organization of the classroom, but also for its function as a medium to facilitate the processes of student learning. More importantly, it is the main source of comprehensive target language input that the learner is likely to receive in the foreign language classroom teaching. Meanwhile, whether the learner is successful in foreign language learning may largely depend on what language is used by the teacher in the classroom. More specifically, teacher talk can have a positive or negative effect on learner’s output and to a great extent determine whether the learner can develop their communication ability. Therefore, teacher talk has been one main areas of focus in research of foreign language education because of its important role in foreign language teaching.Some scholars have carried out a number of empirical studies on teacher talk in the English classroom. Their research on teacher talk has largely focused on college English languge instruction in the local classroom context. However, few studies have been conducted to examine senior high school English classroom. Therefore, in this thesis, the author investigates the features of teacher talk in senior high school English classroom and provides some implications for senior high school English language instrctional practices. In consideration of this, the classroom data were taken from 5 classrooms in a senior high school which was located in Yanji City, by observing, audio-recording and its transcriptions, and using questionaires we investigate and analyze the features of teacher talk in the following three aspects:the amount of teacher talk and the ratio of teacher talk between first language (L1) and foreign language (FL), teacher’s questions and feedback.Through a close study of collected data, the findings are summarized as follows:(1) The amount of teacher talk is more than student talk. The teachers are using target language in the English instruction consicously, but the teacher talk were not in high quality. (2) The teachers tend to ask more display questions than referential questions. (3) Most of the praises offered by teachers are simple praises and repetition of response followed by praise amounts for the second percentage. The analysis of error treatment shows that asking others to answer is used by teachers in high frequency while the explicit correction comes next. The least frequently used one can be found in the method of providing a clue and expecting self-repair. Recast, ignoring and correcting later are seldom found in the present study.All of these findings demonstrate that the present senior high school English classroom is mainly teacher-centered, meanwhile it lacks of genuine communication between teachers and students in English classrooms. Most English teachers realize that they should minimize teacher talk time and achieve some good effects, but fail to pay sufficient attention to the quality of teacher talk. Therefore, based on the research findings, this thesis provides some implications for EFL teaching. Teachers should realize the importance of teacher talk in students’ foreign language learning. Furthermore, teachers should provide more opportunities for students to participate in classroom interaction by monitoring and reflecting their use of language.

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