初中英语教学课堂用语的构建与应用

论文总字数：32764字

摘 要

英语教师课堂用语在外语课堂教学上起着双重作用，它既是教师组织教学的重要工具，又是学生习得语言的重要来源。在组织教学中恰当地使用教师话语可以激发学生的学习兴趣，激进学生学习目标语的信心。本文首先列举了课堂教学中教师课堂用语存在的问题，然后从三方面讨论如何构建有效的课堂用语：构建有利的语言学习环境，构建充分的师生互动和构建和谐的师生关系。本文重点在于如何结合言语行为理论，从不同环节探讨教师课堂用语在英语教学中如何实施，包括问候、指令、提问、讲解和反馈。研究教师课堂话语及其如何应用可以促进英语教师对教学的深层理解，从而有效地指导课堂教学实践活动。

关键词：教师课堂用语；言语行为理论；英语教学；构建与应用

Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Literature Review 1

3. Overview of Teacher Talk 2

4. Present Problems of Teacher Talk in Teaching Practice 4

4.1 Lack of Building Beneficial Language Learning Environment 4

4.2 Lack of Fully Teacher-student Interaction 5

4.3 Lack of Harmonious Relationship with Students 5

5. Construction of Teacher Talk 5

5.1 Construction of Beneficial Language Learning Environment 6

5.2 Construction of Sufficient Teacher-student Interaction 6

5.3 Construction of Harmonious Teacher-student Relationship 7

6. Application of Teacher Talk 8

6.1 Application of Greetings 8

6.2 Application of Instructions 8

6.3 Application of Questions 9

6.4 Application of Preaching 10

6.5 Application of Feedback 12

7. Conclusion 13

Works Cited 14

1. Introduction

Since Chinese reform and opening policy, people have got an easy access to the outside world. English, as one of the most popular language used all over the world, becomes major foreign language in China. But because of the relatively closed English learning environment in junior middle school, the English Teacher Talk will be of vital importance for students’ English learning and the promotion of their English proficiency.

New curriculum standard clearly states that the goal of junior middle school English curriculum should focus on the improvement of students’ ability to use English. Teachers’ appropriate and flexible using of Teacher Talk can not only enhance students’ interests in English learning, but also develop students’ pragmatic competence.

English Teacher Talk is an important means to carry out teaching management and guide classroom teaching. Teacher Talk plays a significant role in the class, for example, offering demonstration, explaining rules of language, organizing teaching activities and providing feedback to students.

With the development of the new curriculum reform in middle schools, there are a lot of changes in teaching concepts. But there are still many problems such as lack of beneficial language learning environment; lack of sufficient interaction and lack of harmonious relationship.

The quality of Teacher Talk may have a direct influence on the results of learning. Teacher Talk in English class reflects teachers’ essential quality and educational concept. Therefore, the study of Teacher Talk in China has very realistic and significant value. Studying Teacher Talk can promote English teachers to comprehend English teaching profoundly and guide teaching practical activities efficiently.

2. Literature Review

More and more experts give their studies on Teacher Talk. Chinese researchers pay more attention to the use of English Teacher Talk because English used in English class has special effect in Chinese context.

Zhou Junping thought that it should emphasize learner-centeredness, corporative learning, interaction and the creation of authentic language environment (Zhou Junping, 2006: 69). Bao Jinfen carried out research into TT in middle school English classes. By means of audio-recordings and interview, she analyzed the situations of TT in college English classes in terms of quantity and quality of TT，teachers’ questioning and teachers’ feedback. And she found that the class time was occupied by teachers’ speeches and students have few chances to speak (Bao Jinfen, 2008: 17). Cheng Xiaotang proposed that the authenticity, interactivity, logic and normative of Teacher Talk are beneficial to the organization of class teaching and language input (Cheng Xiaotang, 2014: 2). Tan Yanling argued that teachers dealing with questions, teachers, students and objective teaching environment will help choose reasonable discourse mode, optimize the environment of language learning, and improve the quality of classroom language learning (Tan Yanling, 2009: 68). He Anping argued that teachers should update and change the teaching idea, pay attention to the form, meaning and education function of Teacher Talk (He Anping, 2011: 23).

What’s more, many scholars abroad study Teacher Talk too. Walsh analyzed whether teachers use Teacher Talk appropriately and effectively. He mainly argued on whether Teacher Talk accords with the aim of classroom activities and whether it promotes effective teaching (Walsh, 2006: 413). In Mehrdad Rezaee’s research in Teacher Talk Time and Student Talk Time, it was revealed that despite the prevalent view which says that it is more advantageous to reduce TTT and increase STT, because Teacher Talk is informative, explanatory and descriptive of course materials and helps teaching, it will not be helpful to reduce Teacher Talk even at upper-intermediate and advanced level classes (Rezaee, 2012: 1237).

Above all, the domestic and international studies on this subject lack the construction and application of Teacher Talk. To fill this gap, this paper will analyze the present state and construct Teacher Talk and give suggestions for how to apply to English teaching.

3. Overview of Teacher Talk

3.1 Teacher Talk

Teacher Talk refers to the language used by teachers in the second language or foreign language classroom. As a language input and the medium of instruction, Teacher Talk plays an important role in implementing the teaching plan. According to Luo Haijun, Teacher Talk can be divided into five types by function: greetings, instructions, questions, preaching and feedback (Luo Haijun, 2010: 6).

Teachers use greetings to create active atmosphere in class. For example, “Hello, everyone.” “Good morning, boys and girls”, “How are you today?”

Instruction is the important way of organizing and keeping the classroom activities applied by teachers. Teachers use instructions to trigger students’ behavior; to control discipline and to implement teaching. These instructions can guide students’ language skills training and the management of communication activities.

Another kind of Teacher Talk is questions. This is a basic link of the teaching process. Whether a question is asked properly depends on many factors, including when to ask a question, whom to ask the question to and what type of question to ask.

Preaching is the most common Teacher Talk in the classroom teaching. Teachers present language phenomena and explain the concept and rules of language by preaching.

One of the important functions of Teacher Talk is to give a feedback to the students’ action. The way of feedback may be positive feedback or negative feedback. Feedback can be based on students’ discourse content or in the form of words of students.

3.2 Speech Act theory

The Speech Act Theory was originated with the British philosopher John Austin. In 1962, Austin published his cognitive masterpiece about the analysis of sentence--- How to Do Things with Words.

As far as Austin’s concerned, a speaker might be performing three acts simultaneously when speaking, which are locutionary act, illocutionary act and perlocutionary act. A locutionary act is the act of uttering words, phrases and clauses. It is the act of conveying literal meaning by means of syntax, lexicon and phonology. An illocutionary act is the act of expressing the speaker’s intention; it is the act performed in saving something. A perlocutionary act is the act performed by or resulting from saying something. It is the consequence of, or the change brought about by utterance. It is the act performed by saying something. Austin’s view has caused a great stir in the field of language philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science, and played a positive role in enhancing people’s language knowledge and deepening language study (Dai Weidong, 2011: 81).

However, Austin showed some self-contradiction in dividing the three categories of speech acts, for example, he argued that illocutionary act was the vital part among the three speech acts and was the key point of understanding and grasping speech acts. Comparing with it, the other two speech acts are less important. But Searle pointed that they were interdependent and they could interconvert under certain conditions. Based on this, he boldly proposed the assumption of Indirect Speech Act that every speech event represented a speech act, but sometimes this behavior was expressed more directly, sometimes more indirectly only. Searle’s explanations about speech acts are the inheritance and development of Austin’s view, which strengthens the explanatory power of the Speech Act Theory. Visible, complete Speech Act Theory should include the two person’s theories on this issue.

In English class, the behavior of Teacher Talk is also speech act. Teachers use different discourse to achieve different speech acts.

4. Present Problems of Teacher Talk in Teaching Practice

4.1 Lack of Building Beneficial Language Learning Environment

In many English classes, ways of teaching is stiff and tedious. Teachers’ too much talking led to students’ boredom. Some teachers always repeat the same sentence from the beginning to the end of the class. This kind of class lost the richness and interest of the language teaching. The teachers, especially the English teachers, should from time to time change the expressing style of the language, on the one hand, to motivate students’ interests in English learning, on the other hand, to create a beneficial English learning environment for the students. However, in the real English classroom, teachers tend to use fixed language expression, always singing the same tune, only to make their language boring, which isn’t conducive to the motivation of the students’ interests in English learning and the development of the students’ spoken English.

4.2 Lack of Fully Teacher-student Interaction

From the distribution of quantity of Teacher Talk and Student Talk, Teacher Talk accounted for 20 min and Student Talk accounted for about 22 min. Teacher Talk dominates almost 40% time of a class. Teachers occupy 10 minutes to impart information by the way of leading reading and showing plenty of pictures (Bao Jinfen, 2008: 17). Teachers in the classroom only unilaterally output knowledge without interacting with students. During learning process, students only acts as passive knowledge receivers, not initiators. It’s the teachers that decide when students can talk, who can talk, which topic students can talk even how much students can talk. Teachers play the lead role in determining classroom communication. Students don’t have opportunity to interact with teachers. Their ability to perform active thinking, to form their own thoughtful ideas and to gain a further insight into things will be impeded.

4.3 Lack of Harmonious Relationship with Students

Feedback is an important part of Teacher Talk. Appropriate feedback is beneficial to build harmonious relationship. Positive feedback is helpful to students’ learning. However, if students can’t answer questions correctly, teachers often interrupt students and eagerly answer the questions themselves. Negative criticism makes students damage self-esteem and lose confidence.

What’s more, when students answered the question, some teachers couldn’t give a proper feedback. Their feedback is always monotonous and sweeping. If students answered well, teachers only evaluate with “good”, “great” without specific feedback, which can not stimulate students’ learning motivation.

5. Construction of Teacher Talk

5.1 Construction of Beneficial Language Learning Environment

Teacher Talk is the guidance of the English class. The talking environment in the English class should be created by teachers as much as possible. If students learn English in the real language environment, they can get a better understanding of learning English. The students can not only get a better grasp about the language form, but also get a better understanding about the usage of language. Teachers should provide a real language environment for students in teaching activities.

Greeting and preaching is the most important period to build beneficial language learning environment. Most English teachers use “Good morning, boys and girls.” to say hello to their students. But this way of greeting lacks real context of communication. Teachers can try to ask some questions about students’ daily to lead in today’s topic, such as “How do you feel today?”

When it comes to preaching part, teachers can use lively, flexible and humorous language to cultivate students’ interest. Some English teachers tend to use the classroom language in a single tone, or some others tend to speak in a harsh way, both of which will easily result in students" nervous mind and a tense classroom, and thus will seriously affect the teaching quality. The humorous classroom language is the lubricant of the English language teaching. It is an effective way to mobilize the classroom atmosphere and to regulate the emotions between the teachers and the students.

5.2 Construction of Sufficient Teacher-student Interaction

It is beyond doubt that teacher-student interaction is vital to improve the effect of English teaching and learning. Effective use of Teacher Talk is conductive to classroom interaction. In teacher-student interaction pattern, questions raised by the teachers play an important role. Teachers often rely on questions to remind students of the learned knowledge, kindle their curiosity for learning and develop students’ thinking abilities. Poor questioning will result in the monologue style of teachers and students’ distraction. To improve questioning skills, teachers can make efforts in the following aspects.

Firstly, it is essential to tailor the questions to students’ level and learning ability. Those questions beyond students’ current abilities should be avoided. For instance, it is not proper to ask the underachievers to figure out the root-causes of English pub culture. Likewise, to ask a straight-A student to recite “a, b, c, d…” is not appropriate either. In addition, much attention should be paid to the questions proper: first, it is better to raise comparatively short questions; second, it is preferable to question with simple grammatical structure in plain language; third, avoid the “yes” or “no” questions, since they will induce the students to respond “yes” or “no” without any other supplements.

Secondly, it is better to allow sufficient time for students to think before answering questions. Traditionally, it is assumed that it is a waste of time to give students enough time to think. So teachers more often than not wait less than a second before asking a student to respond and then either supply the required response themselves, or call on other students. However, the fact is that it is vital to wait in terms of promoting second language acquisition. Students need greater processing time to comprehend and interpret questions in English, the second language.

5.3 Construction of Harmonious Teacher-student Relationship

A good teacher-student relationship is the important factor in the success or failure of teaching. A harmonious relationship is based on care and trust, mutual respect between teachers and students and teaching in close cooperation.

Teachers should make an appropriate feedback to learners in the English classroom teaching. This is another aspect of Teacher Talk. Appropriate feedback can build harmonious relationship; enhance students’ learning motivation and stimulate their desire to participate in classroom interaction. Every student hopes to succeed. Teachers should pay attention to each student"s performance in the classroom, and should not overlook any students. If students perform well, teachers should give praise. While teachers should help students who perform badly to analyze the reasons, look for disparity, and encourage them. Teachers give a correct feedback to students, which can improve students’ confidence. Conversely, the teachers give an error feedback to the students will blow the enthusiasm of the students, which is not conducive to learning. Teachers should give the feedback from the learners’ psychological characteristics. According to the deferent situation, teachers should use different methods and strategies. Therefore, teachers should give the positive feedback in the protection of the enthusiasm of the students.

What’s more, giving proper instructions can also help build good relationship. Currently, teachers are required to be an initiator, a promoter and a learner consistent with students. When teachers need to implement activities, they should use “Shall we... ”, “Let’s ...” to issue instructions. Theses instructions will shorten the distance between teachers and students.

6. Application of Teacher Talk

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