基于语用学视角的中学英语教师课堂话语研究.doc

基于语用学视角的中学英语教师课堂话语研究a pragmaticsbased study on the features ofmiddle school english teacher talkabstract: these years, it has been an inclination that linguists and scholars have shown interests in studying teacher talk. in china the researches on it are mostly carried out in the college but seldom in the middle school. this research studies 10 middle school english teachers, who are of different age, gender, and years of teaching. the thesis aims to draw the english teachers attention to efl classroom interactional processes and to focus on the role teacher talk plays in promoting learners efl development. it will consider the teachers language from the two following pragmatics perspectives: speech act theory and relevance theory. based on the pragmatics perspectives, the thesis explores into three questions. through the analysis of the ten teachers talk in class, its found clearly that 1) teacher talk plays an important role in organizing and maintaining the classroom teaching and learning activities. 2) the distribution of subjects and categories of teacher talk is different, which means that the teachers hold different attitudes towards each category. 3)in order to increase learners motivation and enhance the efficiency of language learning in the efl classroom, it is advisable for the teachers to pay great attention to their teaching language in class.key words: pragmatics；middle school english teachers；teacher talk；tefl class；摘要：教师话语是近几年来语言学家和教育学家研究外语教学的一个重要方面。国内此方面的研究主要集中在大学课堂,而关于中学教师课堂话语的调查与研究很少。本研究是由十名不同年龄,性别及教龄的中学英语教师组成，目的是为了使中学教师认识到课堂话语在组织外语教学和提升学生外语学习过程中扮演着重要的角色。本文基于语用学视角的言语行为理论和相关理论对教师课堂话语进行分析,主要探究并解决三个问题。通过对教师话语类型的数据对比,研究发现1)教师话语在组织和维持课堂教学活动中扮演着重要的角色。 2)各类教师话语的功能不同和教师们课堂话语使用的分布不同。 3)教师应注意课堂语言的组织与运用, 从而调动学生学习的兴趣以及实现课堂语言教学的有效进行。关键词：语用学；中学英语教师；教师话语；英语课堂教学；contentsi. introduction.1a. research background .1b. research purpose.1c. research significance.2ii. literature review.2a. pragmatics .21. definition of pragmatics.22. pragmatics perspectives.3b. previous studies about teacher talk.41. definitions of teacher talk.42. categories of teacher talk.43. researches about teacher talk at home and abroad.5iii. research.7a. research questions.7b. research methods.7c. research instrument.7d. research design.81. construct corpus.82. data collection.9e. research data.9iv. data analysis. 9a. answer to question 1.9b. answer to question 2.10c. answer to question 3.11v. conclusion.12works cited.14a pragmaticsbased study on the features of middle school english teacher talki. introductiona. research background english, as a communicational tool, plays an important part in modern society. learning english as well as english education has turned into an explicit tendency in the field of education. in our country, tefl (teaching english as a foreign language) is the sole form taken in china, and as a domain, it includes at least three elements, i.e., language teachers, teaching medium and language learners. in teaching practice, the teaching objectives will be realized by the interaction among these three internal elements. hence, class interaction between lt (language teachers) and ll (language learners) is one major approach to realize communication. teacher talk has played a critical role in the field of language education as well as the research of language acquisition. first, teacher talk is an important channel for the students to acquire language information and produce their discourse. second, teacher talk is the main method of communicating emotions and conducting language study between teachers and students. it means that teacher talk is an important part of english language teachers implementing classroom teaching practice, it is necessary to attend to. issues that have been investigated include the amount and type of teacher talk, speech modifications made by teachers in terms of different levels such as lexicon and syntax, type and number of questions asked by teachers and teachers feedback. this study is based on the pragmatic perspectives. specifically, the present research, taking the discourse functions and the principle of politeness on perspectives, based on the relevance theory and speech act theory, is to explore into the features of middle school english teacher talk.b. research purpose the research is to adopt empirical approach, including descriptive and prescriptive statistic methods, to study the features of middle school english teacher talk. the aims are as follows:(1) the present study is aimed to find out the categories of language used by the teachers, and through analyzing the teacher talk in efl teaching class, the result can draw the teachers attention to prepare to subordinate their own behavior to the learning needs of their students.(2) the language teachers also are drawn to attend to the students ability of language acquisition and competence, which can increase the students interest and enthusiasm in the participation and affect their progress towards the linguistic and communicative competence. (3) the present study enhances the teachers awareness in applying pragmatical principles or theories into their teaching practice, which can promote their professional devotions to some extent. c. research significancesince tefl classes are required to be interactive and communicative, and teacher class discourse is playing a more important role in learners language acquisition, the present research, as an applicational exploration, is significant in two aspects.(1) the pragmatic features analysis of middle school english teacher talk is to let the middle school english teachers have more opportunities to identify their weaknesses in language competence, through which their professional development can be enhanced, and it also enlighten the teachers to acquire the ability of teaching english more creatively and effectively.(2) the research results of the present research is to provide some manipulative suggestions for language teachers education and training, especially in respect to the pedagogic content designing, the teaching and training models as well as educational evolution system. ii. literature reviewa. pragmatics1. definition of pragmaticsits found from oxford advanced learners englishchinese dictionary (wehmeier 1343), pragmatics refers to the study of the way which language used to express what sb. really means in particular situations, especially when the actual words used may appear to mean something different.pragmatics refers to “the study of the use of language in communication, particularly the relationships between sentences and the contexts and situations in which they are used” (richard 356).in accordance with yang zhongs book, pragmatics refers to the analysis of meaning in context, pragmatics analysis of meaning is first and foremost concerned with the study of what is communicated by a speaker/writer and interpreted by a listener/reader (yang 93).another linguist (hu 17) has pointed out that pragmatics is the study of meaning in context. it deals with particular utterances in particular situations and is especially concerned with the various ways in which many social contexts of language performance can influence interpretation. in other words, pragmatics is concerned with the way language is used to communicate rather than with the way language is internally structured. the last but not the least definition of pragmatics is one new field of linguistics which studies how to use context to interpret and use language (he 1). from the definitions listed above, it can be concluded that pragmatics is one branch of linguistics. it mainly focuses on the relation between context and meaning, holding interpretation of meaning as its essential part. actually, pragmatics is inclined to study how the meaning is interpreted or acquired based on different readers and different contexts. in this process, the relations among the factors are studied.2. pragmatics perspectivesteacher talk is itself a special register of language. it has many characteristics in common with foreigner talk, which refers to the speech variety used by native speakers when addressing nonnative speakers, since teachers find themselves confronted to the problems of conveying information with a code that is explicit, lucid and accessible to the learners. teachers have ultimate responsibility for managing classroom interaction. they also control the topic of the discourse by means of questions. it is not surprising, therefore, that much of the research into classroom language processing has focus on the teachers language. this study will consider the teachers language from these following pragmatics perspectives: speech act theory, relevance theory and functional meaning.relevance theory was formally proposed by dan sperber and deirdre wilson in their book relevance: communication and cognition in 1986 (hu 198), which is defined as: every act of ostensive communication communicates the presumption of its own optimal relevance. relevance means when people interpret language, they seek for a connection between newlyinformation and contextual presupposition. this cognitive and rational process needs efforts, for the purpose of successful communication.speech act theory was promoted by john langshaw austin (1952), which means when we talk about something; the sentences do not describe things, because the sentences themselves cant refer to the things we mean. for example, the sentence “where is the beef?” it can not be said wrong or right, the uttering of this sentence is the doing of action. the listener will do something. according to this question, this is the power of speech. b. previous studies about teacher talk1. definition of teacher talkaccording to longman dictionary of language teaching and applied linguistics (richards 471), teacher talk refers to that variety of language sometimes used by teachers when they are in the process of teaching.in rout ledge dictionary of language and linguistics (bussmann 477), teacher talk is defined as “artificial or stylized language spoken by the second (or foreign) language instructor with the purpose of conveying meaningful information to the language learner”.encyclopedic dictionary of applied linguistics (johnson 320) defines teacher talk as the term used to describe the register which teacher use in class with learners. it includes the aspects of teacher behavior such as error correction, simplification, reduction, explanation and talking time distribution.ellis (1990) talks about teacher talk in her understanding second language acquisition like this: the language that teachers address to l2 learners is treated as a register, with its own specific formal and interactional properties. studies of teacher talk can be divided into those that investigate the type of language that teacher use in language classrooms and those that investigate the type of language they use in subject lesson (e.g. science) involving l2 learners.in this thesis, the term “teacher talk” refers to the language used by english teachers in the classroom to give instructions, ask questions, organize class and give feedback.2. category of teacher talk since the 1970s, quite a lot of scholars have made researches on teacher talk. ellis(1990) holds the view that the researchers interests in teacher talk mainly on two aspects1) the analysis of the type of teacher talk used in the language lesson, such as long and sato(1983) study interaction in esl (english as a second language) classroom and compare it with native speakernonnative speaker conversation in an informal, noninstructional setting; 2) the research of the teacher talk in the university subject lesson, e.g. chaudron(1983) makes a preliminary and classification of teacher talk from the linguistic point of view, revealing that teacher talk has many prominent features in phonology, lexis, syntax and discourse. his focus is on tempo of speech, pause, intonation, stress and adjustments on the level of vocabulary, syntactic structure and text. as to syntactic complexity, some researchers like wesche and ready (1983) found no difference in teachers chosen measures, whereas others like gaise and hakansson (1979) have found quite marked differences. however, little is known about what constitutes optimal teacher talk and on what basis teachers made their modifications. besides, all these studies attach much importance to the various linguistic features of teacher talk as language input, because teachers have ultimate responsibility for managing classroom interaction. it is not surprising that much of the research into classroom language processes has focused on the teachers language. according to the pragmatic function of the english teaching class, mainly the speech act theory and the relevance theory, the thesis divides the teaching language into instruction, question, feedback, transition and phatic function.3. research about teacher talk at home and abroada. researches abroadwith the growth of interest in sla, many researchers begin to explore the functions and features of teacher talk. and the importance of teacher talk is soon recognized and paid attention to by teachers and researchers.as nunan points out, teacher talk is of crucial importance, not only for the organization of the classroom but also for the process of acquisition. it is important for the organization and management of the classroom because it is through language that teachers either succeed or fail to implement their teaching plans. in terms of acquisition, teacher talk is important because it is probably the major source of comprehensible target language input the learners is likely to receive (nunan 189).cook also holds that language may come first from teacher. this may be understood as that teacher talk is a major source of target language exposure in a classroom setting. “the amount and type of teacher talk will influence and even decide the result of classroom teaching (hakansson 1986 quoted in zhouxing and zhouyun 2002).since teacher talk is important for language teaching practice and the studies of pedagogy, the interest in the research for the language used in language classroom has gradually drawn peoples attention in resent years. “interest in the language of the classroom has grown steadily in the last twenty years. it has been motivated by the recognition that whether it is a subject lesson or a language lesson, successful outcomes may depend on the type of language used by the teacher and the type of interaction occurring in the classroom”(ellis 143).to sum up, the teachers language is not only the objective of the course, but also the medium to achieve the objective. both the organization and the process of acquisition are achieved through teacher talk. depending on teacher talk, teachers pass on knowledge and skills, organize teaching activities, guide students to give full play to their subjective initiative, encourage students to participate in class interaction and provide students with due comprehensible language input. in the words of johnson (1995), teachers control what goes on in classroom primarily through the ways in which they use language.b. researches at homehowever，currently the research on teacher talk in china is relatively inefficient, wang(1980) argues that efl researchers have not paid enough attention to teacher talk in the classroom in china. among the few studies on teacher talk in china, zhao (1998) and zhou & zhou (2002) have conducted studies on efl classroom teacher talk. their findings are quite different from each other. zhou and zhou (2002) find that the classroom they investigated seem to prompt more interactional modifications and consequently provide more opportunities for negotiation of meaning. in sharp contrast, zhaos (1998) findings show a reverse result.recently the research on teacher talk based on corpus teemed with our country. for example, luo (1999) and wang (2000). another important researcher who mainly studies the structure of english teacher talk is li (2002). she thinks there are four cases about classroom language structure. tang and liu (2003) use the speech act theory to analyze the teacher talk; they pay much attention on the phatics, instruction and question functions of the teacher talk.from the literature above, it shows clearly that the researches are only focusing on teachers language, they dont pay attention to the students language, and the interaction between teachers and students is not mentioned. besides, these researches are mostly conducted in the universities, which are done by the teachers of english in the senior high school are mainly on teaching methodologies and learning strategies. iii. researcha. research questions teacher talk, which serves as a valuable source of input to language learners, has been an important domain examined by researchers in the field of teaching by means of discourse analysis. the present research which is based on the pragmatics perspectives is aimed to find out the categories of language used by the teachers, and through analyzing the teacher talk in