Essay On Teacher Talk

Introduction

Teaching is a crucial profession because it is designed to empower students; to give them more freedom, more power and more prestige. Teachers hold in their hands the success of our country and the wellbeing of its citizens; they are the key to help every person to realise his/her full potential.

In teaching process, teachers use the target language to promote their communication with learners. They use this language so that they could encourage the communication between learners and themselves. This language is called teacher talk. Teacher talk is the exact words that teachers say to their students (Dickson, 2005; Crawford, 1999). In the other word, it is the content of lesson each teacher taught during each period of the class. Although teachers use same textbook as their teaching materials, each teacher has his/her own methods and words for their teaching process. "Teacher talk is used in class when teachers are conducting instructions, cultivating their intellectual ability and managing classroom activities" (Qican, 1999, p.23). In the other word, teacher talk is a kind of communication-based talk.

Teacher talk is considered as an important element in language teaching (Cook, 2000). Researchers (Cook, 2000; Chaudron, 1988; Xiaohong, 1998) believed that teacher talk makes up around seventy percentage of classroom language. In the teaching process, teachers organize their teaching activities and consequently help students practice through their teacher talk. In English classroom, teacher’s language is not the only objective of the course, but also the medium to achieve the teaching objectives.

Teacher talk has some features. One feature refers to the teacher talk's form such as speed, pause, repetition and modific...

... middle of paper ...

...s such as positive reinforcement, encouragement, trusting, caring and accepting, toward students in the classroom.

Communication: Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics defines communication as "the exchange of ideas, information, etc., between two or more persons. In an act of communication there is usually at least one speaker or sender, a message which is transmitted, and a person or persons for whom this message is intended (the receiver). Communication is studied from many disciplinary perspectives, is often viewed as a discipline in its own right, and is central to sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and information theory".

Learning Attitude: It is expressions of positive or negative feelings towards learning which may cause ease or difficulty of learning a language. Language attitudes effect on second/foreign language learning.