| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺北教育大學 === 兒童英語教育學系碩士班 === 101 === The motivation of the study aroused from two factors that a male colleague feels frustrated when teaching low grade students and that in Taiwan the number of female teachers are apparently more than that of male teachers in elementary schools, especially in low grade classes. The study aimed to investigate the following research questions: 1. What are the characteristics of English teacher talk in low grade classes?
2. Is teacher talk related to gender?
The theoretical bases are Cognitive- developmental theory proposed by Piaget (1964), the features of teacher talk concluded by Chaudron (1988) and “women’s language” proposed by Lakoff (1975).
The study method includes classroom observation and semi-structured interview. The study participants are a male English teacher and a female English teacher. The teacher talk of the participants are video taped and the data are trascribed for frenquency count.Two male and two female homeroom teachers were recruited as respondents for interview.
The results reveal that the features of teacher talk in low grade classes are almost identical to Chaudron (1988), who proposaled that the features of teacher talk includes slow speech rate, many pauses, repetition, basic vocabulary and less complex sentence.
There are six characteristics of teacher talk in low grade classes: using great amount of direct and indirect instructions; using less hints and conditional sentences,using simple vocabularies and sentence structures; using intensifiers to attract attention; speaking slowly, and using transitions and final particles to slow the rate of speech; using different kinds of tag questions to check comprehension.
According to Lakoff (1975), women tend to use more hedges and intensifiers. It means that the female teacher participant should use more transitional hedges in her teacher talk, and check comprehension with many intensifiers.However, the result of the study shows the opposition. The male teacher uses more transitional hedges and intensifiers than the female teacher. Therefore, there are no relevance between teacher talk and gender in this study. The reason why women are suitable for low grades teaching could be flexibility, which means women are willing to adjust their language to fit the cognitive development of low grade students.
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