Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 Purpose of the Study
As a teacher of English in a Higher Vocational College (HVC thereafter) for sixyears, I have been frustrated to find that students are passively engaged in classroomactivities and often fail to reach their potentials. Their poor performance is oftenattributed to two factors: one is their limited proficiency as they are enrolled with alow English mark; the other is exam-oriented teaching objective. Most teachers inHVC consider helping students pass the Practical English Test for Colleges the majorgoal.The dominant aspect of classroom interaction is the question-answer part wherethe teacher initiates the interaction with a question, the students respond and theteacher gives feedback. However, there are many problems in it.First of all, the current English teaching in HVC is based on Practical EnglishTest for Colleges (PRETCO), a large-scale national standardized EFL test for thestudents of HVC, postsecondary specialized colleges, and colleges for adults. So theEnglish Teaching, on a large scale, is still teacher-centered and exam-oriented. Mostof the teachers think that the objective of College English is to help students pass theexam. Their teaching beliefs affect their practices in classroom. Teacher talkdominates classroom interaction and students have few opportunities to air theiropinions in classrooms. Oral English is still a major problem for students and they failto meet the requirements of their jobs. Complaints and criticism are constantlyreceived by the English teachers.
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1.2 Importance of the Study
This study is important in two ways.First, it can fill a gap in research today in the HVC contexts to investigate howteachers interact with students in English classrooms in teacher-fronted class time (i.e.class time when the teacher interact with the students with the whole class as theintended audience).Second, although many researchers have examined teacher-student interaction ordifferent aspects of teacher talk, e.g. questioning behaviors, feedback, etc, fewresearch has attempted to establish the link between teacher-student interaction andteachers’epistemologies, i.e. their belief system. This study can fill this gap. In order to investigate the relationship between classroom interaction andteaching epistemologies, the following two research questions were formulated forthis study of four teachers and their classes:How do the teachers interact with their students in teacher-fronted class time?How do the teachers’epistemologies shape their interactions with the students?
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Chapter 2 Literature Review
2.1 Theories
Krashen’s Input Hypothesis (1982) has been one of the fundamental theories insecond language acquisition since the 1980s. It states that teachers should takeadvantage of classroom time with acquisition tasks or activities instead of explicitgrammatical structures.Students acquire by understanding language that contains messages a bit beyondtheir current level of competence (i/1), with the help of context and extra-linguisticinformation. Their linguistic competence, context, common sense, knowledge aboutthe world, extra-linguistic information contribute to their mastery of the structure a bitbeyond their current level of competence.Students should not，英语论文题目，英语论文
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