A Brief Analysis on the Interpersonal Matefunction of English Teacher Talk in Classes

Abstract

Teacher talk, as a important factor of second language acquisition, play an important role in the control of the university English classes and students' learning effect; quantity and quality of teachers' talk will influence or even determine the success of class. Teacher talk reflects the features and functions as the mean and tool of organizing, managing, arranging, and directing second language classes. Functional grammar has 3 purely theoretical functions: experiential metafunction, interpersonal metafunction, and textual metafunction. This paper analyses teacher talk in the classroom context from the angle of interpersonal metafunction and makes a research on the quantity of teacher talk and interactive adjustment of teachers and students and the forms of teachers' reflection on students' involvement by describing and explaining the structure of teacher talk. The study on interpersonal metafunction in systemic-functional linguistics has expanded the framework of interpersonal metafunction beyond sentence and achieved the interpersonal meanings by cognitive, estimative and interactive semantic means, which emphasizes that teachers talk can become important resources for expressing impersonal meanings.