Attitudes in Teacher Talk in EFL Classroom from the Perspective of Appraisal Theory

Abstract

Adopting both quantitative and qualitative research methods, based on a self-built corpus, this study analyzes the Attitude resources embodied in Teacher Talk from the perspective of Appraisal Theory. The corpus of Teacher Talk is built by transcribing ten spoken English lectures delivered by five excellent college English teachers. This study aims to find out how the Attitude resources are used in EFL classroom to bridge the gap between teachers and students, motivate students, and foster a more engaging classroom environment in order to improve teaching effectiveness. Through a relatively detailed analysis, it is found that: Attitude resources are widely distributed in Teacher Talk. As a whole, the frequency of Affect, Judgment and Appreciation resources changes systematically, with frequency of Affect the lowest, that of Judgment the second, and that of Appreciation the highest. Meanwhile, the frequency of each subcategory among Affect, Judgment and Appreciation resources is very different. Affect subcategory resources are used by the teachers to express their own feelings and opinions; Judgment resources are used to evaluate students’ abilities and personality traits; Appreciation resources are used to evaluate students’ performance and the teaching materials. Teachers use resources related to positive Attitude to explicitly commend students and resources related to negative Attitude to gently or implicitly admonish them. It is anticipated that this study will have instructional value as a reference for Teacher Talk.