Investigating Medical Students’ Perspectives toward University Teachers’ Talking Features in an English as a Foreign Language Context in Urmia, Iran

This study aimed to investigate medical students’ attitudes toward some teachers’ talking features regarding their gender in the Iranian context. To do so, 60 male and 60 female medical students of Urmia University of Medical Sciences (UMSU) participated in the research. A researcher made Likert-type questionnaire which was initially piloted and was used to gather the data. Comparing the four different factors regarding the features of teacher talk, it was revealed that visual and extra-linguistic information factor, Lexical and syntactic familiarity, Speed of speech, and the use of Persian language had the highest to the lowest mean score, respectively. It was also indicated that female students rather than male students were significantly more in favor of speed of speech and lexical and syntactic familiarity.

Teacher Talk and Language Output

As an important input and teaching media in foreign language teaching classes, teacher talk (TT) has a great effect on language output. This paper explores the problems related to teacher talk (TT) and language output in practical ELT (English Language Teaching) classroom and presents some suggestions for solving the problems which affect learner' effective language output.

The Analysis of Teacher Talk in "Learner-centered" Teaching Mode

Being main teaching media and major source of comprehensive target language input, teacher talk plays an important role in learners' second-language acquisition. Under the trend of "learner-centered" teaching mode, some researchers think that the best teacher talk means less. But the author holds that, in Chinese second language classroom, it is not advisable to lay too much stress on the formal students' participation, which requires the teacher to say as little as possible and the student to say as much as possible. The emphasis should be put on how to raise teacher talk's quality.