Teaching students to do: Teacher talk in technical classrooms.

摘要

This dissertation examines the language of the teachers in two technical classrooms at the graduate level--an engineering and a computer science course. Of focal interest are relationships between the discourse of the teachers' language and the teachers' instructional purposes in these technical classrooms.; Previous research on classroom language has not focused on the graduate level. Previous research on technical language, under the heading of English for Specific Purposes, has been dominated by a dichotomy between Arts and Science and an emphasis on vocabulary. This thesis is a preliminary step towards a descriptive account of technical teacher talk, from the point of view of "teaching to-do" as opposed to "teaching to-know". An ethnographic approach is used in data collection and analysis.; Two types of analysis are presented. The first analyzes the overall structure of the lectures in terms of boundary markers, nonverbal gestures accompanying the delivery of speech, control of the floor and focus of speech as marked by content. Two distinct genres emerge: the metalecture--talking "about" the lecture in opening and closing the class as well as in structuring topics; and the core lecture--teaching the subject matter.; The second type of analysis examines four discourse features related to the aim of teaching to-do: problem-solving discourse structure, uses of first and second person pronouns, interplay of verbal and graphics instruction, and the use of anecdotes and analogies to give voice to the teacher's own experience. The findings show how technical teachers at the graduate level use both verbal and nonverbal means to create an experiential context of learning for the students that focuses on students as doers.; This thesis suggests further research of this kind as a contribution to English for Specific Purposes and has implications for direct application to the preparation of students (both native and non-native speakers of English) to attend technical lectures at the graduate level.