Works Cited 14

1。 Introduction 

With the development of classroom teaching in domestic area, English education has been highly advocated and improved because of the increasing social demand for English talents, which requires a high quality of English teacher talk (TT)。 For many years, more attention of teaching research has been attached to teaching method, not to the teacher talk。 As we all know, English teacher talk is very significant not only in class organization but also in the process of students’ language acquisition。 Also, it is a thread involving teaching methodologies and helps teachers complete their teaching plans, which in some ways is required to be efficient, sufficient, rational, relevant, brief and orderly。 Whether English TT is proper affects the output and communication abilities of learners。 Luckily, brilliant abilities of English expressions are possessed by some English teachers。 However, some other English teachers are poor in language communicating。 Their instructional talks in classroom often lack of effectiveness and efficiency。 According to Grice’s Cooperative Principle (CP), people would observe the CP and “Make your conversational contribution such as required at the stage at which it occurs by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged” (Dai and He 87)。 The notion of CP is further expressed by the explanation of the quantity maxim, one of the maxims of CP。 The quantity maxim is a maxim to govern conversation as well as English TT in English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom。 The demand of quantity maxim is “Making the information exchanged as it is required and do not make the conversation more informative than is required”(Dai and He 87)。 With this maxim, teachers in English classroom should observe the rules and try to polish the classroom TT with the help of quantity maxim。 That is to say, the observation of quantity maxim is a prerequisite for the cultivation of TT。 On one part, some English teachers follow this maxim to get success in classroom conversation。 On another part, some may violate this maxim for some reasons。 This paper focuses on the relation between English TT and quantity maxim, and presents a clear account of the studies made in the quantity maxim。 At the same time, it will search for the reasons why the TT would violate the maxim of quantity and then put forward some practical advice to the improvement of English TT。 论文网

2。 Literature Review

2。1 Teacher talk

     Teachers’ language has special meanings for most of the students。 “Teachers address language learners differently from how they address other kinds of learners。 They adjust both language form and function to facilitate communication”(Song and Pan 51)。 So the definition of TT is rendered with these types of adjustments。 English TT is regarded as a register which is adopted by teachers, applied in teaching procedures and activities and modified to make students have a better understanding of the teaching content。 Li Yunying (1999) holds an important viewpoint, in which she appraises the vital function of TT in all kinds of classroom, especially in the ELT classroom。 She also discusses that language is both the target of courses and the channel to get to the target。 Both the organization and the language acquisition in the process of teaching can be realized by the application of TT。 Whether the expected goals of English teaching is reached mostly depends on the effectiveness of TT。 

2。2 Cooperative Principle and quantity maxim

     In 1967, the Oxford University philosopher and logician Paul Grice discovered the existence of Cooperative Principle, by which he assumed that in a conversation the participants will cooperate with each other for achieving their common purposes。 The general principle advocates participants to observe that “Make your conversational contribution such as required at the stage at which it occurs by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged” (Dai and He 87)。 There are four categories of maxims under CP, the maxim of quantity, the maxim of quality, the maxim of relation and the maxim of manner。 This thesis attaches great importance to the maxim of quantity。 Quantity maxim recommends that “Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange)。 Do not make your contribution more informative than is required” (Dai and He 87)。文献综述