Teacher Talk in the Second Language Classroom

The shift from a teacher-centred classroom to a learner-centred or learning-centred classroom does not imply that the role of the teacher has drastically reduced to that of a silent facilitator who leaves everything in the hands of the learners. The teacher has to interact with the learners at various points of the classroom transaction in order to engage them psychologically and emotionally in the learning process. If this interaction does not take place, the learners will be deprived of the contextually relevant teacher talk which has a lot of potential as a rich listening input for language acquisition. In this paper, I would like to present the various aspects of teacher talk in the context of facilitating second language acquisition