STRATEGIES OF TEACHER TALK

The topic of the paper is 'A Comparison of the speech of native speake r interacting with foreign learners at different levels of knowledge'. The speech of the same speaker interacting with a fellow native speak er is going to be the base line for my comparison. In other words, it deals with the language which is used in one of the distinct types of discourse, namely that of the native-foreigner talk. It examines the ' teacher-talk' to various interlocutors who have been graded according to their proficiency in foreign language, and attempts to formulate ge neral description of the linguistic 'register' used by the native spea ker of English. This study is mainly concerned with the roles of the d iscourse interlocutors, particularly, with the main role of the native speaker in a native-speaker - non-native speaker situation. The cruci al factor for the native-speaker in this situation, it seems to me, is to modify her speech to enable the non-native speakers to comprehend the discourse successfully.