“Teacher English”: Teacher’s Target Language Use as Cornerstone of Successful Language Teaching

Abstract

In most of today’s courses of English as a foreign language, the learners and teacher share the same mother tongue, but English is the language used to carry out all activities as far as the learner level allows. This means that the teacher’s level of target language mastery plays a significant role in the quality of language teaching and the resulting learning. The paper looks at the functions of teacher talk as a source of input and model language use as well as a tool for managing classroom processes. Based on that, an argument is made for ‘teacher English’ as a case of English for specific purposes.