Abstract: An in situ study of twinning at crack tip in a TiAl-base alloy has been performed.The result shows that twinning with long shear vector(2/6) [112] can generate on(111) plane, even though usually it is very difficult to occur because of the high energy barrier. It was further shown that (1/6) [112](111) twinning is considerably easier to generate. Furthermore,(1/2)<110) ordinary dislocations were very active and dominated nearly the whole plastic zone, in spite of low Schmid factors. On the other hand, however <101) and (1/2) <112] superdislocations with higher Schmid factors can hardly be observed.

Key words: TiAl-base alloy, deformation twinning, crack propagation