Teacher Talk and Interaction

2008 IABR & TLC Conference Proceedings San Juan, Puerto Rico, USA

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Second Language Classroom Interaction

Patterns: An Investigation

Of Three Case Studies YANG Chi Cheung Ruby, The Hong Kong Institute of Education, Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

The present study investigates the teacher-student interaction patterns of three NNS pre-service

teachers teaching in three different secondary schools during their English lessons through

analyzing the transcripts of their videotaped lessons. In the study, only the discourse patterns in

the whole class teaching portion were investigated. The results show that the classroom discourse

patterns followed the three-part I-R-F exchange structure proposed by Sinclair and Coulthard

(1975) in many instances. There were a great number of teacher initiations while only a small

number of student initiations were found. The students mainly assumed the role of respondents.

INTRODUCTION

Background of the study

Classroom discourse analysis has long been investigated and classroom interaction patterns are worth being

studied because of their great impact on either facilitating or inhibiting students‟ language acquisition.

Traditional language classroom interaction is usually characterized by a rigid pattern, particularly the acts

of asking questions, instructing and correcting students‟ mistakes. Also, teachers are usually the ones who select and

initiate topics for conversation and restrict students‟ responses. These phenomena can be found in Tsui‟s (1985)

study of Hong Kong secondary English classes. In Tsui‟s report on two Form 2 English lessons, she discovered that

these two classrooms lacked the meaningful interaction found in native speaker/non-native speaker (NS-NNS)

conversation which is considered to be necessary for second language acquisition (Long, 1981, cited in Tsui, 1985).

Also, teacher questions were the most dominant in the lessons. The interaction generated was predominantly a

teacher-centred question-answer-feedback interaction during which student knowledge was displayed and evaluated,

whereas „Pupil-Initiate‟ was completely absent. When a communication breakdown occurred, the question was often

directed to another pupil instead of the teacher and student repairing the discourse. With the absence of opportunities

for students to negotiate meaning with their teacher, their language acquisition is claimed to be inhibited (as

suggested by Long, 1987).

Teachers in traditional classrooms tend to dominate the interaction and speak most of the time because they

think that close and persistent control over the classroom interaction is a precondition for achieving their

instructional goals and students‟ unpredictable responses can be avoided (Edwards & Westgate, 1994). This is

especially the case for those teachers who lack confidence in the subject matter they teach (Smith & Higgins, 2006).

Pupils, on the other hand, just act mainly as the receivers of knowledge. This interaction pattern is likely to

minimize students‟ involvement in the lessons (Walsh, 2002) and inhibit their opportunities to use language for

communication (Hasan, 2006). McCarthy (1991, p. 18) suggests that teachers should try their very best to strike a

balance between „real‟ communication and teacher talk. Cullen (1998) also believes that „good‟ teacher talk means

„little‟ teacher talk because too much talk by the teacher deprives students of opportunities to speak. In other words,

it means that instead of dominating the whole lesson, teachers should give their students more opportunities to

initiate topics for conversation (Mackey, McDonough, Fujii, & Tatsumi, 2001).


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Another reason for teacher dominance in classroom interaction is that it is rather difficult for teachers to get

students‟ oral responses. This is particularly true in Hong Kong classrooms. For instance, in the discussion groups of

Allison and Martyn‟s (1993) seminar, getting students to talk was considered as the most important issue among the

teachers. 40% of the teachers‟ questions (21 out of 52 questions asked) were related to this problem which included

„how to get students to speak up or participate in oral English activities‟ (Allison & Martyn, 1993, p. 45). Also, in

the action research studies conducted by Tsui (1996, p. 148-154) with a group of thirty-eight ESL teachers teaching

in secondary schools in Hong Kong, over 70% of them thought that getting students‟ oral responses was one of their

major problems in teaching. The teachers noticed factors leading to student reticence included: 1) low English

proficiency of students; 2) students‟ lack of confidence and fear of making mistakes and being laughed at; 3)

teachers‟ intolerance of silence; 4) the uneven allocation of turns because teachers tend to ask brighter students to

answer questions; and 5) students‟ not being able to understand teachers‟ instructions.

Purpose of the study

Given the centrality of teacher talk in the classroom and their potential influence on students‟ discourse

patterns, this area is worth being investigated.

The purpose of the present study is to investigate the teacher-student interaction patterns of three pre-service

teachers teaching in secondary schools with different banding1 during the whole class teaching portion of their

English lessons through analyzing the transcripts of their videotaped lessons. A special emphasis is put on exploring

the effects of teacher talk on the students‟ discourse patterns. Tsui (1985) believes that it is essential for language

teachers to know what has actually gone on in their own language classrooms. Johnson (1995) also suggests that an

understanding of the classroom interaction patterns is essential for teachers to establish and maintain good

communicative practices and such kind of understanding can be discovered through investigating the features of the

teachers‟ L2 classroom discourse.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Approaches to analyzing classroom discourse

Classroom interaction patterns can be discovered by analyzing lesson transcripts. There are three major

approaches for analyzing classroom discourse: interaction analysis (IA) approaches, conversation analysis (CA)

approaches and discourse analysis (DA) approaches. The DA approach is more suitable because the major focus of

this study was to find out the discourse pattern in the whole class teaching portion of each investigated lesson and

the lessons could be analyzed systematically through its descriptive apparatus (system of analysis). The DA

approach has been adopted in the majority of previous approaches to L2 classroom interaction, for example,

Hardman, Smith, and Wall (2003), Abd-Kadir and Hardman (2007), etc. It has long been popular in the L2 teaching

profession because the analyses used in the DA approach are simple, quick, straightforward and complete

(Seedhouse, 2004). The system for analyzing classroom discourse developed by Sinclair and Coulthard (1975),

which proposed that lessons could be analyzed at different levels, is explained as below.

System of analysis

Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) propose that the lesson is the highest unit of classroom discourse and is made

up of a series of transactions (or lesson topics), which consist of one or more teaching exchanges that also consist of

one or more moves, and moves are made up of acts as discussed below.

Moves

1 According to the Information Leaflet on the Secondary School Places Allocation System 2005/2007 Cycle, the scaled marks of all students in

the territory in their internal assessments at the end of Primary 5, and both in mid-year and at the end of Primary 6 will be put into an order of

merit. Then students are equally divided into three Territory Bands, each consisting of 1/3 of the total number of primary students in the territory.


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A typical three-part classroom exchange usually consists of an Initiation (I) by the teacher, followed by a

Response (R) from a pupil and then followed by the Feedback (F) to the pupil‟s response (Sinclair & Coulthard,

1975). There are five classes of moves which then form the two major classes of exchanges - boundary and teaching

exchanges. Boundary exchanges include framing moves, while initiation, response and follow-up moves form the

teaching exchanges. The function of the boundary exchanges is to signal the beginning or end of a stage of a lesson,

whereas the teaching exchanges are individual steps by which a lesson progresses.

Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) identify a number of different categories of teaching exchanges. The four

main functions of these teaching exchanges are informing, directing, eliciting, and checking and are distinguished by

their different types of act which form the initiating moves.

Acts

1. Teacher and pupil inform This exchange is used when the teacher passes on facts, opinions, ideas and

information to pupils. Sometimes, pupils may also offer information which they think is relevant or

interesting.

2. Teacher direct It is in this exchange that the teacher gets pupils to do something.

3. Teacher and pupil elicit This category is involved when the teacher obtains verbal responses from pupils.

Very often, the teacher will use a series of elicit exchanges to move the lesson forward and keep it ongoing.

Sometimes, an elicit is also used to check if the pupils remember a certain fact. Feedback is an essential

element in a classroom exchange because having given their response, pupils want to know whether it is

correct or not. Pupils may also sometimes ask the teacher questions.

4. Check It is in this exchange that the teacher checks how well the pupils‟ progress is, and whether they can

follow the teaching pace. This is achieved by using a checking move such as „Have you finished?‟.

Apart from the four main functions of teaching exchanges, there now follows a summary of some other acts

suggested by Sinclair and Coulthard (1975).

5. Clue It is realized by a statement or a question which provides additional information to help pupils to

answer the elicitation.

6. Bid In this act, a pupil calls the teacher‟s name or raises his/her hand to signal a desire to contribute to the

classroom discourse.

7. Nomination It is realized by the name of a pupil with its function of calling on the pupil to contribute to the

classroom discourse.

8. Reply This act is either realized by a statement or nonverbally such as a nod to give response to the

elicitation.

9. React It is realized by a non-linguistic action to provide response to the preceding directive.

10. Accept It is realized by responses such as „yes‟, „good‟ or repetition of a pupil‟s reply, with neutral low fall

intonation, to show that the reply is appropriate.

11. Evaluate This act is usually realized by words such as „good‟ or „interesting‟ which comment on the

quality of a pupil‟s reply or react, also by „no‟, with a high fall intonation, and repetition of the pupil‟s

reply.

Each move has different functions. Framing moves are indications given by the teacher that one stage of a

lesson has been finished and another stage will begin. They are signalled by a closed class of items (that is, markers)

such as „OK‟, „Now‟ or „Right‟ (Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975).

The initiation and response moves are complementary. While the function of an initiation move is to pass

on information, direct an action or elicit a fact, the type of response move is predetermined by the opening move

because its function is to be an appropriate response to the opening move. The response appropriate to an

informative move is to acknowledge that one is listening but it can also be performed nonverbally. Following a

teacher‟s directive move, it may be followed by a pupil‟s verbal acknowledgement that he/she has heard it.

Following an elicitation, there is usually a reply or sometimes a comment (Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975).

The function of a follow-up move is to let the student know how well he/she has performed. It usually

occurs after the response move and is realized by acceptance, evaluation or comment (Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975).

Such kind of feedback may sometimes be performed nonverbally, for example, with a nod (Seedhouse, 2004). If the


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follow-up move is withheld, the pupil is likely to predict that his/her answer is wrong or not what the teacher

expects. Withholding feedback until a correct response is given (Tsui, 1995), or initiating repair to get the student

producing the target pattern (Seedhouse, 2004) is a common strategy teachers use to avoid giving negative

evaluation.

Centralized communication in traditional language classrooms

Centralized communication is generally considered as the most obvious characteristic of the discourse

pattern in a traditional language classroom. In the traditional teacher-led language classroom, the typical pattern of

interaction is a three-part exchange sequence of teacher initiation (usually in question form), followed by student

response and then teacher feedback (Cazden, 1988). The speaking rights of teacher and pupils are unequal (Cazden,

1988; Seedhouse, 2004). The teacher is usually the person who controls the topic for classroom talk, and determines

when to start and stop talking in the classroom (Cazden, 1988; Tsui, 1995) because he/she believes that a tight

control over classroom communication is a precondition for reaching his/her pedagogical objectives (Edwards &

Westgate, 1994) and can secure an „orderly interaction‟ pattern (Edwards & Furlong, 1978, p. 15). It is a common

strategy that the teacher throws the speaking turn open to the whole class. If there is no volunteer who takes the turn,

the teacher will rather quickly assign a student to take the turn to sustain the interaction or to move the lesson

forward (Tsui, 1995). The teacher is central to the classroom interaction while pupils are listeners of the lesson.

Thus, Edwards and Furlong (1978, p. 23) think that most teacher talk can only be described as „telling‟. Because of

this kind of centralized communication, teacher talk takes up the largest proportion of classroom talk. It represents

approximately two-thirds of the discourse in both L1 and L2 classrooms according to Chaudron (1988).

The typical I-R-F interaction pattern can easily be found in a language classroom. For example, in the

analysis of one of the lesson transcriptions in an in-service teacher training project designed to raise trainees‟

awareness of the features of their classroom talk, Thornbury (1996) found that there are prolonged sequences of

teacher initiation followed by student response and then the teacher‟s giving feedback, which made the lesson less

communicative. Thornbury (1996) added that one reason for such kind of interaction pattern can be explained by the

constraints imposed by the grammatical syllabus.

Cullen (1998), however, believes that the analysis of teacher talk based on the criteria of communicative

behaviour in the world outside the classroom are over simplistic. In his analysis of the video transcription of a third-

year English class in a mixed preparatory school in Cairo, Egypt, Cullen found that what appears to be non-

communicative teacher talk is not necessarily so in the classroom context. He therefore suggests that the reality of

the classroom context should also be considered when analyzing classroom interaction patterns.

Effects of teacher talk

The dominance of teacher talk is not an uncommon phenomenon in classroom discourse patterns and a

number of studies have been devoted to investigating its characteristics and effects on students‟ interaction patterns,

or the characteristics that make teacher talk communicative (Cullen, 1998).

One of the research studies that investigated the effects of teacher talk is an ethnographic research

conducted by Ernst (1994) during a school year through participant observation. Data were collected through audio-

and videotaping of the interactions of the students (aged 6-11) from an elementary school in Florida. The

microanalysis of the audio and video transcripts showed that when the teacher assumed the role of initiator, the

students assumed the role of respondents.

In one of the classroom transcripts taken from university teacher training courses in southeast Mexico,

more student-centred activities and less teacher talk were emphasized and therefore, Cadorath and Harris (1998)

found that there were authentic teacher-student and student-student interactions involved.

Besides these, in the research study conducted by Burns and Myhill (2004), the video data showed the

Initiation-Response-Initiation-Response (IRIR) discourse pattern, with only very little teacher feedback. Pupils‟

length of responses was inhibited by such kind of teacher-dominated discourse, with few extended exchanges and

the pupils rarely initiated interactions with the teacher.


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Hasan (2006) also did an analysis of the classroom discourse to find out the patterns of the use of questions

and initiations. In this study, six classes of six NNS English teachers at Damascus University were audio and video

recorded. The results of the analysis were consistent with the general claim that teachers in traditional classroom

interactions usually speak most of the time. In this study, there were a greater number of teachers‟ initiations while

the number of students‟ initiations was smaller. There were 176 teachers‟ initiations among all the six classes while

only 10 students‟ initiations could be found. These made the classroom non-communicative and students‟ natural

use of language was inhibited.

Lastly, Abd-Kadir and Hardman (2007) did an analysis of the discourse of whole class teaching in twenty

Kenyan and Nigerian primary school English lessons. In the Kenyan data, teacher explanation, questions and cued

elicitations accounted for over 80% of the initiating moves, while pupil demonstration accounted for only 4% of the

responses. And in the Nigerian data, teacher questions and cued elicitations accounted for nearly 60% of the

initiating moves, whereas pupil questions accounted for less than 1%. In these two sets of data, over 92% of the

choral and individual responses were three words or less. This implies that the dominance of teacher talk gives

students little opportunity to respond and so their responses tend to be very short.

Although it is generally considered that less teacher talk can facilitate more student-student interaction,

some research studies have found that teacher talk still has an important role to play. In the analysis of the language

practices of a teacher in a Grade One Italian bilingual class, Mickan (2006) found that teacher talk is used for giving

instructions, managing students‟ classroom activities and behaviour, teaching subject content, and interacting with

individual students. Apart from these functions, with the repetitive teacher talk (repeated exposure to the discourses

of classroom activities), children‟s comprehension skills developed. Mickan (2006) strongly claims that this

advantage applies in foreign and second language classrooms as well. For example, in a one-year ethnographic study

conducted in a first-grade ESL classroom in the U.S., Willett (1995) found that three girls developed comprehension

skills through the highly predictable and continual reenactment of the morning classroom events and worked

independently in the phonics work. Kanagy (1999), in her study of a Japanese immersion program in the

northwestern U.S., also found that the kindergarteners just entering the immersion school were socialized to initiate

and respond to L2 discourse sequences by the three daily classroom routines, greeting, attendance and personal

introduction.

Building on the earlier research studies, the current study aims to provide an analysis of the discourse

patterns of the three investigated lessons in Hong Kong secondary schools. More specifically, the key focus was to

find out if the three involved teachers dominated in the whole class teaching portion of their lessons and what

feedback strategies the teachers used to engage students in the teacher-student interactions. This was achieved by

transcribing and coding the three video-recorded lessons using the three-part IRF structure developed by Sinclair

and Coulthard (1975) and different categories of acts were also coded for analysis.

In brief, classroom data from a number of studies offer support for the view that teacher initiations tend to

dominate the classroom discourse and make the classroom non-communicative. And, when the teacher assumes the

role of an initiator, the students will assume the role of respondents.

RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS

Case study approach

The methodological approach used in the present study was a qualitative case study approach in which the

lessons of three non-native ESL pre-service teachers were studied with the purpose of investigating the whole class

teacher-student interaction patterns in these lessons. A case study approach was adopted in this study because only a

small number of lessons (three lessons) taught by three participants were used for analyses. Another advantage of

using a case study approach is that each case (or lesson) could be studied in more in-depth and a fuller

understanding of the researched phenomenon then became possible (Merriam, 1998).


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The participants

The selected participants in the present study were three Year 3 NNS pre-service teachers (one male and

two females) in a tertiary institution in Hong Kong. All of them are from the same programme - Bachelor of

Education (Honours) (Languages) (Four-year Full-time) programme. They were obtained from nonprobability

convenience sampling because of „availability‟ (McMillan, 2000, p. 108). All of them were assigned to me as my

supervisees by the Assistant Head of the English Department as it is part of my duty to supervise students in their

teaching practice, based on my preferred geographical location of the schools indicated at the beginning of the

school year. Three English lessons taught by the three participants were videotaped and transcribed for analysis. The

three pre-service teachers were allocated to a Band 1, Band 2 and Band 3 school. The number of students in these

three classes was 42 (27 males and 15 females), 34 (all males) and 36 (18 males and 18 females) respectively.

Setting of the study

The schools

All the three pre-service teachers were allocated to different secondary schools on Hong Kong Island for

their six-week teaching practice. One of them was allocated to a Band 1 EMI (English as the medium of instruction)

co-educational school, one to a Band 2 CMI (Chinese as the medium of instruction) boys‟ school and one taught in a

Band 3 CMI co-educational school. The schools were allocated to the pre-service teachers based on the districts of

their residential addresses. The teaching level of all these student teachers was junior secondary level (Forms 1 and

2) and their students were approximately 12 to 14 years old.

The classes

Three classes of students were involved in this study. First, the investigated class of the Band 1 school is a

Form 2 class of average ability among the five classes of the whole form. For the Form 1 class in the Band 2 school,

it is a mixed-ability class with the highest passing rate in the form test. And in the selected Band 3 school, there are

only two Form 2 classes and the involved Form 2 class is slightly higher than the other class in the English level.

The data

The data for the present study was the transcripts of the three videotaped English lessons. The three

selected lessons taught by the three pre-service teachers were video-recorded and then only the whole class teacher-

student interactions were transcribed, with the student-student interactions or private talk among the teachers and

their students during group, pair or individual work being excluded because the overall purpose of the study was to

investigate the whole class teaching portion of the lessons. The whole class interactions of the three videotaped

lessons were transcribed and coded and then analyzed using the three-part I-R-F structure of discourse analysis

(DA).

MAJOR FINDINGS AND CONCLUSION

Summary of the major findings

The present study presented the classroom interaction patterns of three ESL classrooms of different school

banding taught by three pre-service teachers. The major findings are summarized as follows:

The analyses of the lesson transcripts showed that for the two lessons in the Band 1 and Band 2 schools (a

vocabulary lesson and a grammar lesson respectively), the discourse patterns in the whole class interactions

generally followed the I-R-F (i.e. Initiation-Response-Feedback) structure, with the teachers‟ initiations usually in

the form of questions, followed by the student‟s responses, and then the teacher‟s feedback. For example:


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Speaker(s) Utterances Moves

Teacher Are you ready for the lesson? I

Learners Yes. R

Teacher Mm. Good. F

Teacher Is it easy enough? I

Learners Yes/No. R

Teacher Yes. F

However, the I-R structure (i.e. Initiation-Response) could also be found in a number of instances. For example:

Teacher Whole class. Snorkel. I

Learners Snorkel. R

Teacher Finished? I

Learners Yes. R

In many instances of the Band 1 class, the teacher formed initiations immediately after the student

responses based on the responses the students had given in order to ask them for clarification or further elaboration

of their responses and to maintain the flow of the classroom discourse. For example, immediately after the student‟s

response in the turn „I think boring. I think it’s boring.‟, the teacher formed another initiation „It is very boring. Why

is it so boring?‟. One more key feature in this lesson is that teacher initiations accounted for all the I-moves while no

student initiations could be found. The teacher initiations performed the acts of eliciting (e.g. „So which beach do

you think is the best in Hong Kong?‟), directing (e.g. „Form in groups now. In groups of four now.‟), informing (e.g.

„Today I want to teach you some vocab.‟) and giving clues to students (e.g. „The water is ^2‟).

In the grammar lesson of the Band 2 school, not only were there the discourse patterns of I-R-F and I-R but

also some instances of the teaching exchanges formed only with I-moves, where the acts were mainly informative

and directive. For example:

Teacher Put away all the things and we have to quiz now. I d

Teacher Please sit properly. I d

Teacher Please speak in English, Jason. I d

Teacher This time I have stapled the worksheet I have stapled the

quiz here. So you can just write down on it. Underline

the mistake and write down the correct one on the above.

You may now start and I will give you 4 minutes. OK?

Sit down and keep quiet and do your quiz.

I i

d

Some instances of the acts of checking students‟ progress and nomination could also be found in this

lesson. For example, „Yes, Tommy, what’s the problem?‟ (check) and „Kelvin, can you please read out your

sentence? You are so smart.‟ (nomination).

For the lesson in the Band 3 school (a grammar lesson), probably because of the students‟ low level of

English, it was largely dominated by the teacher‟s initiations with mainly the informative (e.g. „When you want to

change the verb into past continuous tense, you have to use ‘was’ or ‘were’ with the verb plus -ing form‟) and

directive (e.g. „OK! Pass the worksheet to the back‟) acts. In some instances, it was found that the teacher had to

give several initiations before the students gave responses. For instance:

Teacher So which was happening first? I

Teacher Which was happening first? I

Teacher Climbing the curtain or his mother came in first? I

2 indicating rising intonation


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Learner Climbing the curtain. R

One more interesting phenomenon that could only be found in this lesson was that there was an instance that

the teacher gave several clues in order to help her students reply to her initiation. However, after giving several clues

but no student responses, the teacher just told the students the answers directly. This phenomenon can be illustrated

as below:

Teacher When ^ I cl

Teacher When my mum ^ I cl

Teacher When my mother ^ I cl

Teacher When my mother … came into my room. I i

In all the three lessons, the boundary exchange was signalled by the teachers‟ use of markers such as „OK,

now!‟ or „So‟.

About the teacher and student initiations, in the three investigated lessons, there were a great number of

teacher initiations with mainly the elicitation, informative and directive acts. In contrast, there were only a very

small number of student initiations (see Table 1 below).

Initiations Lesson 1 Lesson 2 Lesson 3

Total no. of teacher initiations 115 (100%) 180 (91.84%) 79 (98.75%)

Total no. of student initiations 0 (0%) 16 (8.16%) 1 (1.25%)

Total 115 196 80

Table 1 The number of teacher and student initiations in the whole class teaching portion of each lesson

In most instances, the students just acted as respondents to the teachers‟ eliciting moves, with the student initiations

performing the informative, elicitation and bid acts rarely found (see Table 2 below).

Functions of the utterances in student talk Lesson 1 Lesson 2 Lesson 3

To give responses to teacher‟s eliciting moves

(either individual or choral responses)

58 (100%) 100 (85.47%) 19 (95%)

To offer information (informative) 0 (0%) 7 (5.98%) 1 (5%)

To ask teacher questions (elicitation) 0 (0%) 4 (3.42%) 0 (0%)

To signal a desire to contribute to the discourse (bid) 0 (0%) 6 (5.13%) 0 (0%)

Total 58 117 20

Table 2 Functions of the utterances in student talk in the whole class teaching portion of each lesson

Lastly, among the three lessons, it was found that, except for the teacher in the Band 1 class (Lesson 1) who

was able to encourage her students to elaborate more of their responses in some instances (e.g. „Why don’t you like

going to the beach?‟ and „You think it is very boring to go to the beach. Why is it so boring?‟), all the teachers

usually accepted or evaluated their students‟ responses in the follow-up moves by saying „Yes‟, „Very good‟, or „I

see‟.

Limitations of the study

The major limitations of the present study are summarized below.

The first limitation is related to the small number of participants involved (three pre-service teachers) in the

study. Though the present study gave an in-depth analysis of the classroom discourse patterns of the three selected

lessons, the results were only applicable to the situations that occurred in the three lessons and thus they are by no

mean adequate to draw any firm conclusions on this topic.

Another limitation comes from the research setting and the participants of this study. For the selected class

in the Band 2 school, it is a Form 1 class in a boys‟ school, while the other two classes in the Band 1 and Band 3


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schools are Form 2 classes in co-educational schools. The participants involved are also an issue. They are all Year 3

pre-service teachers who had their first Block Practice of their Bachelor of Education programme. The different

nature of the three classes made it difficult to compare the results obtained and the findings collected from these

three inexperienced teachers may be different from more experienced in-service teachers.

Due to logistical constraints of the research and the system as the supervisor of teacher trainees, different

topic areas were taught in the three lessons. In the case studies, one selected lesson was a vocabulary lesson while

the other two lessons were grammar lessons. Different topic areas may involve different classroom discourse

patterns because of their different pedagogical purposes and teaching activities and therefore, their discourse

patterns may not be comparable.

Lastly, in analyzing the classroom discourse patterns of the three selected lessons, the present study focused

only on the whole class interactions, with the student-student interactions or private talk among the teachers and

their students during group, pair or individual work being excluded from the investigation. Thus, the study does not

reflect the whole picture of interaction in the three lessons.

Suggestions for further research

The limitations of the present study presented above highlight the need for further research.

First, a larger number of participants should be involved. In further research, more teachers teaching in the

three bands of schools should be included so that firmer conclusions can be drawn.

In addition, to make the collected findings more comparable, the setting of the study, which includes the

school type (boys‟ schools, girls‟ schools or co-educational schools), the class level and the topic areas taught in the

lessons should be carefully controlled. Also, some more experienced teachers should be involved in a study, perhaps

comparing pre-service and in-service teachers.

The last suggestion concerns the analyses of the classroom interaction patterns. In order to have the whole

picture about the interaction patterns between the teacher and students in a lesson, apart from analyzing the whole

class interactions, the student-student interactions and teacher-student interactions during group, pair or individual

tasks should also be analyzed.

Concluding remarks

The present study investigated the classroom discourse patterns in the whole class teaching portion of three

investigated lessons. The three-part I-R-F exchange structure proposed by Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) was still

shown as being a useful descriptive tool in analyzing contemporary language classrooms though the classroom

discourse patterns of modern language classrooms may not follow the I-R-F structure in a rigid manner. As can be

discovered from the greater number of teacher initiations, the teachers in the three lessons talked much more than

the students in the whole class interactions. In fact, teacher talk is essential in maintaining the structure and content

of classroom interactions. Without it, the lesson may be run in a haphazard manner. It also provides quality language

input. However, to bring about more dialogic forms of whole class teaching, students should be encouraged to

expand their thinking by justifying or clarifying their opinions in the follow-up moves as well.

References

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Documents

Teacher Talk and Interaction