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Summaries Chapter Nine

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Language in Classroom L2 learning

  •   Teacher-talk makes up around 70 per cent of classroom language.

  •   Language teaching classrooms are different from other classrooms because language is not just the medium but also the content.

  •   Authentic speech may motivate and help communicative goals, if decoding equates with codebreaking.

  •   Non-authentic speech may be specially tailored to students’ learning needs if codebreaking is different from decoding.

  •   Teaching styles of interaction using IRF may interfere with ordinary communicative interaction

 

 

 

Classroom input and language teaching

  •   Everything the teacher does provides the learner with opportunities for encountering the language.

  •   Be aware of the two levels at which language enters into the classroom.

  •   Be aware of the different sources of input.

  •   The input that the students are getting is far more than just the sentences they encounter.

  •   Students learn what they are taught (in some sense).

  •   What works in the classroom in one cultural milieu may not work in another

 

 

Classroom interaction, Conversation Analysis and language teaching

1)   In Hatch’s discourse analysis the moves of a conversation revolve around a topic, for example:
 - topic nomination
 - topic identification
- topic clarification n Hatch’s discourse analysis the moves of a conversation revolve around a topic, for example:
 - topic nomination
 - topic identification
- topic clarification

2)  Conversation Analysis makes use of concepts such as:
     - the adjacency pair where two conversational moves are linked
     - repair – how the participants deal with things that go wrong whether self-initiated repair or
       other-initiated repair

Teaching can use these ideas at two levels:
- the pedagogical exchanges of the classroom
- the target conversational exchanges that the students are aiming at outside the classroom