Analysis Of English Classroom Conversation From An Interactional Perspective

The word interaction originated from sociology. Sociologists like Erving Goffman, Harold Garfinkel, Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jeffersom etc. contributed a lot to the interactional research of language. In this thesis, the author will investigate conversation in English classroom from an interactional perspective. That is to say, the interest of the author is to explore how the participants in classroom interaction construct and harmonize their conversation and action and in the end realize the purpose of better communication.The study of classroom discourse has a long history, ironically, a great deal of classroom discourse analysis has had a lot to say about the structuring of talk in terms of the IRF and related moves, but it has often neglected to investigate the nature of the meanings in construction, the relative roles and responsibilities of teachers and students at the time of constructing those meanings, and the placement of such patterns in the overall larger cycle of classroom work. It is worth stressing that" input can be measured only by output-that what has been learnt can never be observed directly, but only by some act of communication by the students"(Sinclair & Brazil: 1982 ). In any case, conversation is constructed jointly by two participants at least. Examining the behavior of just one of them does not tell the whole story of the interaction. So in this thesis the author will try to summarize the most frequent discourse patterns in class and how these patterns of classroom discourse influence teaching and allow negotiation and construction of meanings. The aims of the research are 1) to summarize the most frequently used discourse structures in English classroom and pointing out that they are classroom specific. 2) to find out the best ways to facilitate the interaction between teachers and students in English classrooms of China , that is to say, to try to find out how to realize negotiation of meaning in classrooms. 3) negotiation of meaning and turn-taking mechanisms play an essential role in classroom interaction, so in order to realize this purpose, it is very importantfor both the teacher and the students to grasp the mechanisms of meaning negotiation and turn-taking rules. So another aim of the thesis is to point out that the obtain of the skills and using them fluently in classroom become the basic requirement for language teachers.The thesis consists of six parts, including the introduction and the conclusion.The Introduction forms chapter one, it tells the scope of interactional linguistics and the purpose and methodology of present research.Chapter Two introduces the three related frameworks which influence the development of interactional linguistics: Systemic-functional linguistics, anthropological linguistics and conversation analysis. Functional linguistics treats language as a tool of social interaction. It holds that the expresser and the recipient can influence each other's mind and the pragmatic information and, in the end, influence their own behavior model (Lin Dajin, Xie Zhaoqun, 2003). As early as 1970s, sociologists proposed a new term in conversation analysis: talk-in-interaction, which they used to refer to all the natural interactions in real situations (Sacks el al. 1974). And the anthropologists regard language not only as a tool for thinking but also for behavior. They think that language itself is a kind of social interaction. Based on these theoretical frameworks, interactional linguists, fully aware of the dynamic and contextualization of language, aim to account for language as it occurs in everyday interaction.Chapter Three describes the two approaches in the study of classroom interaction: one is behavior categorization and the other is conversation analysis. Influenced by behaviorist psychology, behavior categorization bears the shortcomings of subjectivity and one-sidedness. At the same time, conversation analysts regard classroom interaction as "living interpersonal interaction" (Allwright 1984:156). Aiming to promote teaching,...