| English as a Second Language teaching methodologies advocate almost uniformly for the importance of student output, without acknowledging that the quality of student talk matters as much, if not more, than the quantity. Despite the ubiquity of teacher-fronted activity in English as a Second Language classrooms in the United States, recent classroom discourse research has neglected this setting in favor of study of talk in small groups or during pair work based on the assumption that students' opportunities for participation are greater in these more intimate settings. This study examines student-initiated participation during teacher-fronted activity qualitatively in order to highlight the nature of student talk within this common classroom setting. The following research questions are answered: (1) What are the characteristics of student-initiated participation in teacher-fronted activity? (2) What are the characteristics of teacher responses to student-initiated contributions? and (3) What are the interactional consequences of student-initiated participation sequences in teacher-fronted activity?;The conceptual framework of sociocultural theory motivated my interest in student participation, and data collection and analysis were both completed utilizing conversation analytic methods. An entire five-week semester in an adult English as a Second Language classroom was video- and audio-recorded, and transcriptions were created following conversation analytic methods. Both solicited and unsolicited student-initiated participation in teacher-fronted activity is discussed, conceptualized on a continuum of difficulty of initiation. Teacher responses are similarly conceptualized on a continuum of possibility for further student expansion. Finally, student-initiated participation sequences are analyzed in a single-case analysis of an entire lesson in order to highlight the interactional consequences of student contributions and teacher responses on the unfolding of talk. While small group and/or pair work have been assumed to provide students with more and better opportunities for language use, particularly within the communicative language teaching paradigm, this study found an abundance of student-initiated participation in a setting commonly thought to be teacher-controlled---teacher-fronted activity. The account of student-initiated participation provided in this study casts doubt on whether previous accounts of participant rights and obligations in teacher-fronted activity are representative of most classrooms. In particular, the data in this study show (1) the heterogeneity of talk within activities, and not simply between them, as has been suggested by the literature, and (2) the utility of student-initiated participation as a gauge of student understanding. |
