A Comparative Study On EFL And CSL Classroom Discourse

As a new discipline in modern linguistics, discourse analysis developed rapidly and became an important research field; many scholars like Sacks, Halliday, Van Dijk, Labov had studied discourse from various perspectives. With the deepening of recognition of the importance of classroom discourse, more and more researchers focused their studies on classroom discourse, among them, discourse analysis (DA) and conversation analysis (CA) are the most important ones.In 1975, Sinclair and Coulthard at the University of Birmingham accounted for the characteristic of classroom discourse based on a hierarchy of discourse units, i.e. lesson-transaction-exchange-move-act. And they proposed that the classroom discourse structure presented as the IRF model which involving three-phase model: a teacher initiating move, a student responding move, and teacher feedback move. During the same period, conversation analysis, which was found by Harvey Sacks and his colleagues, focused on close observation of the discourse patterns which recured over a wide range of natural data. Since the 1970s, with its emphasis on managing the sequential organization of talk, has given language teachers important insights into many aspects that are critical to the classroom interaction, such as turn-taking, conversation repair, and adjacency pair.Although both DA and CA have the same purpose to discover the structural features of classroom discourse by describing classroom conversation, they are different in their research perspectives. Discourse analysis aims to analyze the total picture of natural communication, examining the structural features in the unit of discourse. In conversation analysis, the emphasis is on the close observation of the specific behaviors of participants in interaction which recur over a wide range of natural communication in the unit of turn, such as turn-taking, conversation repair, and adjacency pair. The present research aims at displaying interactional features in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) and CSL (Chinese as a Second Language) classroom discourse from the perspectives of both DA and CA to provide some pedagogical implications to foreign language learning and teaching. The present research adopts classroom observation and video-tape as its instruments. The video-taped recording will be transcribed under the transcription system developed by Gail Jefferson (1984). Then the researcher will mainly focus on qualitative analysis based on the transcription. The results show that:(1) The discourse structure in EFL and CSL classroom is more complex than single IRF model which also includes the IRFR structure,the IR [I₁R₁…(I_nR_n)] F structure and the IR₁F₁R₂F₂…R_nF_n structure.(2) Unlike the students in CSL, students in EFL classroom rarely initiate the conversation, and usually take the turn by nomination. Students seldom seize the right of speaking by overlapping and interruption.(3) Self-initiated self repair frequently occurs in teachers and students'utterance in both EFL and CSL classroom which aims to repair the current speaker's utterance; self-initiated other repair and other-initiated self repair which are considered facilitating classroom interaction infrequently occur in EFL, and in CSL other-initiated self repair is often used by the teacher to encourage students to improve and correct their language output; other-initiated other repair mainly occurs in teachers'utterance in both EFL and CSL which is usually used by the teacher to correct students'language output.(4) Repetition frequently occurs in both EFL and CSL classroom, and teachers usually use repetition to emphasize or guide students to complete utterance, and students usually repeat part or all teachers'utterance to show their confirmation or doubts.Pedagogical implications that addressed from the results generated from micro-analysis are as follows:(1) In view of rare student initiation and poor student participation, the teacher needs to create the classroom environment which can facilitate students'performance in classroom interaction, such as topic selecting and grouping.(2) The students should practice the skills of turn-taking, such as turn-entry device and multi-unit turn, which can help students integrate into classroom interaction effectively and improve their ability of expression.(3) The teacher can guide students to use more complex language expression forms when repairing their utterance, like partial repetition of last speaker's words.Limitations are also discussed in the end of research. For example, it is mainly a micro-analysis of the classroom discourse, so the results obtained in the present research leave much to be verified and improved. In addition, the authenticity of transcription analysis may influenced by the subjectivity of the researcher.