Understanding Teacher-Student Conversational Interaction

As exploratory practice, which language teachers conduct in their own classroom to understand the areas of language teaching and learning that they wish to explore (Allwright,1997) , the present study on teacher-student interaction is conducted by the author as a novice English teacher. A number of interactional strategies were adopted in practice to examine whether and how the. strategies used 1) facilitate students' language learning and 2) enhance their cognition and affect in general. The interactional strategies focus on the aspects of questioning, feedback and negotiation.The data mainly come from audio-recording and transcription of integrative English Classes in 14 weeks of one semester in a university in Nanjing. Based on the qualitative analysis of the data from the perspectives of both psycholinguistic interactionists and the social interactionists, the study reveals that teacher-student conversational interaction assists L2 acquisition not just by helping to develop learner's linguistic competence, but by creating more beneficial cognitive and affective environments. As for the specific aspects of interaction, major findings are listed as follows:1. Referential questions provide the students with the opportunity of using the target language to communicate, thus facilitate their language learning and cognition development in general; Display questions are helpful when they require analytic or synthetic work of the given information.2. "Encouraging feedback" creates an affectively supportive environment for L2 learning ; Implicit but tactic correction of students' errors can avoid negative affect while helping L2 learning. In addition, the teacher plays an important role as scaffolding when students are involved to correct their own errors.3. Three types of negotiation have great facilitative effects on students' L2 learning and cognitive development in different ways. With the students in charge of the topic and the teacher playing a supportive role, students can be motivated to actively participate in classroom interaction.Through "the teacher as a researcher" practice, I gain a better understanding of teacher-student conversational interaction in college EFL classroom. The results of the...