A Study Of Verbal Interruptions In English Majors' Comprehensive English Classroom Interaction

In the 1970s, researchers in English-speaking countries began to study the interruption phenomenon in daily conversations, with Zimmerman and West as the leading ones. In their recorded conversations, men were responsible for 96% of all interruptions. Since their early work, many researchers have replicated their findings, studying interruptions in daily conversations from the sociological perspective. Not until the late 1990s and the beginning of twenty-first century did studies of interruptions on the mainland in China begin. These studies can be classified into two types, that is, studies on interruptions in daily conversation from sexual-difference perspective and from critical discourse analysis perspective. Chinese scholars have made fruitful achievements in the study of interruptions in that they choose different settings to research, and these studies are concerned with almost every field, like the educational field, the legal field, and the medical field apart from daily conversation analysis. Furthermore, these studies just took studies of interruptions in foreign countries as reference and gender as the most important affecting factor was their focus, too. But few studies on interruptions in classroom—a very important environment for Chinese students, can be found.Due to the insufficiency of studies on classroom interruptions, this study chooses classroom interruptions as the subject matter. Based on the transcriptions of freshmen's and sophomores' Comprehensive English classes recorded in a natural way, this study defines classroom interruptions as the phenomenon in classroom interaction, in which any party of classroom participants, either the teacher or students, for the sake of taking the conversational floor, violates the other party's turn at talk verbally, completes the other party's turn earlier and begins to speak. Concerning the setting of this study with classroom interaction characteristics, is different from the previous studies, the criteria should be different. This study classifies interruptions from different perspectives.First, from the interpersonal perspective, interruption can be classified into two types: teacher as the interrupter (shown as T▼S) and student as the interrupter (shown asS▼T,S▼S).Secondly, from the pragmatic perspective, interruptions can be cooperative and non-cooperative. Cooperative interruption occurs when the interrupter wants to add or reduce information or correct the current speaker. The purpose of the interrupter is to help the current speaker complete, but not to destroy his/her turn. In a non-cooperative interruption, the speaker takes the current speaker's turn, interrupts him/her, initiates a new turn and changes the topic.Thirdly, structurally speaking, interruptions can be classified into single interruption, alternate interruption, repeated interruption and alternate plus repeated or repeated plus alternate interruption. In a single interruption, the interrupter interrupts only once and completes a turn-taking. During the process that the interrupter continues to speak, he/she is interrupted, and again he takes the turn back and interrupts the current speaker, alternate interruption (shown as T▼S▼T, T▼S▼▼S, S▼T▼S, S▼T▼▼T) occurs. Repeated interruption has a characteristic, that is, the interrupter does not change in an interrupt-being interrupted exchange (shown as T▼S—T▼S, S▼T—S▼T). Sometimes, alternate interruption and repeated interruption occur in the same turn.Fourthly, from the activeness aspect, interruptions can be active or passive, according to the speaking party, whether teachers' or students' words come to an end or end with voice-delaying, pause, or other ways to provide a chance for the other party to speak. For students, if they actively take chance to interrupt the teacher and other students, active interruptions occur. Otherwise, if the teacher uses some methods to guide students to interrupt, passive interruptions occur in that they are not out of students' own will even though he/she practices interruptions.From the perspective of whether the interrupter completes his/her turn, interruptions can be complete or incomplete. The only difference between complete and incomplete interruptions is that whether there are both interruption signals and target words to interrupt. A complete interruption usually has both interruption signals and target words, that is, the interrupter's purpose is to speak out the target words before the current speaker completes a turn; whereby an incomplete interruption has only interruption signals but has no target words.Besides calculating the number of different types of interruptions, the study also discusses the relation of the total number of Teacher Talk and Student Talk to the occurrence of interruptions. Moreover, it studies the relation of students' final examination scores to classroom interruptions. The following are the findings based on statistical results. First, there is a difference in interruptions occurring in English major's class in terms of grades and teacher's sex: in freshmen's class, there are more teachers' interruptions than students' interruptions, against the result in sophomores' class; male teachers interrupt students more on average than female teachers. Second, in class, interruptions are mostly cooperative in that cooperative interruptions outnumber non-cooperative interruptions; and students' cooperative interruptions outnumber teachers', while their non-cooperative interruptions are much less than teachers. These may help provide convenience to teachers in dominating class atmosphere, completing teaching tasks and achieving teaching objectives. Third, in a class with a comparatively larger amount of student talk, there are more interruptions and a higher frequency of the occurrence of alternate and repeated interruptions, which may better demonstrate students' level of spoken language, a determined zeal in participating in classroom interaction and confidence in English learning. Fourth, the great disparity in the amount of teacher talk and student talk has a direct effect on classroom interruptions. In a class with a great distance between the total number of teacher talk and student talk, there is less students' involvement, and thus less occurrence of interruption. Fifth, there is a positive relation of the occurrence of interruptions to students' final score in this course. In a class with high frequency of the occurrence of interruptions, students have higher mean score, while in a class with few interruptions the relation is not clear.Then the study discusses the contextual factors, including linguistic contextual factors and communicative contextual factors which lead to the occurrence of interruptions. Linguistic contextual factors concerning teacher's being interrupted include his /her repetition, pause, repairing students' words, tedious explanation, etc.; communicative contextual factors include the face problem and authority-challenging. Linguistic contextual factors concerning students' being interrupted include their incompetence to express a certain idea, grammatical mistakes, over-informativeness, changing a new topic, etc.; communicative factors include teacher's pressing for an answer, teacher's humor, students' hesitation and anxiety, etc.Next the study also discusses the positive and negative functions of interruptions based on the analysis of transcribed material. For teachers, interruptions help maintain classroom orders so as to guarantee a smooth teaching process; interrupting one student may encourage other students' active participation; helping other students understand the current speaker's words better; activating the atmosphere in class with humor; creating chance for silent students to ensure that every student can speak what they want to say. For students, successful interruptions actually demonstrate their competence of language use, inspiration, creativity, confidence in English learning, students' attention focused on the teaching content, their trust with the teacher, active thinking, etc. However, the negative side of interruptions should never be neglected. Once interrupted by a student, the teacher may have to stop to discuss what the student wants to know, it may slow down the teaching flow; the teaching content cannot be completed as expected before the class; and too frequent interruptions from teachers may cause students to lose interest in classroom involvement.On the basis of discussions above, the study puts forward suggestions for English teachers who teach freshmen and sophomores Comprehensive English Course respectively, to better their classroom strategy so as to better teacher-student interaction in English classroom.At last it comes to the following conclusion: interruptions are not evenly distributed in Teacher Talk and Student Talk. In a class with a short distance between the total amount of Teacher Talk and Student Talk and a comparatively larger amount of Student Talk, interruptions occur more frequently with more cooperative, alternate and repeated interruptions, students have higher final mean score. Besides, classroom interaction is more active, which adds more effectiveness of the communication between teacher and students.