Classroom Teaching Revisited: Constructing Learning Communities In The Classroom

As the major part of school education, classroom teaching has become the focus of exploration and research for many experts and researchers for a long time. Since the beginning of the 21th century, with the emerging interdisciplinary researching trend, and echoing with the fast, compressed, complex and uncertain features of the postmodern world, numerous theories from applied linguistics, cognitive psychology, and even social sciences are introduced into the language teaching research, the ecological perspective comes into its own.Out of the practical concern of the contextual factors of junior middle school classroom teaching, the study is based on the classroom discourse analysis put forward by Sinclair and Coulthard (1975, 1991) and the community theories developed by Lave and Wenger (1991). Attempts have been made to investigate the existent common junior middle school classroom teaching to show the possibility of transforming the current junior middle school classroom into learning community, and to shed light on how a learning community may be built.The case study was based on two classroom teaching transcriptions. It adopts the classroom discourse analysis, focusing on the communications and interactions among the teacher and the students during the real junior middle school classroom teachings. The Sinclair and Coulthard Model or Birmingham Model which was first developed by Sinclair and Coulthard supplies the major analytical framework for this study.The analysis is developed in two perspectives. One is from the discourse perspective, beginning with the lowest rank unit of act, then move exchange and transaction in turn, at last to the highest rank unit of lesson. Separate analysis is made to understand what the junior middle school classroom is really like. The results show that the structure of the junior middle school classroom discourse fits into Birmingham Model with minor modifications. They also show that the dominative discourse of the structure is the teachers' discourse, a kind of "lesson language" which follows the IRE or IRF structure. Because of this discourse structure, the students' discourse is suppressed greatly, and personal meaning of participating into the classroom teaching activities is obliterated. The learning way of experiencing, practicing, participating, cooperating and communicating, which the New Course Standard of English emphasizes, can not be achieved in the classroom teaching. The other is from the perspective of community, based on a careful analysis of how teachers' discourse controls the classroom communication, the interaction between the teachers and the students in the classroom, and the influence of the teachers' discourse to the students' learning constructions. It is obvious that the fatal influence of the teachers' discourse transformation to transform the classroom into a learning community. Also in the analysis, the direction of teachers' discourse transformation must be from the "lesson language" to "life language". In this way, to make the topic of the communication in the classroom teaching will point more to the teachers' and the students' real lives. Thus the suppressed discourse of the students' will emerge. It will also ensure the narrative ways and the communicative mode that the students adopt to exhibit some features of a learning community.