Conversation Analysis Approach To Turn-taking In Oral English Classroom

As the development of the information technology and the globalization and unification of world economy at present,the earth is becoming smaller and smaller, and the communication between people all walks of life and from different countries has been becoming more and more frequent.And at the same time,our country has been becoming opener than before.Especially after the reform and opening policies is applied,great changes have taken place in China in the past thirty years.More and more people have a desire to communicate with other people from other countries and regions in the world.And to fulfill it,the language for communication is a necessity.As the most widely used language in the world,English and the importance of learning English is becoming a common sense for most people.The teaching and learning English has a long history in China.But its importance was not realized and put into practice until the reform and opening policies was applied thirty years ago.However,in a long time,the English teaching and learning in our country had been static and unnatural.They were accustomed to the grammar translation method. And the materials and examples were disconnected from what was happening in everyday situation among the real and lively people.It was a great joy that a growing interest in studies of language interaction in the classroom has come into appearance since the 1940s.In the late 1960s,sociologist Harvey Sacks et al proposed the Conversation Analysis(CA) approach which influenced and still has been influencing many scholars up to now.And our country has realized the problem and has been making efforts to improve the students' efficiency in learning English.The interactive activities in the classroom have been paid great attention and more students are involved in the activities.And the situation in the oral English classes is more obvious.Comparatively,there are more turns and turn-takings in the oral English classes.Students are prone to be more active and initiative in oral English classes,in both native English teachers' English classes and non-native English teachers' English classes.The frequency of turns and turn-takings in oral English classes is much higher than in other classes.In the present thesis,the author will have a research on the classroom interactive activities and the case of the turns and turn-takings in oral English classes with the conversation analytic approach.The study of classroom conversation has a long history,which can date back to the theory of sociologists like Erving Goffman,Harold Garfinkel,Harvey Sacks,Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson,etc.who made a great contribution to the conversation analysis approach.In order to testify the present situation of the oral English classes and the relationship between the turns and turn-takings and the communicative competence, the author carried the surveys by means of interview,participant-observation and tape-recording in the natural context.The subjects are two classes of Grade 1 and Grade 2 of English majors,and their ages range from 17 to 20.And the teachers both have taught Chinese English for three years in China.They both are male.Their students are the same,but in different stages.The former teacher comes from the Great Britain;the latter teacher comes from the United States.And the teachers both have their own choices to decide what to teach in every lesson.The present paper will display how turn-taking rules are carried on,and how turn-taking rules are implemented between English teachers and students in oral English classrooms in the respective classes.The research questions are the amount of teacher talk versus that of the student talk,the number of the display questions versus that of the referential questions;and the number of turn-taking initiated by the teacher versus that of the student.Swain(1993,1995) pointed out that though understandable language output is important in the process of language acquisition,only meaningful language output can help to achieve the accuracy and fluency of the target language.The understandable language output can force the language learners to both pay attention to the form and structure of the target language,and push forward the language learners to improve and expand their grammatical knowledge.The function of the display questions is to make students practice intensively in a limited time and give a feedback on what the students have learned.However,this kind of questions can not innovate the students' creativity and initiation greatly.On the other hand,the referential questions require the students to think about it and then give their opinions and viewpoints.The referential questions can always activate the students' spontaneous thinking and state their,viewpoints.This method can encourage the students to express themselves and enhance their communicative competence.The opportunity of turn-taking can directly improve the students' language acquisition. However,it won't be so if the number of turn-taking taken by the teacher is more that of the students'.And after a detailed examination of each survey,a comparison of the two surveys will be made,which will provide a deeper understanding of the oral English discourse in China,to some extent.The thesis is made up of four parts,including the introduction and the conclusion.The Introduction part forms chapter one,which introduces the general scope of the Conversation Analysis,the purpose and the methodology of the present research.The Literature Review part forms chapter two,which includes the three related frameworks:the parts of Conversation Analysis,Ethnography of Communication, Pragmatics,and the relative content of the Relationship between Communicative Competence and Interaction,the Structure of Discourse,the Four kinds of Discourse Structure Based on the Analysis of Discourse,the Display Questions and Referential Questions,Turn-taking System.These concepts are very necessary in investigating the students' communicative competence and can help us deeply understand the situation in the oral English classrooms.They present us a general clue of the theoretical framework in this field.At the same time,this part introduces the research done by national and overseas scholars in this field.Chapter three is the main body of the present thesis,which describes and interprets the two surveys and their respective results.It reveals that even the oral English classrooms taught by native English speakers are still teacher-centered;the teacher still dominates the whole class,and takes much more of the opportunities of the turns and turn-takings.Students are assigned few opportunities to communicate and speak out their ideas and viewpoints with the target language-English.Furthermore,the findings are very different from former results,which prove that the amount of teacher talk is less than the student talk,the number of the display questions is smaller than the referential questions,and the number of turn-takings initiated by the teacher is much smaller than that of the students'.Chapter four is the Conclusion part.It summarizes the research results and reaffirms the significance of the present study in enlightening the present English teaching and learning.And it states the shortage of the present study.And further efforts are still required to broaden the result of the research.