Study On Teacher-student Interaction In Chinese Classes In Italy

Teacher-student verbal interaction is the basic means to implement teaching in classroom, which is the key link in language teaching process. This study is a dynamic description and comparison among the teacher-student interaction in Chinese language classes in elementary school, senior high school and university in Italy based on the data from tape recording of3natural Chinese classes for4hours, with aid of class observation tools such as "Observation scale in teaching Chinese as a second language classroom" and FIAS("Flanders interaction analysis system"), taking both the characteristics and modifications of the language of teacher and the students and of characteristics and modifications of teacher-student interaction as dimensions for analysis, focusing on the parameters including the discourse amount of teacher and students, language selection, relevance with teaching content, stability of utterance of students, interaction form, speed and vocabulary density of teacher’s speech, T-unit in teacher’s speech, teacher questions and teacher feedback in the research frame of "classroom as interaction", to inspect to what extent the teacher-student interaction manifests benefits to second language acquisition. Four conclusions have been made as follows:(1) Overall interaction:differences of classroom interaction type are manifested in three Chinese classes in elementary school, senior high school and university in Italy. The class in elementary school is characterized by big numbers of topics and activities, by big amount of students’ utterance and low relevance with teaching content, while the class in senior high school is characterized by small numbers of topics and activities, by big amount of students’ utterance and high relevance with teaching content, and the class at university by small numbers of topics and activities, by small amount of students’ utterance and high relevance with teaching content, and by a big amount of classroom silence. All the three classes take teacher-class as dominant interaction form and teacher-individual student as subordinate form.(2) The meaning of interaction:the lack of meaningful interaction is characterized in two ways:first, students are exposed to very limited comprehensible Chinese input. Second, the content of interaction is not compounded by semantic and pragmatic meanings.(3) The authenticity of interaction:the Chinese classes are in shortage of authentic interaction, which means, firstly, the class interactions are not occurred in an authentic context; secondly, the interactive process is not authentic.(4) The relevance with students of interaction:the Italian Chinese classes are slightly related to students. First, the class activities elicit very few students’Chinese output. Second, the teacher-student interaction pays much more attention to the construction of students’knowledge than to that of their identity in class.Four suggestions for classroom teaching are made based on the conclusions above:(1) take the advantage of both the topic control and topic transfer;(2) enhance comprehensible Chinese input;(3) create authentic context;(4) construct students’ multi-identity in class.