Conversation Analysis Of Classroom Discourse In Beginning Chinese Spoken Class

Classroom instruction is the key component of the four sections in second languageteaching. Thus, classroom is mainly where the language learning and acquisition takeplace. In second language classroom, language is not only the purpose but also themedium of instruction. Aside from learning linguistics knowledge, students acquire theskills of using second language to communicate with others, which is the ultimate goal oflanguage learning, through talking to teacher. Therefore, every verbal behavior happenedin the classroom causes direct influence to the language acquisition of learners.In order to deepen our understanding of language classroom, this paper attempt todescribe and analyze the discourse in beginning Chinese as a second language classroomon the basis of the theory in Conversational Analysis. First, data is collected throughobservation and audio-recorded interactions in real language classroom. After that, therecordings are transcribed according to the micro analytic conventions of ConversationalAnalysis. The characteristics of classroom discourse are then emerged from the dataduring transcription. Since classroom discourse is made up of teacher-student interactionand it always provide students with various opportunities for language acquisition, thispaper primarily focuses on the interaction between teacher and students.This studyconsists of two parts, which are the structural and content analysis ofclassroom discourse. The structural analysis is based on the turn-taking theory, thefoundation of Conversational Analysis. Firstly, the overlapping of discourses happened inclassroom are divided into five types. So do the space found within discourse or betweendiscourses, which are sort according to its duration and where it lies. Different roles and status of teacher and students in classroom are reflected from the analysis that emphasizedon the reasons of the occurance of overlapping and space and how they deal with it. In thecontent analysis, the research findings about teacher-student interactive mode in SecondLanguage Acquisition are used for reference to analyze the negotiation of meaning andcorrective feedback found in language classroom. How the negotiation of meaning happenand ends arebeing described in this paper. It is found that negotiation of meaning does notabsolutely lead to more comprehensive input and output of students, especially thecomprehension check where teachers have more right to speak than students. Thus, theresult of the negotiation of meaning mostly depends on teacher, even when it is intiated bystudents. On the other side, the six types of corrective feedback found in data have its ownspecialization. Recast is the most common one; however, it does not achieve the correctivemove as expected.Through detail oriented analysis of language classroom discourse, this paper has reachedsome findings that are not predicted before. Although the data collected are not enough torepresent the general situation of the beginning Chinese spoken class, it visualizes thenature of language classroom by doing conversational analysis of teacher-student talk-ininteraction. Moreover, the research findings in this paper may help in the future studyregarding the relationship between classroom discourse and second language acquisition.