Conversation Analysis Of Teacher-Student Interaction In College English Classroom

As a key ingredient of discourse analysis, conversation analysis has gained increasing publicity since it was introduced by Harvey Sacks in the1960s. Along with Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson, Sacks was devoted to the analysis of natural conversations and their findings of the research lay a foundation of the analysis of conversation structure. Their main viewpoints involve turn-taking, adjacency pairs, repair system and presuppositions etc. Conversation analysis is, to a large extent, qualitative research, and it identifies the repeated modes from plenty of natural conversations and summarizes the laws of conversation structure by means of induction based on experience. Conversation analysis has evolved from exploring the structure of organization of daily conversations into probing into the sequential structures of different speech acts in daily conversations, grammatical structure of conversations and even the specific institutional conversations, such as analysis of scenes of court, church, service industry and classroom teaching.Currently, conversation analysis of classroom teaching has aroused wide concern among educationalists and linguists at home and abroad. Nevertheless, a large majority of the researches regarding classroom constantly focus on the aspects of teachers, such as teachers’questions, the sum of teachers’talk and teachers’feedback, ignoring the conversation structure of classroom teacher-student interaction, the modes of conversation of teacher-student interaction and features of teacher-student conversations. Conversation analysis of classroom interaction is an objective approach of classroom research, aiming to describe the teaching and learning processes and illustrate the joint contributions of teachers and students. This thesis inquires into the classroom interaction of College English teaching in City College of Wuhan University of Science and Technology by recording and observing classroom interaction between five teachers and their respective students in five successive periods (forty-five minutes for each period), attempting to perceive the conversation structure and identify the features of turn-taking in interaction, such as topic control, overlap, interruption, silence, repetition, repair system and meaning negotiation, In the meanwhile, the thesis gives rise to the elements contributing to the continuity, diversity, vividness and effectiveness of classroom interaction by means of both improving the students’ initiative, motivation as well as communicative skills and rendering teachers to reflect on the modes, language features as well as behavior features in classroom interaction.The author concludes that teachers should be capable of maintaining the flow of interaction by controlling the topic, specifically, by consciously identifying transition relevance place and controlling the sums of turns as well as the skills of selection of next speaker. In addition, the teachers should prepare themselves for the suspension of interaction with a comprehensive emergency mechanism intending to reckon with different embarrassing confrontations in interaction. Lastly, the author points out that for both teachers and students, the elevation of language proficiency makes a huge difference to the quality of classroom interaction. And it is of great significance to improve teachers’ questions and feedbacks and cultivate students’ turn-taking skill to improve their communicative competence in interaction.