A Systemic Functional Analysis Of Discourse Interruptions In College English Class Of Non-English Majors

Classroom interaction has been the focus of attention for researchers for more than fifty years, but the complex relationship between language, interaction and learning is still only partially understood. Among all of those phenomena involved in classroom discourse, interruption stands out to be regarded as one of difficult situations to handle with. Analyses which began to study interruption phenomenon in daily conversations could retrospect to early1970s, then gradually, there is a great tendency that exploring interruption phenomenon of institutional discourse, such as medical field, legal field, was prevailing in the community. Moreover, affecting factors as the gender difference and power relationship were given a prominence.This dissertation conducts a systemic functional study aiming to provide a comprehensive account of current perspective on classroom interruptions and to promote a fuller understanding of interaction which is considered as being central to effective teaching. Based on the definitions of other scholars and connected with the characteristics of College English Class of Non-English majors, the author defines classroom interruptions as any conversational participate, either the teacher or students, who violates the other party’s or themselves’turn at talk verbally or non-verbally, for the sake of taking the conversational floor, completes the other party’s turn earlier and begins to speak. Three interruption patterns were addressed in terms of characteristics of teacher-students’ talks. Interruptions caused by non-verbal strategies adapted by teachers were elaborated in detail. The author combined the quantitative analysis and discourse analysis methods together to delineate interruption.The results suggest that it is feasible to apply systemic functional theory to analyze interruption. Teacher tends to implement true interruption strategies for controlling the interaction, overlapping inclines to take place where there is a necessity for conversational participates to modify their speech or elicit a response or correct errors. Furthermore, both teacher’s language knowledge and language use in classroom practices are enhanced by studying transcript of classroom interactions. Immediate reflection after lessons contributes to teachers’ professional development, especially their language awareness. Interpreting interruptions in terms of Systemic Functional Theory benefits teachers in shifting teaching procedures naturally and adapting appropriate interruption strategies so as to improve classroom interactional competence.