A Conversational Analysis Study Of Teachers' Replay Sequences In High School English Classroom

In the 1970 s,sociologists Garfinkel and Sacks began the study of formulation in conversations.As a common conversational practice in institutional settings,formulation is regarded as an important communicative strategy because of its positive role in overcoming communicative obstacles and promoting communicative interaction.However,most of the researches on the formulation focused on the doctor-patient,court and other institutional interactions,and the application of the formulation in classroom settings has not received enough attention.Classroom teaching is a process of interaction between teachers and students.Barrierfree communication between teachers and students is the premise of effective teaching,especially in English classes.Therefore,it is of great significance for this study to explore the phenomenon of teachers’ formulation in English classes.Based on the theories of interactive linguistics and interaction hypothesis,this study adopts the research method of conversation analysis and takes high-quality English classes of senior high school as the corpus sources to conduct the dynamic research on teachers’ formulation in the sequences.Through transcribing and analyzing the corpus,the following research questions are proposed:(1)What are the types of teachers’ formulation in senior high school English classes?(2)What are the turn design formats of teachers’ formulation sequences in English classes?(3)What are the sequence organization features of teachers’ formulation sequences in English classes?Through the analysis of corpus,the following conclusions are drawn:(1)There are two types of teachers’ formulations in senior high school English classes,which are the gists and upshots.(2)The turn design formats of formulation sequences are analyzed from two parts: teachers’ formulation turns and students’ decision turns.There are two types of formulation markers in the teachers’ formulation turns,which are the leading formulation markers and the additional formulation markers.Therefore,there are mainly four specific turn design formats of teachers’ formulation: 1)specific content alone without any formulation markers;2)leading formulation markers + specific formulation content;3)specific formulation content + additional formulation markers;4)leading formulation markers + specific formulation content + additional formulation markers.While the turn design formats of students’ decision include single word,single phrase and single clause.(3)In senior high school English classes,teachers and students eliminate communication barriers through the pre-expansions,insert-expansions and post-expansions of the formulation sequences based on the formulation-decision adjacency pair,so as to achieve the intersubjectivity between teachers and students.The pre-expansions of the formulation sequences are based on the question-answer sequences between teachers and students.The insert-expansions are used by teachers and students to eliminate the barriers of understanding or invite other students to participate in the conversation.The minimal post-expansions of formulation sequences are usually in the form of teachers’ acceptance or evaluation,while the non-minimal post-expansions are usually the extension and supplementary explanation of the topic.Since the data samples collected in this study are relatively small and qualitative research method is mainly adopted,the extensibility of the research results needs to be further verified.However,it has achieved the expected effect on the whole.On the one hand,it further enriches the research on the formulation of different institutional interactions in theory.On the other hand,it puts forward suggestions for teachers’ classroom language in practice.It is hope that teachers can pay more attention to formulation utterances and improve it in practice,so as to promote the good interactions between teachers and students and improve the efficiency of classroom teaching.