English Language Teaching in its Social Context

EVALUATION OF CLASSROOM INTERACTION 297this does not require the use of metalanguage, in fact, a close perusal of the learners’ uptakecharts demonstrates that the informants were perfectly capable of reporting what went onduring the course of the lessons in terms of grammar. By and large, learners succeeded inaccounting for the teacher’s structural intentions by reporting the title if not writing themain points of the sessions. Some even illustrated the teacher’s focus of instruction byproviding examples of sentences to show their comprehension or at least familiarity withwhat was taught. This suggests that the informants did not lack the means of expressing thestructural objectives.It is believed that one of the reasons why learners did not report as many structuralfeatures as lexical ones is that several of these features were already familiar to the class. Infact, it is not surprising that most of the structural features emphasised during instructionwere not reported as newly learned because most of them, if not all of them, were part ofthe syllabus in high school. For instance, only one informant claimed to have seen andlearned the passive and active voices for the first time during the observed events. In fact,these affirmations are confirmed by the 20 per cent of topicalised episodes in the lessonwhich were claimed to be part of the learners’ prior knowledge. One could add that aftera few hours of teaching, second language instruction becomes very much remedial asstructural features are presented and represented for a review.It looks as if the learners’ claims are somewhat different from what the teacher hasplanned for them. His intentions might have helped learners to rehearse already encountered(if not mastered) structural features. However, in the process of carrying out the plan, theinteractive work has lent itself to the creation of a whole range of perhaps unexpected andbeneficial events (at least, to some learners if not to all).The learners’ claims (44 per centonTable 18.2) remain a combination of the teacher’s objectives but also their by-productas well as the by-product of the classroom interaction. For these reasons, therefore, attemptsto evaluate the learning outcomes against the teacher’s plan can be misleading if one doesnot take into account the mediating interactive processes which characterise classroominteraction.In view of the data expressed in the table, therefore, the teacher’s influence over thesubjects’ learning did not reveal itself to be as strong as suggested earlier since approximately56 per cent of what has been focused upon did not apparently bear any immediate fruit: 20per cent were claimed to be already familiar and 36 per cent were not, in any way, mentionedby the learners.It should lie pointed out that about 77.45 per cent of the topicalisation was effected bythe teacher. This is not particularly surprising in view of the fact that the discourse wasunidirectionally controlled by the teacher, who did 45 per cent of the talking. What appearsto be strikingly interesting though is that a further analysis of the effect of the teacher’sversus the learners’ scarce opportunities (22.54 per cent) for topicalisation showed that thelatter offered much higher chances for items to be uptaken. Learners benefited much morefrom their peers’ rare instances of topicalisation than from the teacher’s.A close scrutiny of the theme of topicalisation reveals that topics initiated by learnersattracted more claims from the learners than the ones initiated by the teacher. The analysi sshows that out of 46 items initiated by the learners, 34 (73.9 per cent) were claimed,whereas only 78 (49.4 per cent) out of 158 were claimed when topicalised by the instructor.Thus, the chances for claims are much higher when items are triggered by classmates. Afurther emphasis on the profitability of the learners’ initiation is that it attracts morereporters than when topics are brought up by the teacher.By limiting to himself the initiative of topicalising most items for instruction, the teacherdoes not give the learners much opportunity to distinguish between items which are