English Language Teaching in its Social Context

NAVIGATING THE DISCOURSE 311are not directed at particular individuals but serve as a kind of communal monologuedirected by the teacher at the whole class wherein learner contributions are woven by theteacher into his or her own text.Chaudron’s (1988) review of research on teacher talk in the language class furtherreveals that a good proportion of teacher input made available to learners has very specificcharacteristics.Tcachers appear to have two-thirds more practice in the target language thanall the learners put together. They also modify their speech in ways similar to thecharacteristics of caretaker speech to young chddren or native speaker speech to non-nativespeakers. Interestingly, such teacher modification appears more emphatic when addressinglearners whom they regard as having lower proficiency (Dah1 1981, Griffiths 1991, HamayanandTucker 1980, Henzel 1979, Kliefgen 1985, Ellis 1985, Wong-Filmore 1982). In otherwords, the degree of modification in a teacher’s direct interaction with an individual learnermay signal to that learner the tcacher’s judgement of his or her capabilities.A crucial feature of the text of lessons is teacher feedback on learner utterances. Becauseof the fast flow of lessons, teachers are understandably inconsistent in their reactions tolearner errors with the result that different learners may either fail to distinguish a teacher’scorrection from other kinds of teacher utterance or assume that almost all teacher responsesto what they say are some form of judgement or correction (Allwright and Bailey 1991,Edmondson 1985, Nystrom 1983,Van Lier 1988). UnderliningVan Lier’s observations aboutthe teacher’s discursive control of the text of lessons, research reveals that a remarkablyhigh proportion of teacher utterances are interrogatives (Johnston 1990, Long and Sat01983). And a very high proportion of these arc closed display qucstions in which learnersare required to provide information which the teacher already knows rather than openreferential questions which genuinely seek information from the lcarners (Long and Satoop. ut.).Although acknowledging the centrality of the teacher in the orchestration of classroomdiscourse, Van Lier (1988) suggests that the text of language lessons constantly shifts dueto its being generated by four types of interaction: teacher instructions, teacher’s highlystructured elicitations of student responses, and procedurally structured learner activitiessuch as small group or dyadic tasks, all of which arc occasionally punctuated by small talkor student asides. Van Lier suggests that these different types of talk reflect different degreesof teacher control over topics or activities. From this we may also deduce that each of thefour types of interaction will facilitate or delimit particular discursive practices on the partof learners.There appear to be features of the text of language lessons that may be distinctive ascompared with other types of lessons. We might describe this as thc inter-textual nature oflanguage input in classroom talk. Allwright (1980) analyses classroom talk into three types:‘samples’ or instances of the target language, ‘guidance’ where communication occurs aboutthe target language, and ‘management’ wherein procedural talk facilitates the optimaloccurrence of samples and guidance. It seems, therefore, that the data made available to thelearner in the classroom is an on-going amalgam of three dominant and inter-weavingdiscursive practices: communication through the target language, metacommunication aboutthe target language, and communication about the teaching-learning process, its proceduresand classroom routines. And, as participants in the discourse, learners have to navigatethrough its inter-textuality identifying the textual cues which signal a transition from onekind of talk to another. It is vcry likely that different learncrs will be more or less skilled insuch navigation.We might concludc from these general patterns in the contributions of teachers to theinteractive text of language lessons that learners are not actually required to do much overt