TEACHER TALK IN A YOUNG LEARNERS’ ENGLISH CLASSROOM

Abstract

Over the last decade, the research on teacher talk has shifted its focus from the quantity of teacher talk, that is, the amount of time a teacher spends talking during a foreign language class, to the quality of teacher talk, i.e. how effective teachers are in facilitating learning and encouraging communicative language exchange by means of speech modifications they make when talking to their students, the way they react to errors or the kind of questions they ask. Researchers found that teacher talk can be a valuable source of comprehensible input and that it may promote communicative environment in the classroom and authentic language use.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the attitudes and behaviours of teachers who teach English to young learners concerning teacher talk. For this purpose, we conducted a quantitative research using a questionnaire constructed for this research that included statements about constructive teacher talk (direct error correction, content feedback, prompting, extended wait time, repairing) and obstructive teacher talk (turn completion, teacher echo, extended use of initiation-response-feedback). The investigation tested the null hypotheses that there will be no significant differences in teacher talk with respect to the teachers’ gender, age, years of teaching experience and the size of the class in which they teach, and that there will be no difference between the teachers’ attitudes towards teacher talk and the frequency with which they engage in teacher talk in the classroom.