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An Exploration of Oral Interaction in Three EFL Classrooms in a preparatory school of a university in Turkey Selen Sökmen Ramos Phd Student Çağ University, Mersin, Turkey
Abstract – The aim of this study was to analyze L2 development in the oral interaction among the English preparatory school students from three different classes in a foundation university in Turkey. With that research focus on mind, recordings of three instructors of English attempted to investigate and analyze the oral interaction in the listening and speaking classes. The findings revealed that interaction with both peers and the teacher help oral proficiency develop and students feel more relaxed to speak although they are afraid to make mistake in the beginning. However; more researches and studies should be conducted to raise an awareness between teachers to increase the more communicative environment consisting interaction in the classroom for students. Keywords: oral interaction, peer/teacher interaction, English speaking proficiency,
1. Introduction The world is increasingly becoming a globalized place where individuals are communicating among the multiple cultures each day. Today, an individual is able to access to a massive valley of information and infinite knowledge from a variety of world cultures at the touch of a button. Especially, elsewhere in the world where English is locked as the most spoken language, we take access to learn English for granted. Surpassing all other languages, English is the accepted the most popular language that the number of the people speaking English as a second language than as their mother tongue is increasing day by day. Learning English, which is accepted as the international lingua franca, is a core subject in most of the non-English speaking countries. Since communication is the essential part of daily life, speaking/learning English provides a big opportunity to exchange information, ideas, thoughts, and feelings among the individuals or group of people. Throughout the world, when people from different nationalities need to communicate with each other, they commonly use English. That is why English is called as ‘the language of communication’. Speaking English
will enable you to contact people from all over the world, to travel more easily and to become an international individual. Tavil (2010) states people feel the need to understand each other by speaking the same language when they learn a foreign language. She also argues that in real-life communication people are inclined to learn variety of language skills which are the four basic principles of a language and are important in the development of individuals’ effective communication (Yalçınkaya, Muluk, & Şahin, 2009) such as listening, speaking, reading, and writing. In that sense, teaching English language plays a big role in school education, especially in the universities, as great communication skills are the tickets to success in the academic and business world. That is the reason why many universities set English preparatory school obligatory for the new enrolling students. In preparatory schools, speaking and listening skills are highly important as well as grammar teaching, and are taught by native speakers of English from the United States of America, Great Britain, and Australia. In EFL classrooms, great oral fluency is aimed to gain the learners speaking interactional competence in the classroom atmosphere. So, oral interaction (hereafter abbreviated to OI) tasks conducted in EFL classrooms are inclined to increase students’ performance and have an important effect on real-world OI competence may be constructed by all the learners recognizing and responding to the expectation of what and how something (they bring to interaction) is said (Young, 2011). In acquisition of OI skill, teachers play a central role. They should be aware of the fact that faceto-face interactions between teachers and students make what is learnt in the classroom meaningful in real life. In that sense, teachers are supposed to ensure; -Engage learners in the classroom discourse, -Encourage interactional adjustments between teacher and learners, -Promote opportunities for self-expression, -Facilitate and encourage clarification by learners (Walsh, 2002). So, considering all these points, a lot of questions come to minds such as; to what extent oral interaction is realized both between peers and between peers and the teacher, whether speaking activities in the classroom help students negotiate the lesson, so next time they are more willing to take part into the activities. With these questions in mind, a
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comparative study of classroom interaction was conducted on English preparatory school students. 2. Research Design Before starting the study, the necessary permissions from the institution and individual participants were obtained. The participants in the study were three instructors who are the native speakers of English (coming from U.SA and Great Britain) working at the English Preparatory School and their students in a foundation university in Turkey. The preparatory school at the foundation university offers a year intense-English program including variety of courses such as integrated skills of English, oral communication, writing, and grammar. All the students are required to complete all these courses to be able to finish the preparatory school education. The participants/ instructors (2 female and 1 male) teach only listening and speaking classes to the elementary level students. These classes are designed to develop English speaking and listening abilities of the students. The elementary level students were chosen among the 584 students enrolled in the university. In each class, there were 20 students. The instructors were recorded during their classes which are mainly 45 minutes per lesson respectively. The recordings were transcribed by the researcher to analyze the oral interaction taking place in EFL classes and the students’ negotiation into the lesson. 3. Data Analysis and Discussion Based on the classroom recordings, the interactions of the preparatory school students both with their peers and the teacher in a regular 45 minutes class were analyzed. All teachers conducted the lesson based on the course book given by the administration of the preparatory school. The speaking activities on the course book were the main guidance for the teachers. Only one teacher brought extra work sheets to the class and organized different type of listening & speaking activities related to the topic. Synonyms, antonyms and homonym words frequently used in English were taught in the lessons. Teaching style of each teacher was different. First two teachers were trying hard to engage the students into the activities to voice their opinions more and waited until they finish their sentences while the last teacher was speaking most of the time and correcting the errors of the students immediately. However; teachers were mostly dominating the lesson while students generally kept silence. Teachers’ observation will be discussed below separately. First observed teacher, who are the most experienced teacher in teaching, started the lesson by reminding the students what it was taught in previous lesson, then introduced the
new topic. Her voice sounded very enthusiastic. She made students vivid by asking them questions such as; Abstract 1 Teacher: Are you guys ready for today`s lesson? Students: Yes, teacher. Teacher: Perfect. Do you know how to say synonym and antonym of a word? No answer from the students Teacher: Do you know how to say same and opposite meaning of a word? For example: difficult-hard, or difficult-easy. Students: Yes, teacher (all together). Teacher: You are very smart! Now open the page 73 on your book and let’s start working on today’s activities. The students could not understand what these terms means first so the teacher wrote the meaning and a few examples of synonymous and antonymous words on the board. Then, she told students to open the related page on their course books and started to do the speaking activities. She divided the students into pairs and give them fill in the blank activity on the book. While students were working on the tasks, teacher observed them one by one and answered their questions related to the activities. Most of the students failed to fill the blanks since they were unfamiliar with the vocabularies. Even if some students were able to answer, they hesitated to raise their hands to answer the questions. So, interaction with the classroom was not active in the first observed class. There might be many reasons for the reluctance of students such as high anxiety or low motivation. Hernandez (2010) found that significant relationships between learners’ integrative motivation and the amount of interaction with the foreign language, and between the amounts of interaction with the foreign language speaking abilities. Peers were also reluctant to communicate with each other while working on the task. Palermo & Mikulski (2014) evidence was found between positive peer interaction and learners` oral proficiency. Thus, peer interaction should be given importance and supported by the teachers.
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Second observed teacher started the lesson by warming up the students: asking them questions such as: Abstract 2 Teacher: Hello, guys. How are you? Students: Fine thanks and you, teacher? Teacher: I am super. I am wondering how you guys spent your week. What have you done last week? Student: (some of them answered) I gamed with my friends. Teacher: Oh, great! You played video games with your friends? So, did you enjoy playing video games with your friends? Student: Yes, teacher. Very much. Teacher: Do you remember what we have learnt last week? Students: Yes. Teacher: We have learnt comparatives and superlatives, right? Did you enjoy it? Did you like it? Students: Yes, teacher. Although most of the students said they enjoyed it, some of them were not interested in answering and talked with their other friends. After the teacher warmed up a bit, she told the students to open up the course book. She started with a listening activity on synonyms. Students first could not understand what the activity was about, but then teacher introduced the topic and gave a list of synonym words on the board. Abstract 3 Teacher: Okay, my lovely students. Can you please open your books, now? Please listen carefully and answer the questions below (She used CD-room for listening). After the students listened the text twice-
Teacher: So, who wants to answer the first question? No answer Teacher: The text is about the synonyms and antonyms words. Let’s see some examples. She wrote examples on the board and then asked the students repeat each word after her. That way, she helped students learn the correct pronunciation of the vocabularies, too. She did not apply any peer activity, but she was all the time in interaction with her students. She gave tasks to students to work on their own. After they were done, she asked if there was anyone volunteer to answer the questions. Abstract 4 Teacher: Let’s go back to the questions on the book. Who wants to answer the first question? No answer Teacher: Okay, Sinem. Can you answer the first question? Student: I do not know teacher. Teacher: Okay. Can we make it together? Student shook her head and said Student: Yes, teacher. Teacher told the students the answer. Since there was no volunteer, she chose some students. However: students seemed confused and completed the activity with the help of the teacher. They slowly lost interest into the lesson. Teacher was aware of this situation, but her effort to revive the lesson was not enough. She might have supported the lesson with more pair interaction. Another thing is that she could have applied task-based activities to promote students` attendance into the class after she introduced the topic. Boonkit (2010) suggested that task- based learning enhance the development of speaking skills by helping them speak in different situations. It was also
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observed some students got anxious and shaky voice when teacher asked them to give answer. It might be because either students did not know the answer or they knew the answer but did not know the correct pronunciation. Atli & Bergil (2012) argued that students who are afraid to make pronunciation mistakes are more inclined to keep silent even if they know the right answer. Last observed teacher was the only male teacher having the less teaching experience. He was the only one bringing extra work sheets to the class support the speaking activities. He first handed out the sheets and gave brief information about what topic the students would learn and wrote few examples on the board. He also used the course book. He applied different kind of activities such as: pair & group work, individual tasks, and he was interaction with the students all the time. Besides that, he encouraged the students to discuss with their peers in the group. It can be said that students enjoyed the lesson a lot. They have been always interacting with both each other and the teacher. Although some of them had some hesitations to answer the questions, they felt motivated to join the activities afterwards. Abstract 5 Teacher: Today, we are going to learn about synonym and antonyms. For example: I told my students to keep quiet OR I told my students to be silent. Quiet and silent are the synonyms, okay? Students: Yes, teacher (all together) Teacher: You are very intelligent! Let’s have a look at these sentences, too. This table is so hard. OR this shirt is so soft. Hard and soft are antonyms, okay? Students: Yes, teacher (all together). It can be concluded from the classroom observations that both teacher-student and peer-peer interaction have a positive effect on students` oral proficiency development. Students, who were interacted in the classroom, were more willing to take part into speaking activities. It has been also observed that students got motivated to speak English after they interacted more in the classroom although they were anxious or hesitant in the beginning. Teacher’s effort to engage the students more into the speaking activities helped the students to take initiative to start the talk, as well. More studies and researches should be done to raise awareness about interactive teaching/ learning among teachers and students in EFL classroom.
References Atli, I., & Bergil, A. S. (2012). The effect of pronouncation instruction on students’ overall speaking skills. Procedia - Social Behaviour Science, 46, 3665-3671. Boonkit, K. (2010). Enchanching development of speaking skills for non-native speakers of English. Procedia Social Behaviour Science, 2, 1305-1309. Hernandez, T. A. (2010). Promoting speaking proficiency through motivation and interaction: The Study Abroad and Classroom Learning Contexts. Foreign Language Annals 43(4). 650-670. Palermo, F., & Mikulski, A. M. (2014). The role of positive peer interactions and English exposure in Spanish-speaking preschoolers’ English vocabulary and letter-word skills. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 29, 625-635. Tavil, Z. M., 2010. Integrating listening and speaking skill to facilitate English language learners’ communicative competence. Procedia- Social Behaviour Science, 9, 765770. Walsh, S. (2002). Construction or obstruction: teacher talk and learner involvement in the ELF classroom. Language Teaching Research, 6(1), 3-23. Yalçınkaya, F., Muluk, B. Y., & Şahin, S. (2009). Effects of listening ability on speaking, writing and reading skills of children who were suspected of auditory processing difficulty. International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology, 73, 1137-1142. Young, K. S., & Travis, H. P. (2011). Oral Communication: Skills, Choices, and Consequences.