The Awareness of Managing “Teacher Talk in Language Classroom Interaction”

Lead In

In discussing classroom language, teacher’s language will be the most important part to be considered. As teachers concern their position as a model for their students, they need to be aware of how their language will influence the condition of classroom interaction, or in other words, it is how the students will use the target language  through classroom interaction.

The discussions as well as tasks in Activity 1 will invite us to explore the concepts and the principle of teacher talk then see how it will influence teacher’s using the target language in the classroom as the medium of instruction.

Teacher’s use of the target language as a medium of instruction of the teaching process of the target language is also known as teacher talk as Ellis (1985, p.145) mentioned that “teacher talk is the special language that teacher use when addressing L2 learners in the classroom”. It is also believed to have a significant influence to the success or failure of foreign language teaching in the classroom (Cook, 200, p.144) . Teachers pass on knowledge and skills, organize teaching activities and help students practice through teacher talk. In English classroom, teacher’s language is not only the object of the course, but also the medium to achieve objective.

Material

The goal of learning a language is the ability of using the language to communicate, and for that purpose the opportunity to use the target language should be provided. In doing so, language teacher should be able to manage the classroom  interaction. Brown (2001, p. 165) reveals that interaction is the collaborative exchange of thought, feelings, or ideas between two or more people and that it results in a reciprocal effect as it involve the use of the language in various context to ”negotiate” meaning. Therefore, language teacher should be able to encourage as well as to model the use of language for interaction through their use of the target language in the classroom.

In relation to teacher talk, Harmer (2007, p.37) describes that teacher should be able  to ”rough-tone” their language. Rough-tuning is the simplification of language which both parents and teachers make in order to increase the chances of their being understood. In doing so, they should be able to adjust their language use – in term of grammatical complexity, vocabulary use and voice tone – when their listener shows signs of incomprehension. In order to rough tone, teacher need to be aware three points:

a.     They should consider the kind of language that student are likely to understand;

b.     They need to think about what they wish to say to students and how best to do it;

c.     They need to think the manner in which they will speak

Interactive Principles

In order to be able to effectively manage classroom interaction through teacher talk, teacher need to consider the interactive principles as well as various roles that they can play during the teaching and learning process.

Brown (2001, p. 166) suggests seven interactive principles as the foundation of establishing interaction in the language classroom:

 a.   Automaticity

A real human interaction is best accomplished when focal attention is on meanings and message and not on grammar and other linguistic forms. Learner are thus  freed from keeping language in a controlled mode and can more easily proceed to automatic modes of processing.

 b.   Intrinsic Motivation

As students become engaged with each other in speech acts of fulfillment and self- actualization, their deepest drives are satisfied. And as they more fully appreciate their own competence to use language, they can develop a system of self reward.

 c.   Strategic invesment

interaction requires the use of strategic language competence both to make certain decision on how you say or write or intepret language and to make repairs when communicating pathways are blocked.

 d.   Risk Taking

Interaction requires the risk of failing to produce intended meaning, failing to interpret intended meaning (on part of someone else, of being laughed at , and of being rejected.

 e.   The language culture connection

Language cannot be separated from the culture of the language itself. Practice in interaction using the target language will help learners to understand easier about the cultural nuances of the target language.

 f.    Interlanguage

The complexity of interaction entails a long developmental process of acquisition. Some errors of production and comprehension will be a part of this development.

The role of teacher feedback is crucial to the developmental process

g.   Communicative competence

All the elements of communicative competence (grammatical, discourse, sosiolinguistic, pragmatic and strategic) are involves in human interaction and work together to make successfull communication take place.