ETHNOMETHODOLOGY AND CONVERSATION ANALYSIS BY GEORGE PSATHAS

ADDRESSING IRAQI ELF/LEARNER DISCOURSE INTERACTIONS IN TASK-BASED CLASSROOM

            The main objective of language teachers is to create communication inside of the classroom where students can communicate with verbal or non-verbal patterns related to social interactions, where learners have to follow certain roles like what kind of activities they are going to carry out, who asks the questions, in this case, the teacher, and what kind of questions are going to be implemented (display or referential questions), and in many cases, the teacher (who has the power) is the one who selects the student in order to answer a specific question, however, those patterns make that the classroom discourse inside of the classroom is somewhat restricted and learners cannot have a natural interaction or communication.

            Classroom discourse was divided into four (4) structures where the teacher was using them with his/her students; the first one is IFR, which is common in the classroom since the main role of the teacher is to ask questions in order to evaluate them through the student’s answer and then the teacher gives her/him a feedback, of course, this sequence continues, but as we know this kind of structure makes that just a few students participate or get involved actively, in other words, this structure does not promote the interaction at all between student-student or student-teacher.

            The second structure is the instruction which it is common into the classroom, teacher makes use of this structure when he/she is giving some information about any activity, when he/she uses the instruction the students do not have a real interaction or communication related with verbal but they understand what the teacher is saying and follow the instructions in order to do the activity.

            The next structure is probing questions or referential questions which means that the kind of questions that the teacher gives to the students encourage them to think or rethink the answer before share it with teacher and partners and they also have to use the argumentation in order to justify their answers or reasons, and sometimes this answer makes challenge the teacher’s position, in this case, the teacher can observe the real interaction between teacher-students.

            According with this reading, it shows four types of language that can be presented in the EFL classroom discourse where students present different patterns related with the communication like mechanical in which the exchange of communication is not involved, meaningful is when the meaning is contextualized but there is not new information, pseudo-communication is when students get new information but they do not put in practice that information outside of the classroom, and real communication.

            Inside of the classroom teachers use to use two kind of questions (referential and display questions) in order to stimulate communication and interaction inside of the classroom; according to this, teachers use those kind of questions in order to create communication in the classroom between teacher-students and students-students, but through the studies that were presented in this the reading we could observe that teacher uses  display questions (the teacher knows the answer of the question and ) in his/her classes, it is because he/she wants to keep controlling and manipulating classes where he demonstrates that he/she is the only one who has the power, and in some cases the teacher is the only one who can decide who is going to answer the question or if it is going to be a volunteer participation.

            One another hand, exist the referential question (is when the teacher does not know the answer that student is going to provide related to the question), in this case, this kind of question provide a real interaction and communication between teacher-students. However, EFL teacher usually uses low-questions in which students just need to memorize or give a superficial answer, and at the same time with this type of questions teacher is limiting students, the idea with the question is that students think so deeply before answer and the role of the teacher is to develop a real context related to interacting and communicative environment.

            Another types of question that are presented in the classroom are “divergent and convergent questions”, in this case, teacher uses those questions depend on the objective of the class, for example, when the teacher wants to know what is the student’s opinion about a specific topic it is because the teacher wants to create more communicative language use (divergent), also the teacher observes the student’s comprehension about the topic, but in some cases, the teacher uses the yes-no the question, with these questions the objective of the teacher is that students just focus on a specific topic but the communication or interaction is not developed at all.

            In other words, EFL teacher do not focus on questions that promote the interaction and communication between teacher-students, teacher just focuses in questions that students can answer in an easy way, it means that students do not need to go beyond of the topic in order to answer the questions, they just need to memorize in short-term the topic with the objective of answer the questions.

Lorena Fuya