[[alternative]]Korean Children in Taiwan: A Case study on Bilingual Teacher–Student Interactions

[[abstract]]In the 21st century, Chinese has become one of the most influential languages in the world. Today, learning Chinese has become a trend in Korea. A significant number of students have chosen to study Chinese abroad in China and Taiwan. There are many books on Chinese, but most of them are mainly in the area of Chinese literature or philosophy. There is very little research about learning Chinese as a foreign language, and almost none focusing on teaching Korean children Chinese. In this thesis, we will be analyzing and understanding the interactions within a Chinese-Korean bilingual classroom. I hope that this will provide helpful information for Chinese teachers in Korea and Korean teachers in Taiwan in their endeavors. The teacher and students in the first year Chinese class at the Taipei Korean-Chinese Elementary School are the informants of this case study. This thesis includes, documents (e.g. class handouts, exam papers and quizzes), interviews, tapes and other materials used to analyze classroom interactions and discourse. First, the Initiate Response Follow-Up (I.R.F.) model is used to present characteristics and interaction models between the teacher and the students. Findings show that by using I.R, R.F and I.R.F. as “meaningful interactions”, the interaction ratio will be 75% with I.R. as the most common interaction. This result indicates that this is a “teacher centered” classroom. Secondly, “Teacher Talk” will be discussed from three perspectives, paralinguistic features, syntactic features, and discourse features. Paralinguistic features include the teacher’s speech speed and intonation. Results show that the teacher’s speech speed in class (204 words/min.) is slower than the speech speed outside of class (271.2 words/min.). This indicates that the teacher purposely slows down her speech speed when teaching material related to the class. In this thesis we will discuss the issue of how to control paralinguistics features, an interesting issue regarding children’s language education. We will also be discussing the Chinese-Korean ratio used in class (95% : 5%) and the affects of the intonation of the teacher on the students. With regard to syntactic features, we use the Mean Length Utterance (MLU) to measure the child’s language ability. The results show that I:R:F’s average lengths of the sentences are 5.30, 2.96 and 4.33. These findings show that the teacher changes the length of her sentences in accordance to the child’s language ability. The language abilities of a student at Taipei Korean-Chinese elementary school (MLU=3.5) are similar to a Taiwanese one-year nine month old child (MLU=2.2). In this thesis discourse features (speech characteristics) have been classified as either Initiation or Feedback. Initiation has been divided into five types, informative, directive, clue, drill or question. The questions have been classified as checks, display questions (D.Q.) or referential questions (R.Q.). Checks have been divided into comprehension checks, clarification requests or confirmation. D.Q. have been divided into factual, reasoning, explanation, or yes/no. The research results show that the teacher most often uses drills (31.3%), questions (26.5%) and Directives (23.3%). For questions, the teacher most often uses D.Q. (75.78%), in which 55.28% are factual questions. Feedback has been subdivided into four categories, acceptance (49%), praise (13.9%), correction (4.5%) and comments (32.7%). From this data, we can see that most of the teacher’s feedback is positive. Thirdly, from the point of view of scaffolding language education and teaching strategies, we try to find out how to provide comprehensible input in order to help children learn Chinese.