Teacher Talk Matters in Writing: A Pedagogical Perspective

Teacher talk is an indispensible part of language teaching in an EFL context which is importance and usefulness mainly consists in its management with respect to the context in which it is employed. The current study explores language teacher discourse from a pedagogical or functional perspective in writing classes. The descriptive framework for analyzing the writing teacher talk in this study rested on a generalizable corpus of three different sets of writing sessions held by two expert writing teachers, totaling roughly 18.5 hours of 15 sessions or 15500 words. The investigation undertaken based on Analysis of Speech units revealed three distinct pedagogical episodes, namely Focal, Remedial and Notional talk. By these three modes writing teachers can orally fulfill their pedagogical purposes of teaching, recovering, and evaluating the linguistic and conceptual structures by either text-directed or non-text directed speech. It was also found out that the text-shared teaching or text-directed teacher talk can bring about more student talk and participation, which are significant to identify then support their learning needs. Finally, the most common episode switches observed in the study were related to Notional –to Focal, Remedial-to Focal, and Remedial-to- Notional transitions respectively