An Exploration of Discourse in an EFL Classroom: Teacher Talk

AbstractIn the present study, the amount of teacher talk in class and students’ reactions is presented. For this purpose, twelve upperintermediate students (8 male and 4 female) were gathered and their interactions with the teacher and with each other were taperecorded for 45minutes in five consecutive sessions. At the end, a structured interview with 8 open-ended questions with the aim of getting the teacher's opinion about teacher talk, its merits and demerits together with the amount of time needed to use i t in different classes was administered and analyzed. The purpose of the research was twofold. First, it was deemed to see how much of the class time is allocated to teacher talk and student talk, respectively. Secondly, the paper sought to find the role of teachers’ questioning. It was revealed that on average, some 70 percent of the class time was allotted to teacher talk, 20 percent to student talk and about 10 percent to other activities. It was found that the allocation of such time to teacher talk has various advantages and flies in the face of the view which underplays the role of teacher talk (especially in upper-intermediate and advanced levels) and encourages teachers to talk less. Meanwhile, it supports the claim that a skilful teacher uses questions in his teacher talk both to get feedback from the class for what he has taught, get the attention of the students to what he is going to say or do next, and gain the full control of the class