Interaction Analysis of the English Teaching-Learning Activities V : Reflexivity in Teacher-Pupil Exchanges 1

Our research on junior high school English classes based on the Flanders Interaction Analysis Categories (FIAC) system and its revised versions [10,11] revealed that more than eighty percent of classroom activities are teacher and pupil talk, that the main flow of verbal interaction between teacher and pupils shows a drill pattern, what types of verbal events tend to occur before and after a particular type of events, etc. Various calculated ratios, based on the category frequencies, also permitted us to infer the tendencies involved in some aspects of the teacher-pupil interaction. The above studies were concerned only with verbal interaction between teacher and pupils. The importance of nonverbal behavior in the English classroom, however, was suggested in my recent study. By including in the data nonverbal behavior as well as implicit speech acts, implicit in the sense that they are superficially absent but the speaker and the hearer are fully aware of them and by using Mary Canice Johnson's discourse structure rules, we would expect a clearer understanding of some aspects of English classroom interaction which were not considered in our previous research