Teacher Talk and Student Talk: Classroom Observation Studies

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DEDICATION

To my father, who never understood my scholarly pursuits but always encouraged me anyway.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword

Preface

Prologue (Contextualizing Classroom Observation Studies)

The Ethnography Of Speaking And Language Teaching

Chapter 1

Questioning-Responding In Filipino And English:

Classroom Interacton In Philipping Literature Classes

Chapter 2

Antas Ng Tanong Sa Klase Sa Literaturang Filipino

Chapter 3

Simplificaton Strategies In Two Philippine Literature Classes:

A Pilot Study

(With Andrew B. Gonzalez, FSC And Bonifacio P. Sibayan)

Chapter 4

Classroom Interaction In English For Specific Purpose Classes:

Teacher’s Questioning And Classroom Organization Strategies

Chapter 5

Pair Work And Group Work In English For Specific Purposes Classes

Chapter 6

Classroom Observation Studies At De La Salle University:

Some Things Learned, Some Things Yet To Learn

Appendix (Using Classroom Observation Data for Other Studies)

Towards Intellectualization:

Filipino As A Pedagogical Idiom For Teaching Literature

References

FOREWORD

Classroom observation studies, as the author of this volume confesses, quoting from Allwright, exemplify a procedure in ‘search of a purpose’. In other words, for some time now within the past decade, scores of studies have been done in North America, Europe, and parts of Southeast Asia looking at the process of classroom interaction between teacher and pupils and attempting to see if the observation of such data can yield insights into language teaching, the implications of which might have applications in methodology and procedure.

The studies gathered and reported in this volume by Maria Lourdes S. Bautista represent the first sustained effort in this country going beyond one-time studies to fulfill the requirement of a masteral thesis or doctoral dissertation to study interaction in different classes of one institution and to look at the process for possible implications for language teaching.

The pioneering set of studies uses both a qualitative description of the ethnography of speaking in a classroom setting and a quantitative counting of questions and answers summarized in percentage to yield proportions of teacher talk and student talk in different classrooms in literature, language, and English for Specific Purposes.

What the studies yield is insight into the actual instructional procedures that take place, the teacher behaviors, and the learner behaviors in terms of verbal responses.

While the studies suffer from the limitation of being based in only one institution, they have nevertheless larger implications for similar settings where student are well selected, come from high socio-economic status homes, are culturally advantaged, and are taught by academically qualified faculty members who are often familiar with the cutting-edge of new research in their respective fields. Other researchers in institutions in the Philippines with matching characteristics will undoubtedly find similar situations while investigators in those institutions less blessed materially can be witnesses to the reality described but in attenuated form in terms of teacher characteristics and student responsiveness.

What then is the utility of classroom interaction studies of this sort? They dramatize for us the preponderance of teacher talk over student talk; the quality of questioning which is relatively low level and therefore not conducive for growth of the language learner; the restricted code often in use in classrooms using English as a medium of instruction in spite of the relatively adequate competence of both teachers and students because of high socio-economic status; the spontaneity and freedom of expression in a class taught in Filipino and the relative elaboration of the code in contexts of this sort, presumably enhancing the learning process and if nothing else contributing to the intellectualization of Filipino (which is treated in an appendix as exemplifying the on-going process of elaboration and cultivation and hence provides excellent documentation of the process of intellectualizing the language); the necessity of contextualizing all talk to make sense out of what is happening; the value of feedback to the teacher and inferences on the behavior of students in class including their proverbial shyness and hesitancy to do turn-taking spontaneously.

In turn, for techniques and methods, insights into different procedures are given by faculty members on creating a class organization climate leading to better student talk through proper elicitation and organizing strategies for small group work complementing whole-class work to give more opportunities for verbal interaction. What emerges from the data here is the need for the teacher to clarify explicitly for herself her purposes in each classroom meeting and then to arrive at the proper organizational arrangements and to use the teaching strategies, especially in questioning, to achieve her purposes.

With the groundwork laid by studies gathered in this volume, and banking on similar studies done elsewhere in the Philippines (which are cited in the bibliography), the way is now open for Filipino scholars to tighten research procedures and to add more rigor to their methods so that we might be able to see not only correlations but perhaps causal connections through regression analysis to show how teacher questioning affects student responses and ultimately student growth in competence in the language.

To lead the way to this new avenue of inquiry, studies on classroom interaction need to be expanded in order to uncover clues as to ‘what things are yet to be learned.’

ANDREW GONZALES, FSC

PREFACE

This volume is a compilation of articles that I have written over the years in the general area of classroom observation. In the late seventies, I had heard of classroom observation studies in relation to discourse analysis, specifically through the work of Sinclair and Coulthard (1975). I had also come across Stubbs and Robinson’s introduction to the topic (1979). It was natural for me to be fascinated with the analysis of classroom language since my studies in sociolinguistics, especially in the ethnography of speaking, had made me interested in the sociocultural rules governing different genres of human interaction. I did my first real classroom observation study in schoolyear 1985-1986, when I participated in the 1986 annual seminar of the SEAMEO Regional Language Center on ‘Patterns of Classroom Interaction in Southeast Asia’ (see Das 1987 for the collection of papers from that seminar). The interest has been sustained through the year, in spite of pressures of administrative work and in spite of the competing demands of other research interests such as the intellectualization of Filipino, Tagalog-English code-switching, and Philippine English.

Classroom observation studies have their own models and their own formalism, and many of us are familiar with the Flanders Interaction Analysis Categories, and the Sinclair and Coulthard model of lesson – transaction – exchange – move – act and the three-part structure of the exchange: Initiation (I) – Response (R) – Follow-up (F). Allen and his colleagues at the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education in Toronto, Canada have devised their own specialized system for observations of language teaching (1984). Allwright (1988) reviews all the models related to classroom observation and language teaching, at the same time discussing the context in which they appeared and their contributions to the field of language teaching.

I have shied away form the models, and have tried to describe classroom interaction between teacher and student(s) and between student and student more qualitatively, anecdotally, and impressionistically. The studies, therefore, suffer from a lack of formalism and empiricism; however, I hope that they provide useful and usable insights, especially to the language and literature teacher who is still trying to understand classroom behaviors and processes.

And I hope the studies are clear enough and simple enough to encourage teachers to become the ethnographers of their own classrooms, thus ushering in the era of the teacher as researcher in the Philippines.

The book has a Prologue, six main chapters, and an Appendix. The Prologue situates classroom observations within the area of the ethnography of speaking. The six chapters utilize classroom interaction data from literature classes in English and in Filipino and from English for Specific Purposes classes. Chapters 1, 2 and 3, together with the Appendix, actually are studies using the same set of classroom data—an example of the great mileage that one can get form a good data base. Chapters 4 and 5 used two different sets of date coming from ESP classes. Chapter 6 provides a review of past, and a preview of future, classroom observation studies at De La Salle University. The Appendix indicates how classroom observation data can be used for other purposes, in this case, to show how Filipino teachers and students at De La Salle are intellectualizing the national language in their classrooms.

For consistency in this book, I have used Filipino to refer to the national language even though it was called ‘Pilipino’ when the first set of data was collected.

I would like to thank the De La Salle University Faculty Research Program for the financial assistance for the work presented here; the project has extended over many years and the Faculty Research Program has never failed to support it. I am especially grateful to the six Literature and Filipino teachers and the seven English for Specific Purposes teachers who allowed my research assistant and me to enter their classrooms and tape their interactions with their students; I am also grateful to the Chairs of those Departments for their cooperation. I am grateful to my consultants and to my research assistants through the years—their names are mentioned in the footnotes. I would like to acknowledge the logistical assistance provided by the De La Salle University Research Coordinating Office.

If there is one regret, it is that I have not had the time to go to other libraries to look at the classroom observation work going on in those campuses. I am certain that a lot of research is happening at the Philippine Normal University Language Study Center and at the University of the Philippines Institute of Language Teaching, just to name two places; that omission is a real gap in this monograph. This volume should then be viewed as only one case study that needs to be supplemented by other case studies.

The chapters in this monograph have appeared previously or will appear in the following publications:

Prologue: The ethnography of speaking and language teaching. 1979. In Applications of linguistics to language teaching, ed. by Jack C. Richards, 48-64. (Anthology Series 6.) Singapore: SEAMEO Regional Language Centre.

Chapter 1: Questioning-responding in Filipino and English: Classroom interaction in Philippine Literature classes. 1987. The DLSU Graduate Journal 12(1).1-34.

Chapter 2: Antas ng tanong sa klase sa Literaturang Filipino. This appeared as ‘Interaksyong guro-estudyante sa klase sa Literaturang Pilipino’. 1990. In Bantayon: Mga piling saysay sa wika at panitikan (Handog-parangal kay Ponciano B.P. Pineda), inedit in Alfonso O. Santiago, 48-62. Quezon City: Phoenix Publishing House, Inc.

Chapter 3: Simplification strategies in two Philippine Literature classes: A pilot study. 1993. This is an excerpt from a longer paper ‘Teaching and learning simplification strategies in a Philippine classroom: A pilot study’, by Bonifacio P. Sibayan, Maria Lourdes S. Bautista, and Andrew Gonzalez, FSC. In Simplification: Theory and Application (Anthology Series 31), ed. By M.L. Tickoo, 155-132. Singapore: SEAMEO Regional Language Centre.

Chapter 4: Classroom interaction in English for Specific Purposes classes: Teachers’ questioning and classroom organization strategies. 1990. Teaching English for Specific Purposes Journal 9.1-26.

Chapter 5: Pair work and group work in English for Specific Purposes classes. 1993. This will appear in the Festschrift in honor of Fe T. Otanes on the occasion of her retirement.

Chapter 6: Classroom observation studies at De La Salle University: Some things yet to learn. 1993. This will appear in the forthcoming issue of the Teaching English for Specific Purposes Journal.

Appendix: Towards intellectualization: Filipino as a pedagogical idiom of teaching literature. 198. In Festschrift in honor of Marcelino A. Foronda, Jr., ed. By Emerita S. Quito, 223-242. Manila: De La Salle Press.

PROLOGUE

(Contextualizing Classroom Observation Studies)

THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF SPEAKING AND LANGUAGE TEACHING

(1979)

The purpose of this paper is to review some aspects of the theory of the ethnography of speaking and some of its findings on verbal interaction in the classroom, with a view to showing the relevance of ethnographic research to language teaching. I will be focusing on research that has been done and still needs to be done in the Philippines and the implications of such research for language teaching in the Philippines.

1. Background

The language teacher has traditionally looked to linguistics for an understanding of the subject matter that she teaches. The relevance of linguistics research to language teaching, then, can only be to the extent that linguistic research deepens and illuminates understanding of the nature of language. In recent years, many linguists have come to the conclusion that the view of language presented in current linguistic theory is a rather narrow and lopsided one. Although transformational grammar has given us fuller and more formalized description of language – making us aware of rules of transformation and the levels of deep structure and surface structure – it is, according to Hynes (1972), only a theory of grammar, not a theory of language.

Since, as Mackey (1973:5) has pointed out, ‘the problem of the language teacher is not only whether or not to apply linguistics, but whose linguistics to apply, and what sort’, I would like to suggest that the language teacher try applying certain concepts of sociolinguistics in that area of research in sociolinguistics called the ethnography of speaking.

I would like to thank Bro. Andrew Gonzalez, FSC, Academic Vice-President of De La Salle University, for helping me conceptualize and organize this paper.

2. Beyond Linguistics: The Ethnography of Speaking

At this stage, the ethnography of speaking is still, in Hymes’ words, ‘towards a theory of language’. But the points where it goes beyond the usual scope of linguistics are already clear.

2.1 Language and Verbal Repertoire. First of all, consider the definition of ethnography of speaking as ‘the study of speech community’s means of speaking and their meanings from the standpoint of those who use them’ (Hymes, various papers). The phrase ‘means of speaking’ already implies that what is being studied is not one language, certainly not the language of Chomsky’s ideal speaker-hearer in a homogeneous speech community, but rather a community’s verbal repertoire, made up of different styles and registers of different social and geographical dialects of one or more languages. The notion of verbal repertoire can be exemplified by the college student who has lived in Manila all her life. If we take Joos’ (1968) classification of styles as being the continuum ‘intimate – casual – consultative – formal – frozen’, the student’s verbal repertoire would probably consist of all five styles in the Manila dialect of Filipino, probably the three styles consultative, formal, frozen in Standard English and most probably a variety featuring the mixing of English and Tagalog lexical items, phrases, clauses, and sentences usually called ‘ mix-mix’ or ‘Taglish’ for the intimate, casual, and consultative styles.

2.2 Referential Meaning and Social Meaning. The ‘meanings’ of ‘means’ of speech to their speakers are not restricted to referential meanings but include social/stylistic meanings as well (as the terms ‘intimate’ and ‘casual’ versus ‘formal’ and ‘frozen’ for styles already suggest). Thus, referentially, it matters little if a teacher on his first meeting with his freshmen introduces himself with ‘Hi! I’m Jouey Reyes, your teacher for English One’ or ‘Good morning. I’m, Mr. Reyes, your teacher for English One’, but the use of the first rather than the second carries the social meaning of a choice made in favor of familiarity over distance.

2.3 Language Structure and Language Functions. In the ethnography of speaking, the emphasis is on the multiple functions of language, rather than on the structure of language. Language is structure, of course, but structure at the disposal of the users of language and the