Communicative language teaching requires careful and extensive use of the target language by the teacher who functions as a linguistic model for his/her students. This necessitates confident language use in the most frequently occurring teaching situations. In order to provide trainee teachers with proper language education, it is important to identify the language skills and abilities that a teacher has to possess and demonstrate when in action. I carried out a research project whose aim was to describe the characteristics of the situations in which teachers use the language when they conduct classes in English. The aim of the study was to provide a basis for language use tasks to be included in a performance-based proficiency test for potential English language teachers in pre-service teacher education. Thus, the type of description provided as a result of the study is not meant to produce a comprehensive account of teacher behaviour (either linguistic or paralinguistic) but to facilitate a definition of possible test-task characteristics. The test is called the Test of English for Teaching Purposes (TETP), and it will be developed to assess the engagement of test takers' language proficiency nationwide in tasks which they are likely to encounter outside the testing situation. Some pilot tasks have already been developed by teachers working at the University of Veszprém, ELTE and JPTE.

The study was conducted in two phases. In the preliminary phase, 6 out of 24 teachers were identified as 'good' teachers' on the basis of feedback sheets from students. In the baseline phase, these six teachers were observed during teaching in order to investigate the features of their language use in classroom teaching situations. The analysis of these features centred around four issues, which were as follows: 

(1) Which language skills  are engaged and through what types of activities?
(2) Which are the most frequent discourse functions  of teacher talk? (cf. Bowers, 1980; Geiger, 1981; Patil, 1994;)
(3) What is the proportion of discourse types (monologue, dialogue and conversation) within teacher talk? (cf. Malamah-Thomas, 1987; Allwright and Bailey, 1991; Johnson, 1995)
(4) What are the most frequent topics of discussion in English language classrooms? (cf. Spratt, 1994)

Method

I observed twelve classes conducted by six different 'good teachers' in a secondary grammar school and a private language school in Veszprém, Hungary. The students in these classes werre from 14 to 25 years of age whose level of language proficiency ranged from pre-intermediate to upper-intermediate. The general purpose of most of these learners' English studies was to pass the intermediate level state language examination.

In the majority of these EFL instructional settings, teachers relied heavily on commercially published teaching materials as their main sources of linguistic and cultural information about English. Teachers typically depended on these materials for syllabus design, lesson planning and classroom activities. Consequently, textbooks had a considerable impact on the instructional events and procedures identified. 

Participants

The participants of the observations were six Hungarian EFL teachers who had been specifically chosen for the research. On the basis of student feedback sheets, they proved to be the most favoured and successful teachers among the 24 teachers contacted in the preliminary phase of the study. Their teaching experience ranged from three to ten years. The impressions gained from lesson observations revealed a general level of the teachers' language proficiency from advanced to near-native.

Research instrument

Prior to the current research, field-notes of 112 classes were taken with the purpose of facilitating the construction of a systematic observation instrument to structure classroom experiences. Several refinements of the originally compiled schedule resulted in an observation checklist in which teachers' performance was classified in terms of (1) skills performance; (2) discourse types; (3) topical content, and (4) styles of communication. 

Procedures

During the observations the 'sign system' (Chaudron, 1988) of recording was applied. This system enables the observer to record what is happening at equal intervals, which was set for twenty seconds. For a formal classification, the unit of analysis was one utterance, whereas for a functional item, one unit was identical with one function. Topics, styles and modes of communication were recorded every time they changed rather than being tallied systematically every 20 seconds. The units of analysis, therefore, varied in length according to the event observed. It could be one 'speech act' as it was mainly the case with the majority of functions, but it could be a longer stretch of speech or 'episode' within the prevalent topic of the lesson. Instances of student talk were recorded as 'teacher listening to process student talk'. No language processing was identified whenever the teacher was passive during students' individual, pair- or group-work. Silence was not marked in any way unless the teacher was clearly involved in a writing activity. Such a data collection procedure naturally leads to nominal frequencies where the total number of the samples could be calculated by adding up the tallies beside the items. 

Results and discussion

In the following I will give an interpretation of the collected data in terms of the four issues outlined in the introduction: (1) language skills and activities; (2) discourse functions of teacher talk; (3) discourse types or modes of communication (monologue, dialogue and conversation), and (4) topics of discussion.

Question 1 Which language skills are engaged and through what types of activities?

Table 1 shows how the teachers' observed behaviour in the classroom was related to the four skills. As is clear from the table, the overwhelming majority of what the observed teachers did in the classroom required oral performance. Teachers did not seem to read much in class, and the proportion of writing was quite low. This implies that in the observed classes, the teachers' oral skills had much greater importance than their writing abilities.

By way of reading, the teachers mainly read aloud parts of texts, which were usually instructions to exercises. No silent reading of student work was observed.  Also, they hardly ever read aloud stories let alone dialogues. What they did is have students listen to native speaker speech on a cassette rather than read aloud themselves. This fully contradicts the general picture of EFL teachers' target situations on which most examinations for English teachers are based (e.g. The Cambridge Examination in English for Language Teachers), namely that reading aloud is a frequent task for a teacher. The observations made in the current research refuted this assumption, although, it might still be true of native speaker teachers or other non-native teachers of the language. 

As far as listening skills are concerned, the teachers frequently processed and re-worded student talk whereas they hardly ever processed oral texts from sources other than their students. Their writing activities in the classroom seemed to be dominated by putting model sentences on the board - usually to feature grammar structures -, and new words with or without phonetic transcriptions. No full engagement of all the enabling skills of writing was observed.

Question 2 Which are the most frequent discourse functions of teacher talk?

The discourse functions included in the checklist were taken over from J. A. van Ek's (1976) Threshold Level list. The list was modified and made classroom specific thus reflecting an initial frequency of functions established during exploratory research. Table 2 shows the most frequently performed functions of teacher talk as observed in the case of six successful teachers:

The results of the study confirm that the most frequently performed function of teacher talk was eliciting factual information (e.g. 'What does Joe do?'). This is fully in line with a previous finding that assigns an important role to teachers' questions in the classroom. The frequency of structuring the lesson  (e.g. 'We are going to listen to the casette first…'),  'requesting' (e.g. Could you come here, please?'), expressing/eliciting opinions and feelings  (e.g. 'I'm happy to see that you are all right.'), informing  (e.g. 'You use '-ed' to form the past tense.'), praising/encouraging (e.g. 'Great! You are doing very well today!'), evaluating, correcting (e.g. 'That's incorrect. You don't say 'zero', you say 'o'.') and summarising what has been said, read or heard (e.g. 'So you all think that it's important.') were all relatively high. However, negotiating (e.g. 'Shall we read on?'), socialising, (e.g. 'Happy birthday to you, Zsuzsi.') apologising/regretting  (e.g. 'Sorry, I didn't have the time for that.'), or dis/approving (e.g. 'You shouldn't be eating during the lesson.') were quite rarely observed as exercised functions by the teachers. The lack of negotiating might indicate a kind of  'teacher knows well, why negotiate' attitude to the teaching/learning process. The rarity of socialising moves might imply a tight classroom management, in which there was not much room for social chats. 

The relatively high amount of elicitation as well as the large proportion of teacher questions indicate that the prevalent mode of communication in these classrooms had a question and response pattern, which was directed by the teacher. The obtained results depicted in Table 3, also confirm the dominance of question and answer type dialogues in classroom communication.

Question 3 What is the proportion of discourse types (monologue, dialogue and conversation) within teacher talk?

An oral monologue was taken to mean a long, usually transactional turn by the teacher. A dialogue was interpreted as a kind of interaction between teacher and student in which the turns are short, the answers are often predictable and there is only one point made during a turn. A conversation then was defined as a kind of open interaction between teacher and one or more students, in which everybody is free to make a contribution. There are longer turns and the outcome is often unpredictable. 

Again, dialogues between teacher and students seemed to dominate the scene. The teacher 'monologued' much less and, unfortunately, there was very little actual conversation taking place between the teachers and the class (see Table 3).

Question 4 What are the most frequent topics of discussion?

Table 4 shows that in the observed classes everyday discussion topics such as family, daily routine, housing, jobs, meals, services, health, sports, weather, traffic, entertainment, hobbies, and travelling, were by far the most favoured subjects of discussion. They were followed by personal stories, questions of language learning and cultural, civilisational issues. Current affairs or topics related to other curriculum subjects were not often talked about in these English classes. 

Conclusion

This article has summarised the results of the baseline phase of a larger-scale study in which features of teachers' classroom language use were investigated in order to provide the basis for language use tasks in a Test of English for Teaching Purposes. This phase of the study included the observation of six 'good' teachers -as identified through feedback sheets from students- in classroom teaching situations. 

As is clear from the description of results, an overwhelming majority of what the teachers do in the classroom requires oral performance. The obtained results confirm the dominance of question and answer type dialogues in classroom communication. In the observed classes everyday discussion topics such as family, daily routine, housing, jobs, meals, services, health, sports, weather, traffic, entertainment, hobbies, and travelling, were the favoured subjects of discussion. The most frequently exercised functions of teacher talk were eliciting factual information, structuring the lesson, requesting, expressing/eliciting opinions/feelings, informing, praising/encouraging, evaluating/correcting, and summarising what has been said, read or heard. The prominence of activity management over explanations implies a task- or activity-centred classroom where new information tends to be elicited rather than conveyed and in which instructions are basically retained for activity management purposes.

Naturally, the description provided of six good teachers' language use is not a comprehensive account of teacher behaviour. Nevertheless, by  defining the context in which teachers use the language they teach, such an investigation facilitates the description of possible test task characteristics , which is essential  for the next phase of the TETP project.
 

References

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