Background to the study

1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background to the study

There has been much research on the teacher talk in recent years. This interest reflects the importance of such talk in language teaching. Issues related to the teacher talk are, among other things, number and type of questions asked and speech question modification made by teachers, quantity of speech, error correction, feedback, instructions and explanation Chaudron, 1988. It lies in the fact that “second language learning is a highly interactive process Richard and Lockart, 1994 and the quality of this interaction is thought to have a considerable influence or learning” Ellis, 1985.In other words, Ellis 1985 argues that successful language learning is found to depend as much on the type of interaction triggered by teachers’ questioning behaviors that takes place in the classroom as on the method used. Subsequently, prompting students to be more actively engaged in learning is pedagogically valuable, for their active involvements will promote substantial learning regardless of well-designed method that the teacher use Nystrand and Gamoran, 1991. If teacher’s questions triggers students to initiate the prolonged interaction, there should be enhanced students’ comprehension as well as more production of outputs by them Pica et al., 1987; Ellis, 1993 The various question types play a pivotal role in students’ language production and acquisition. Brock 1981 cited by Chaudron 1988 states that teachers’ various 2 question types affect the quantity and complexity of students’ TL use in spoken discourse. Furthermore, Nunan 1989 citing Pica and Long 1986 asserts that teachers’ modifying speech –among other things, questions- improves the comprehensibility of the input to the students, resulting in acquiring TL. Subsequently, the utility of teacher questions needs to be measured against three inter-dependent restricting factors Gabrielatos, 2001: 1 the need to minimize teacher talking time, so that the teachers do not dominate the lesson, 2 the importance of involving learners and elicitinggenerating as much learning thinking and talk as possible, and 3 the need for time effectiveness, since a common complaint of teachers is that there never seems to be enough time to deal with the set syllabus. However, concerning the teacher’s minimal talking time, it is inevitably influenced by the students’ current language proficiency as stated by American Scholar Wong- Fillmore Xiao-yan ,2006. She views that two conditions have to meet if the teacher talking time is minimized. The first circumstance is that the students must have possession of high level language proficiency. Consequently, they can communicate with their teacher and among themselves. The second one is that there must be sufficient pupils who feel like communicating in the class. As a matter of fact, teacher talking time should not be minimized blindly Xiao-yan, 2006. The teachers are pedagogically aware of when and how much they spend the time talking in TL during 3 the language instruction. In other words, using their common sense and experience, good teachers get the balance right Harmer, 2000. Eventually, Richards and Lockhart 1994 assert that questions, in educational terms serve a number of purposes, most notably a encourage student involvement in learning, b help weaker students participate, c help elicit particular structures and vocabulary, d stimulate thinking, and e enable teachers to check student understanding.

1.2 The problem