Teacher Talking Time

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Quite often we act out role plays with another student. But if you get students into pairs for the role plays and simply walk around to assist, you will speak less, and they will speak more. The same goes for groupwork , whether you have them do a writing task, like write a story together, or a speaking task, like a discussion. If the instructions are in the coursebook or the worksheet, why must you read them out loud and explain them to the class? This is also a great way to keep eager beavers happy; they get to explain something that is very clear to them, and those who need a little extra help still get the assistance they need.

What kind of music do you listen to? I listen to rock music. Because I like it. Where do you listen to it?

I listen to it everywhere: During class time, try to focus your efforts on getting them to speak. When we tell students the answer, they passively receive it. You mean this device we use to staple papers together? Much too often we tell: Remember when we talked about the different types of weather? Get them to say it!

Elsewhere he may speak less as students need ample opportunity to practice the new material. Their use of the language should further promote qualitative thought. For example, this means that choral drills, substitution drills, and other exercises remain important because students need these activities to become familiar with and absorb the target language. However, too many drills or other, similar activities result in students who switch off their brains.

The fail to critically observe, analyze, and practice with the new language.

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It allows the teacher to restrict his speaking to vital areas of the lesson. When he then speaks, students know the information is important. They listen more attentively and work harder to successfully process the information. Students get to speak more. This can be easily exemplified by the instance of a classroom where the learners are working in groups and, as they interact amongst themselves, the teacher is interacting with a particular group or a particular pupil; it is possible that the PTTT can partially or entirely coincide with the PSTT at the end of the lesson.

Thus, notwithstanding the fact that the teacher is not addressing the whole group, it seems reasonable to consider the turns taken by him or her in those particular instances as teacher talk, which in turn could well fall into some of Milk's teacher-moves categories. In Table 3 , there is a distribution of the length of time minutes the students spent talking amongst themselves and to me, and the time I spent addressing the whole group against the length of the lessons CL.

Moreover, the peculiarity of the four minutes in the TTT slot corresponding to my moves in the session comprising the first two lessons recorded is accounted for by the fact that all the details about the task carried out by the five small groups into which the students were divided on that occasion had been explained in the previous session.

For one thing, in a lesson that should involve activities such as video viewing or composition writing for most of it, both teacher talk and student talk would be drastically reduced for obvious reasons. For another thing, the teacher should do most of the talking should the lesson focus on involved explanations of grammar rules, for instance. These arguments seem to be in line with Nunan's comments on the amount of teacher talk in the L2 classroom Nunan, Two factors involving the audio recordings in the elementary group render them different from the data collection in the other classroom.

For one thing, although lessons were merged into minute hebdomadal sessions, the data were collected from the beginning of each meeting up to the th minute of classroom activity. For another thing, the nature of the lessons in this classroom differs markedly from those given to the intermediate group. In this classroom, there was massive video viewing, which accounts for the large figures in the SL slot, as can be seen in Table 4. The comparison between the figures in this table with those outlined in Table 2 indicates that the initial hypothesis about the amount of teacher talk in the two classrooms investigated was not supported by the results of the research.

If TTT versus STT in the L2 classroom can be an indicator of the teaching principles adopted by me, these results seem to indicate the adoption of a more learner-centred approach towards the intermediate group, and the establishment of a balance between teacher-centredness and learner-centredness in the elementary classroom.

Teacher Talking Time

This equilibrium can be explained by the type of activity carried out video viewing as well as the level of the students in this particular classroom - it seems beginning level classrooms tend to demand more TTT. While it might be the case that the type of investigation which involves the tallying of the amount of talk produced in the L2 classroom is undervalued by some language-oriented experts, it can be of considerable value to reflective teachers. The results of the study reported here, for instance, can unveil a number of postulations related to the relevance of the distribution of the amount of talk in the L2 classroom.

Many would be likely to agree that there is no negativity whatsoever in such concurrent tallying, since in student-student, student-teacher or otherwise interactions both parties students versus teacher are equally involved in the process of speech production even if in different proportions. Considering the balance struck between TTT and STT in the EG classroom, for example, was those students' learning prejudiced by the fact that I was talking as much as the students in the classroom? If examined in the light of the nature of the activities carried out by the EG students, one might argue that, even when allotted a lesser share of the TTCR, students can still have their learning skills improved to a great extent and in various fronts from the type of lessons I have implemented, namely, 1 listening comprehension; 2 pronunciation; 3 intonation; 4 syntactical aspects and 5 vocabulary, just to cite a few.

Another issue that may be raised on the basis of these results is the question of whether or not the type of learner-centredness suggested by the high level of STT in the IG classroom contributes effectively to a solid development of L2 intermediate students. Finally, considering my approach towards classroom management and my capitalisation on task-based activities mostly in the IG classroom, one tends to accept that, despite the tentativeness of the investigation, the results somehow indicate a greater focus on the learners.

The creation of an environment in which learners learn by doing appears to be one of the concerns of a learner-centred approach, inasmuch as it seems the greater the involvement of the students in the process of learning, the higher the likelihood of retaining newly learnt items Stern, At this point, activities anchored in TBL, which in most cases have to be completed in small groups, appear to be a valuable tool to the development of learner-centred lessons Nunan, ; Willis, The assumption that the classrooms investigated are in alignment with the principles of an LCA in terms of TTT implies that lessons designed and implemented based on TBL are successful in keeping TTT at a low level in L2 classrooms aiming at the achievement of communicative competence in the TL.

Nevertheless, TBL, which currently seems to pervade L2 classrooms worldwide, should not be applied without caution.

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It is desirable that close monitoring of both the long- and short-term outcomes of this teaching approach should be done in order to avoid responsibility for any sort of placebo effect in the classroom Pica, As Hixson and Tinzmann anticipated some time ago, in the educator's world, only change remains the same.

In other words, the teacher should never be satisfied with results indicating professional progress. Instead, he or she must pursue the continuous development of their expertise as educators, as Hixson and Tinzmann This seems to constitute a safe course for keeping one's lessons both dynamic and productive. It does not mean to say, though, that less TTT equals dynamic and productive lessons.

Good lessons seem to be resultant of a number of factors that can range from language theories favoured by the teacher to his or her personality traits Holland and Shortall, But this, as well as most of the other issues raised from the results of this study, seems to merit the implementation of other classroom investigations Allwright and Bailey, ; Chaudron, ; Nunan, Currently he holds a lecturing position at the State University of Amazonas.

He is interested in the teaching of methodology and pronunciation. Focus on the language classroom.

An introduction to classroom research for language teachers. Forms and substance in learner-centred teaching: Teachers' take-up from an in-service programme in South Africa. Teaching and Teacher Education,18, Research on teaching and learning. Implementing the scholarship of teaching. What changes are generating new needs for professional development? Retrieved August 07, , from http: Classroom research and research methods. Techniques and principles in language teaching. How learner-centred are you? Ministry of Basic Education and Culture. Designing tasks for the communicative classroom.

7 Things Your Quiet ESL Students Are Not Telling You

A textbook for teachers. Research methods in language learning. Tradition and transition in English language teaching methodology. Issues and options in language teaching. A framework for task-based learning.

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