Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

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9
Classroom interaction 
and Conversation Analysis
9.1 Language and interaction inside the classroom
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Do people learn a second language best inside or outside a classroom?
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Do you think of the classroom as a real situation of its own or as something
artificial?
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How much of the class time does the teacher speak? How much should they
speak?
Focusing questions
leader and follower: in some types of conversation one person has the right to
lead the conversation while the others follow his or her lead
teacher talk: the speech supplied by the teacher rather than the students
initiation: the opening move by the teacher
response: the student response to the teacher’s opening move
feedback: teacher evaluation of the student response
authentic speech: ‘an authentic text is a text that was created to fulfil some
social purpose in the language community in which it was produced’ (Little
et al., 1988)
Keywords
L2 learning inside and outside classrooms
Is L2 learning the same inside the classroom as outside? One extreme point of view
sees the L2 classroom as a world of its own. Teachers and books slip into the habit
of referring to the world outside the classroom as the ‘real world’ – New Cutting Edge
(Cunningham et al., 2005) has a section in each unit called ‘Real life’ – denying that
the classroom is a part of the real world for its participants. What the students are
doing in a classroom may be quite different from the ‘natural’ ways of learning lan-
guage they would experience in an uncontrolled situation. Thus some teaching
exploits deliberately ‘unnatural’ L2 learning. Focus on form (FonF), for instance, is
exploiting the other faculties the mind has available for L2 learning, rather than

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Classroom interaction and Conversation Analysis
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making use of the ‘natural’ processes of the language faculty specifically dedicated
to language learning. At the opposite extreme is the view that all L2 learning, or
indeed all language learning of the first or second language, is the same. The class-
room, at best, exploits this natural learning, and at worst puts barriers in its way.
What happens in class has to be as ‘natural’ as possible, dodging the question of
the bitter disputes over exactly what natural language learning might be.
What evidence is there one way or the other? Some areas of grammar have been
investigated in classrooms as well as in the world outside. Learners appear to go
through the same sequence of acquisition in both situations, for example, German
children learning English at school compared with those learning outside (Felix,
1981). Three children learning English as a second language in London over a
period of time started by producing ‘no’ by itself as a separate sentence ‘Red, no’
(Ellis, 1986). They said sentences with external negation, ‘No play baseball’ before
those with internal negation ‘I’m no drawing chair.’ This happened slowly over the
period of a year, only one child producing a single sentence with internal negation
‘This man can’t read.’ The children were passing through the standard stages in the
acquisition of negation despite the fact that they were actually being taught nega-
tion. So students in classrooms learn some aspects of second languages in much the
same way as learners who never go near them.