Discoursal Structure of Class Opening and Closing in EFL Teachers' Talk: A Conversational Analytic Perspective

Abstract

Adopting the ecological view of research amalgamated with a combination of Conversation Analysis (CA), Cluster Analysis (CL), and a dynamic and variable approach in analyzing classroom talk, this study investigated the interactional architecture of two discoursaly occluded interactional moves of EFL classrooms: the opening and the closing. To do so, 60 EFL classrooms at different proficiency levels were selected. Each classroom recording lasted 1.5 hours, totally comprising a 100-hour classroom corpus. From each class, the two phases of the beginning and the end of the session were targeted and the talks of teachers were analyzed. The results revealed that teachers had several interactional microactions which were counted as the submoves of starting a class and terminating moves. To start a class, teachers were observed to have several interactional strategies such as (a) greeting, (b) name calling, (c) asking reason for absences, and (d) checking the assigned homework and for the terminating a class have other interactional moves such as (a) giving assignment, (b) briefing of the next session plan, (c) stating attitude about the session, and (d) saying only farewell. In closing the class move, seven combinations of submoves were discovered as well. It can be concluded that, despite the gap in the literature on classroom discourse vis-à-vis these discoursal moves, the results indicate that both opening and closing the class moves have complex interactional architecture when they are investigated through microanalytic perspectives like CA, CL, and dynamic and variable approach.