A Case Study of Classroom Discourse Analysis of Teacher’s Fronted Reading Comprehension Lessons for Vocabulary Learning Opportunities

Abstract

This study examined classroom routine and interactional patterns of Grade 5 English Language reading comprehension lessons through delineating the speech act functions of instructional discourse that was based on Malcolm’s sociolinguistic model (Malcolm, 1979a; Malcolm, 1979b; Malcolm, 1982; Malcolm, 1986). It also evaluated the classroom interaction patterns with reference to four proposed levels of vocabulary learning opportunities that could be afforded through the discourse. Using a qualitative single case study methodology, four video-recorded and transcribed lessons, together with a semi-structured interview with the teacher, classroom observations, and lesson plans formed the data for the present study. The classroom routine showed teacher’s informing, teacher’s elicitation, children’s bidding, teacher’s nomination, children’s replying, teacher’s acknowledgement, teacher’s informing and teacher’s directing and a predominant Initiation-Response-Follow-up pattern. The teacher’s discourse had focussed the learners’ attention on target vocabulary and was effective in eliciting the meanings of those words from the learners. However, most of the successful elicitations took few and short turns. A closer examination further revealed that the most prevalent teacher’s elicitation acts were checking elicitation and multiple elicitation; and that the most prevalent teacher’s acknowledgement acts were unqualified accepting or relaying, and evaluating. The types of teacher’s elicitations and acknowledgements resulted in an interaction that was devoid of dynamic negotiation of the meanings between the learners, teacher, and text.

Keywords

Classroom interaction speech act functions classroom routine teacher’s elicitations and acknowledgements sociolinguistics model vocabulary learning opportunities case study

Introduction

Educators and researchers have a long-standing interest in classroom discourses and how they might influence learners and their learning processes. Classroom discourse is one of the most important instructional tools that educators use to facilitate learning. Different types of speech events (e.g. teacher-fronted lesson, group discussion) serve varied purposes; and they exhibit unique sequential characteristics and social behaviour which might provide insights into ‘how’ and ‘what’ learners learn. As classroom discourse pertains to particular educational, social and cultural contexts, and is not static but in a state of change, current classroom discourse research is continuously needed. In this study, we examine the speech act functions, classroom routine, and interactional patterns of Grade 5 English Language reading comprehension lessons based on Malcolm’s sociolinguistic model (Malcolm, 1979a; Malcolm, 1979b; Malcolm, 1982; Malcolm,1986) and explore whether the current instructional discourse provides learners with vocabulary learning opportunities.

There are several theoretical rationales for examining classroom discourse with Malcolm’s sociolinguistic model (Malcolm, 1979a; Malcolm,1979b; Malcolm, 1982). First, the model is extremely valuable in terms of its comprehensive categories, completeness as a model, validity in coding, and sensitivity to both the form and function of speech act utterances (Malcolm, 1986). Second, a review of the current literature in classroom discourse shows a paucity of studies that are based on Malcolm’s sociolinguistic model. In fact, classroom discourse research studies have mostly adopted an ad-hoc analysis instead of a system-based analysis (Walsh, 2006), whereby there is no preconceived set of descriptive categories. Some ad-hoc analysis relies on simplistic coding schemes which fail to distinguish utterances well (Mercer, 2010). Such an ad-hoc analysis has also less order, faces the challenge in generalizability of findings, and researchers’ conclusions are largely derived from the categories identified and at times, driven by what they ‘want to see’. By contrast, Malcolm’s sociolinguistic model is a well-known and well-validated system-based framework, that allows comparisons to be made across classroom research studies which employ this framework. Third, the speech act functions of the teacher and students show the purposes of the interlocutors’ intentions and their responses to each other’s intentions, thus, a close and detailed examination of the functions would reveal the intricacies of classroom interactions (Hutchby and Wooffitt, 1998; Mori, 2004; Schegloff, 1987; Schegloff, 1988).

Recent research has found that teacher’s speech act functions, such as elicitations and acknowledgments, influence the quality and length of students’ replies and that these acts are almost completely at the teacher’s disposal (see Chin, 2006; Mehan, 1979; Molinari et al., 2013; Shintani, 2013; Shintani and Ellis, 2014; Smith and Higgins, 2006; Wolf et al., 2005). Most of these studies (e.g. Chin, 2006; Molinari et al., 2013; Vaish, 2008; Wolf et al., 2005) offer rich and detailed descriptions of observed events and are based on an implicit assumption that classroom discourse affects learning. However, only few research studies attempted to study classroom discourse for language learning behaviour (e.g. Shintani, 2013; Shintani and Ellis, 2014).

According to Long (1981; Long, 1996) and Lyster (1998), classroom discourse plays a critical role in second language learning. The instructional exchanges between teacher and students provide opportunities for the learners to practice the target language, test out hypotheses about the target language, and obtain useful feedback. The general consensus among second language acquisition researchers on how classroom talk might facilitate second language learning is that the teacher’s talk directs and heightens learners’ attention to linguistic meanings and forms. Learners’ conscious attention to such meanings and forms (i.e. noticing) is necessary for language learning (Schmidt, 1990). The situations typically occur when the teacher and learners negotiate the meanings of the target words or when the learners notice the gap between what they want to say and what they can produce during classroom interaction (Long, 1981). According to Lightbown, Meara, and Halter (1998), the teacher’s input is equally important for learners to learn the target words. The learners need to encounter the target words 12 to 20 times in order to learn them (Coady and Huckin, 1997). Laufer and Hulstijn (2001) further suggest that learners learn by searching for and locating information on the meanings or forms of the words. Instructional scaffolding that lead learners to make associations of the target words with other lexical items, grammatical forms, syntactical structures, and contextual meanings improve learners’ depth of processing of the target words. As Hulstijin (2001) aptly suggested, it is the frequency and quality of processing of the meanings of the target words that help learners to remember them. Ellis and Beaton (1993) also found that learners’ rehearsal of the target words facilitated the retrieval of those words.

The above studies lead us to propose four levels of vocabulary learning opportunities that can be afforded through classroom discourse. With reference made to these four levels, we evaluate the instructional discourse of English language reading comprehension lessons to find out whether the current classroom interaction provides the learners with second language vocabulary learning opportunities. The four levels are as follows.

Level 1: The teacher’s discourse focusses learners’ attention on the target words.

Level 2: The students’ discourse reveals that they notice the target words.

Level 3: Classroom interaction shows that the learners search, locate, and retrieve the meanings of the target words.

Level 4: The teacher’s discourse provides interactional opportunities for learners to process the target words, particularly through meaningful negotiation of the word meanings.

Theoretical Framework

As Malcolm’s studies have provided a basis for the present study, we will delineate the details of his studies. Malcolm (1979a; Malcolm, 1979b; Malcolm, 1982; Malcolm, 1986) focussed on the sociolinguistic aspects of the classroom interaction between the Aboriginal students and non-Aboriginal teachers in primary schools in Western Australia which was at the time greatly hampered by cross-cultural communication difficulties. Adopting an ethnographic approach, he observed and analysed 100 different teachers teaching in 100 different classrooms. In his study, he identified about 100 different kinds of speech acts and reported that 40% were performed by the students whilst 60% were performed by the teacher.

The speech acts were categorized into seven basic functions: eliciting, bidding, nominating, replying, acknowledging, informing, and directing. Each of the functions had its sub-categories. Malcolm (1979a; Malcolm, 1979b) found that interactions in his observed classroom discourses entailed the following dominant speech act functions: proxy eliciting, empty bidding, deferred replying, declined replying, shadowed replying, and unsolicited replying.

Malcolm (1982) further conceptualized theoretical constructs such as speech acts, routines, and speech events in his study of classroom discourse. The speech acts are the smallest functional unit in an interaction. There are seven basic interactional functions. Routines are patterns of organizing the speech acts. An example of a basic teaching routine of a speech event of imparting content that occurred in Malcolm’s analysis (1982) is known as the tripartite speech-act structure (see sequence in Mehan, 1979) which consisted of initiation, response, and feedback (IRF) (see Initiation, Response, and Evaluation, IRE, in Mehan, 1979; McCarthy, 2002). The routine characterizing Malcolm’s classroom discourse was teacher’s elicitation, child’s bidding, teacher’s nomination, child’s reply, teacher’s acknowledging, and teacher’s informing. Finally, the speech event displays an activity that is characterized by rule-governed patterns of speech acts. Examples of speech events include but are not limited to imparting content, classroom discussion, and picture talk.

Review of Classroom Discourse Research Studies

In what follows, recent studies on classroom discourse that share a converging focus with our study on how teachers’ elicitations and acknowledgements moves influence students’ replies in the classroom are reviewed. Wolf, Crosson, and Resnick (2005), for example, assessed quality of reading comprehension lessons of Grade 1 to 8 classes using an Instructional Quality Assessment tool. Their investigation focussed on accountable talk and academic rigour. Using an ad-hoc interaction analysis, they described accountable talk as comprising seven dimensions: 1) participation rate, 2) teacher’s linking ideas, 3) students’ linking ideas, 4) teacher’s asking for knowledge, 5) students’ providing knowledge, 6) teacher’s asking for rigorous thinking, and 7) students’ providing rigorous thinking. Accordingly, academic rigour consisted of 1) rigour of the text, 2) active use of knowledge: analysing and interpreting the text during the class discussion, and 3) active use of knowledge during class discussion. The researchers found more teachers’ talk than students’ talk; and the dominant teacher’s moves consisted of elicitations of the students’ knowledge and prompting of their thinking. The students’ replies were brief, particularly when the teacher used closed-ended questions or elicited one-word answers. The interaction among students was limited. It has been further reported that a positive and strong relationship was established between good accountable talk moves and the level of rigour in the observed lessons.

Vaish (2008) examined a total of 273 English language lessons in Primary 5 and Secondary 3 classrooms from 51 Singaporean schools. The main findings were that curriculum-related teacher’s talk constituted the largest percentage of total teacher’s talk time for both grade levels; and teacher-fronted lessons were dominant. From Vaish’s (2008) qualitative transcripts analysis, the teacher’s questions were typically closed-ended and the feedback moves were largely evaluative.

Similarly, Liu and Hong (2009) examined teacher’s elicitations, but their focus was on the types and functions of teacher directives. They looked into regulative discourse of 32 lessons conducted by eight teachers in Grade 5 English language classrooms. They found that there was a predominant use of imperatives (62.7%) compared to declaratives (26.1%) and interrogatives (11.3%) in the teachers’ directives. There was also a higher percentage of procedural (62.6%) rather than disciplinary directives (37.4%). The use of teacher’s directives was found to be forceful and explicit; and they concluded that there was an asymmetrical power relation between the teachers and the students, with the teachers possessing a more powerful social position than the students.

More recently, Shintani (2013) and Shintani and Ellis (2014) examined teacher’s inputs and students’ outputs of the target language items in classroom discourse, with an overarching aim of ascertaining language learning behaviour. What is of relevance to the current study is that Shintani (2013) found that teacher’s elicitations (either requested or optional) influenced the types of students’ replies (borrowed or self-initiated). Shintani (2013), for example, examined the effects of two instructional approaches (the FonF instruction versus FonFs instruction) on the acquisition of nouns and adjectives of 45 young Japanese EFL children. The FonFs group received explicit vocabulary instruction through the Present-Practice-Produce teaching method. The FonF group received implicit vocabulary instruction through the task-based teaching method. The control group received regular vocabulary lessons. Apart from analysing the results of the production vocabulary tests to find out whether the learners acquired the target items, Shintani quantified the instances of the items produced as inputs and outputs in the discourses of the experimental and control groups. She found that the FonFs group produced more of the target items than the FonF group, despite the fact that both groups were exposed to similar amount of inputs. More importantly, she found that when the learners’ replies were elicited by the teacher, the FonFs group greatly surpassed the FonF group in the production of the target items. However, when the learners’ replies were not elicited, the FonFs group mostly borrowed the target items from the earlier utterances but the FonF group mostly self-initiated the use of the target items. Shintani (2013) empirically verified the effects of instruction on vocabulary learning, and illustrated how target items were negotiated in classroom interaction.

The Study

This study was guided by two main research questions:

1. What are the classroom routine and interaction patterns of Grade 5 English Language reading comprehension lessons?

2. Does the classroom discourse of reading comprehension lessons provide the learners with vocabulary learning opportunities?

Methodology

Participants and Context of Study

This study drew on data collected from four teacher-fronted English language reading comprehension lessons conducted by a teacher for 40 Grade 5 students in an elementary school in Singapore. Apart from the classroom transcripts, our data analyses were supplemented with a semi-structured interview with the teacher, the classroom observation notes, and lesson handouts. Each of the transcribed lessons was of 45-minutes duration. The type of lessons, teacher, and students were selected based on a broad criterion, that is, their typicality or representativeness of the wider population from which they were drawn – a criteria Duff (2012) recommended for the selection of lessons or participants for a case study. We focussed on teacher-fronted lessons because Vaish (2008), who examined a total of 273 English language lessons in Primary 5 and Secondary 3 classrooms from 51 Singapore schools, found that teacher-fronted lessons formed the bulk of English language lessons conducted by teachers in Singapore. Based on the interview with the teacher, the reading comprehension lessons, with one of the aims of building the students’ vocabulary through explicit vocabulary instruction, were also typical of lessons conducted by other teachers in the school. The common instructional procedure was that the teacher would instruct the learners to read an article and search for the meanings of the target words before the lessons. The data from the four reading comprehension lessons, although limited in terms of the quantity of lessons, permitted us to delineate each speech act utterance and do an in-depth analysis of classroom interactional patterns.

Procedures of Data Analysis

The classroom transcripts were coded by two independent raters who had been trained to code samples of transcripts using Malcolm’s sociolinguistic model (Malcolm, 1979a; Malcolm, 1979b; Malcolm, 1982). First, each speech act utterance in the transcript was coded according to (i) the speakers (the teacher or students), (ii) the types of acts (e.g. eliciting), and (iii) the sub-categories of the acts (e.g. checking elicitation) which we will elaborate next. The initial inter-rater reliability was .95. The disagreements in coding were resolved through discussion.

In Malcolm’s sociolinguistic model (Malcolm, 1979a, Malcolm, 1979b; Malcolm, 1982), each of the seven speech act categories entails several fine sub-categories. Teacher’s elicitations consist of the following sub-categories: general eliciting, checking eliciting, suggestive eliciting, conjoined eliciting, linked eliciting, relayed eliciting, multiple eliciting, vocabulary eliciting, formula regulating, looping, greeting, terminating, reading eliciting, querying, and eliciting referring. Table 1 shows examples of the teacher’s elicitation acts. Teacher’s acknowledgments consist of the following sub-categories: acknowledging, unqualified accepting, qualified accepting, refusing, relaying, modified relaying, evaluating, response referring, and incorporating. Table 2 shows examples of the teacher’s acknowledgement acts. The student’s replying acts consist of the following sub-categories: general replying, whispered replying, deferred replying, shadowed replying, declined replying, unsolicited replying, supportive replying, interrogative replying, directed echoing, reading aloud, reciting, directed singing, reacting, borrowed replying, disclaiming, reply turn holding and multiple replying. Each of the sub-categories has its definition and an example to illustrate its function (see Malcolm, 1979a). Before we proceeded with our analysis, we drew upon Malcolm’s definitions and examples of the main types of speech act functions (Malcolm, 1979a; Malcolm, 1979b) which appeared frequently in our classroom transcripts.

Table 1.

Example of the Teacher’s Elicitation Acts (Malcolm, 1979a).

Teacher’s Speech Act	Description	Example
Checking Eliciting	An act of the Teacher-Sender intended to elicit a predetermined response. The aim is to check on the Child-Receiver’s knowledge rather than to supply the teacher-Sender with new information.	Mrs. B: How many sounds did that make?
Multiple Eliciting	A succession of differently-coded elicitations directed by the Teacher-Sender to the same child without any response being received to one elicitation before the next is given. This act is often associated with CR3 Deferred Replying.	Mrs. H: All right, now why did he want to collect as many shells as he could, Karen? Why do you think he wanted to collect as many as he could? To try and get what? What did they want to get?

Table 2.

Example of the Teacher’s Acknowledgement Acts (Malcolm, 1979a).

Teacher’s Speech Act	Description	Example
Unqualified accepting	An acknowledging act in which the Teacher-Sender accepts a child’s response to his/her elicitation without going on to modify or extend it. This act commonly co-occurs with a relaying act.	Mr. C: What do they do in actual riding, they’ve got a special job most of the horses, haven’t they? Noel: Mustering? Mr. C: Mustering, yes.
Relaying	An acknowledging act in which the Teacher-Sender repeats verbatim the response or elicitation which he/she has received. The act often co-occurs with Unqualified Accepting and the same item may fulfill both functions. The distinctive function of Relaying is to make explicit the teacher’s perception of what has been said and to convey it to the class.	Mrs. H: Where are the socks Marlene? Marlene: On the little boy’s foot. Mrs. H: On the little boy’s foot yes.
Evaluating	An acknowledging act in which the Teacher-Sender conveys a judgment evaluating a prior replying act and/or its Sender.	Mrs. W: (following CR10 Reading Aloud) Right. Good boy Hedley that’s getting much better.

Following Shintani (2013) who counted the number of times the teacher orally mentioned the target words (also known as inputs) and the number of times the students orally mentioned the target words (also known as outputs), we quantified the frequency of the target words appearing in the types of speech acts of both the teacher and students and the frequency of the teacher’s successful and unsuccessful attempts at eliciting the meanings of the target words across the number of turns taken.

Findings and Discussion

The Classroom Routine and IRF Pattern

This study focussed on the instructional phase of the lessons where there was an exchange of academic information (see Mehan, 1979). There were 48 episodes in the four reading comprehension lessons. We observed a common recurrent pattern of teacher’s initiation or elicitation, student’s reply, and teacher’s feedback or acknowledgement with the seven basic functions illustrated as follows:

Eliciting (What is the meaning of diagnosis?)

Bidding (Mr. Lim!)

Nominating (Alex)

Replying (A forecast of the course of a disease)

Acknowledging (A forecast of the course of a disease. ok, very good)

Informing (A doctor tells the patient at which stage of cancer he is in)

Directing (Copy the definition)

The specific classroom routine that characterizes our classroom speech event is summarized as follows: teacher’s informing, teacher’s elicitation, children’s bidding, teacher’s nomination, children’s replying, teacher’s acknowledgement, and teacher’s informing. The main classroom routine shows that the teacher read aloud the text to the class (teacher’s informing: reading aloud), stopped at the paragraph level where a vocabulary word was located. He elicited the meaning of the word (teacher’s elicitation: checking eliciting) by nominating a student (teacher’s nomination: nomination) to provide for the definition of the word. Other students offered bids at occasional instances (child’s bidding: unsolicited bidding). The student whom the teacher nominated replied to the elicitation (child’s replying: replying). Those unsolicited bids from the floor would be given opportunities to reply to the teacher’s subsequent elicitations. The teacher acknowledged the student’s response (teacher’s acknowledgement: unqualified accepting or replaying) by repeating and conveying the student’s response verbatim to the whole class, with no modifications made to it. The teacher then briefly extended his preceding utterance by incorporating more information (teacher’s informing: extending); at other times, the teacher demonstrated by writing the meaning of the word on the board (teacher’s informing: demonstrating). The classroom routine observed in this study converges with the routine identified in Malcolm’s study (1982) despite the diversities between the two classroom contexts in terms of the ethnicity and the linguistic proficiency of the participants, and the differences in education, culture, and time. The only difference is that our teacher typically begins with an informing act. A likely reason is that the classroom routines are closely bounded with the types of speech events; in this case, both studies were imparting of content events.

The classroom routine further reveals a predominant IRF pattern. Out of the seven moves, five are from the teacher and the remaining two are from the students. Out of the two students’ moves, one is non-verbal, e.g. the students raise their hands to bid for elicitations. In other words, teacher’s initiation, student’s reply, and teacher’s feedback (IRF) structure characterized our classroom instructional sequences. Our result aligns with the recent studies conducted by Molinari, Mameli, and Gnisci (2013) and Wolf, Crosson, and Resnick (2005). Such IRF sequences have been found to predominate classroom discourse (Nassaji and Wells, 2000) and it accounted for up to 70% of classroom interaction (van Lier, 1996; Wells, 1999).

Frequency of Teacher’s Inputs and Students’ Outputs and Teacher’s Successful versus Unsuccessful Attempts at Eliciting

We quantified the frequency of the target words appearing in the types of speech acts of the teacher and students in the four reading comprehension lessons. For example, in Episode 1, the target vocabulary is ‘cracked’. This target word appeared three times in the teacher’s inputs and one time in the students’ output. Table 3 shows the frequency of the target words appearing in the speech acts of the teacher (inputs) and students (outputs). The total number of teacher’s inputs greatly surpassed the total number of students’ outputs. The ratio is 18: 1. The teacher’s inputs appeared mostly in his acknowledging and eliciting acts, but the students’ outputs appeared only in their replying acts.

Table 3.

Frequency and Percentage of Target Words in the Speech Acts of the Teacher (Inputs) and Students (Outputs).

Teacher’s Inputs			Students’ Outputs
Types of Speech Acts	Frequency	Percentage	Types of Speech Acts	Frequency	Percentage
Eliciting acts	54	37.2	Directing	0	0
Nominating acts	0	0	Informing	0	0
Replying acts	0	0	Eliciting	0	0
Acknowledging acts	62	42.7	Bidding	0	0
Informing acts	29	20%	Acknowledging	0	0 %
Directing acts	0	0 %	Replying	18	100%
Total	145	100%		18	100%

With reference made to the four proposed levels of vocabulary learning opportunities that can be afforded through classroom discourse, the teacher has successfully achieved the first three levels. The high frequency of teacher’s inputs shows that the teacher had effectively focussed the learners’ attention on the target words. Although the students’ outputs were low, they seemed to notice the target words. This is reflected in the students’ successful production of the meanings of the target words which would be elaborated next. If the students had not noticed the target words, it is unlikely that they would be able to produce the meanings of the words. Two plausible reasons for the low frequency of students’ outputs are: first, their noticing of target words might have been covert, instead of overt; second, it was not necessary for them to mention the target words in their replies.

Table 4 shows the frequency and percentage of the teacher’s successful and unsuccessful attempts at eliciting the meanings of the target words from the learners across the number of turns taken. A turn is defined as a conveyed idea that typically follows a turn-shift. The teacher has successfully elicited the meanings of the target words from the learners. The percentage of successful attempts was high, at 94%. Exactly half of the successful elicitations took between one and four turns. The percentage of unsuccessful attempts was low, at 6%. When they occurred, they took more than eight turns.

Table 4.

Frequency and Percentage of the Teacher’s Successful and Unsuccessful Attempts at Eliciting the Meanings of the Target Words across the Number of Turns Taken.

	Successful Attempts		Unsuccessful Attempts
	Frequency of Turns	Percentage of Turns	Frequency of Turns	Percentage of Turns
1 - 4 turns	36	80	0	0
5 - 8 turns	8	17.8	1	33.3
8 and above turns	1	2.2	2	66.7
Total	45	100%	3	100%

Characteristics of the Teacher’s Discourse

In order to find out whether the classroom interaction has provided the learners with vocabulary learning opportunities, we did a microscopic analysis of the teacher’s eliciting and acknowledging acts.

The Types of Teacher’s Elicitation Acts

The two common features of the teacher’s elicitations were checking elicitations and multiple elicitations. For instance, in Episode 1, line 3, the teacher elicited, ‘what is the meaning of “cracked?”’ The checking elicitations were typically sequenced right after the teacher had performed a directive act through marking boundary in line 1 and an informing act through reading aloud from the reading comprehension text in line 2. Table 5 shows an episode that illustrates the teacher’s checking elicitation.

Table 5.

Episode 1 Illustrates the Teacher’s Checking Elicitation.

Line	Speaker	Non-verbal	Verbal	Types
1	T		Let’s carry on.	Directing act: Marking boundary
2			‘The tests show that the cancer is in the third stage’, the doctor said flatly after he entered the waiting room. Lee’s voice cracked as she asked about her mother’s prognosis. ‘She has six to 12 months left’, the doctor replied. Lee broke down in tears - her mother, Goh Kim Kat, was the foundation of their, family.	Informing act: Reading aloud
3			What is the meaning of ‘ cracked ’?	Eliciting act: Checking eliciting
4	Ss	A few raise hands		Bidding act: Solicited bidding
5	T		I believe it is on the number 14 of your vocabulary list, cracked .	Informing act: Commenting
6		Writes on the board	S1?	Nominating act: Nominating
7	S1		A sudden change in vocal pitch.	Replying act: Relying

The teacher’s checking elicitations was predominantly low-level and close-ended types of questions which tended to elicit only short and fragmented student responses. Most elicitations are product ones which require the students to provide factual responses (Mehan, 1979). Second, the teacher’s multiple elicitations were quite prominent. In Episode 2, the teacher used multiple elicitations. The multiple elicitations were ambiguous and difficult to answer. They co-occurred with limited waiting time for the students’ responses. In response to the teacher’s multiple elicitations, students replied with a reply turn holding act and an explicit declined reply.

Episode 2 shows that the teacher failed to activate the students’ background knowledge on their experience with caring for a cancer-suffering patient and he eventually abandoned the multiple elicitations after three repeated attempts. In Episode 2, line 3, the teacher elicited from the students, ‘Who has a relative who has cancer?’ and ‘Who has died of cancer?’ Following the multiple elicitation, some students mumbled in line 4. The teacher gave limited waiting time for the students to reply, and initiated another multiple elicitation in line 6, ‘It is very painful, right? Do you want to describe your experience?’

The teacher’s multiple elicitation was ambiguous; it was unclear to the students if ‘your experience’ refers to ‘the experience of the caregiver or the patient’. It may be equally plausible that the students find this elicitation difficult to answer because of their limited social experience with caring for a cancer-suffering patient. Unfamiliarity with a topic of discussion that was distanced from students’ everyday lives is a factor which has resulted in less dialogic interaction among second language learners of English in Hong Kong (Luk and Lin, 2007). Even if the students possess the experience of caring for a cancer-suffering patient, it may not be easy for them to express their emotion on this sad topic. As a result, a student responded with a confusing marker ‘Huh’ in line 7. This confusing marker denotes two possible meanings; first, the student was signaling for further teacher’s clarification or second, the student rejected the elicitation implicitly as this question was difficult to answer. According to Malcolm (1979b), the function of this above speech act is known as reply turn holding; and it is used when the student is unable to give a reply to the elicitation. The teacher initiated another multiple elicitation in line 8, ‘Your feeling about this. Your friend’s suffering, your relative suffering’. This multiple elicitation changed from interrogatives to declaratives, despite having the same function. One student, S3, declined and called-out the reply this time with, ‘I don’t know’ in line 9. Instead of either rephrasing the elicitation or providing an example of what type of response the teacher had expected from the students, the teacher continued his multiple elicitations in line 11, ‘You have any close friends who have cancer? How was it like?’ The teacher again did not wait for the students to respond. The teacher then instantaneously abandoned his elicitations when he realized that his third attempt in getting the students to respond to his elicitations had failed. He quickly directed the students’ attention to another issue on the types of and treatment for cancer (from line 13 onwards) by using two informing acts. Table 6 shows an episode that illustrates the teacher’s multiple elicitations.

Table 6.

Episode 2 Illustrates the Teacher’s Multiple Elicitations.

Line	Speaker	Non-verbal	Verbal	Types
1	T		Let’s carry on from there.	Directing act: Marking boundary
2			‘As well, visitors can post questions, which are answered by experts in Singapore and overseas. CancerStory.com quickly became a hit. It has received about 33,000 visits from around the world, and has over 350 registered users from as far as France and South Africa. Cancer Story also has over 100 volunteers who help with fundraising. Lee has won praise from people struggling to come to terms with cancer. “This is a fantastic website”, Singapore resident Nora Ng wrote in the site’s guestbook. “It will definitely help many people to cope. I’m a cancer survivor and can understand the pain every cancer patient has to go through”.	Informing act: Reading aloud
3			Who has a relative who has cancer? Who has died of cancer?	Eliciting act: Multiple eliciting
4	Ss		(Inaudible mumbling)	Replying act: either Declined replying or Whispered replying
5	T	(1s)
6			It is very painful, right? Do you want to describe your experience?	Eliciting act: Multiple eliciting
7	S2		Huh?	Replying act: Reply turn holding
8	T		Your feelings about thisYour friend, suffering, whatever, your relative suffering.	Eliciting act: Multiple eliciting
9	S3		I don’t know.	Reply act:Declined replying
10	T	(1s)
11			You have any close friends who have cancer? How was it like?	Eliciting act: Multiple eliciting
12		(1s)
13			They have to undergo chemotherapy. That means you have to use some laser beam to kill the cancer cells. And people really have to suffer. You have to kill the cancer. By killing the cancer cells, our body is made up of cells, you know. A lot of cells. So all these cells huh that are not multiplying normally, they are called cancer cells. Some of them, they have, this thing. They called the benign tumour. You know what is malignant tumour? All these people who have cancer. They have two types. One is the benign. The other is malignant.	Informing act: Extending
14		Writes on the board	Ok. I don’t think you have to know all these terms, but basically, benign tumour, my mother has it a few years ago in her stomach, in her intestines, is a growth, you know. When you have cancer, the cells starts growing, so if you don’t remove the cells or tissue, that the tumour.	Informing act:Demonstrating
15			S1, are you with me?	Eliciting act:Checking reception
16			S2?	Eliciting act:Checking reception
17			Ya. Later on. ok. You can do it later.	Directing act:Directing
18			I just tell you the meaning. Benign means sleeping, not so dangerous. So you will remove the organ of the tissue. You will be saved. It is called benign tumour, ok. But this mother, I think this mother of this daughter have malignant tumour. This is the tumour cell that spreads all over the body in the bloodstream. You cannot normally cure them, even with chemotherapy. It will invade to other organs, you know and the person most likely will die. But for benign tumour, it is very safe.	Informing act:Extending

The Types of Teacher’s Acknowledgement Acts

The two common speech act functions which characterize the teacher’s acknowledgements (or feedback moves) were unqualified accepting or relaying and evaluating. This is shown in Episode 3, line 4, when S4 replied to the teacher’s elicitation of the meaning of inspirational, ‘Prompted thought’. The teacher’s acknowledgements consisted of an exact repetition of the student’s response, ‘Prompted thought’ in line 5, followed immediately by the teacher’s positive evaluation act, ‘Very good’ in line 6. Repeating the exact verbatim of the student’s utterance is known as unqualified accepting or relaying (Malcolm, 1979a, Malcolm, 1979b). Both unqualified accepting and relaying act entail no modification or extension from the teacher, with the latter possessing an added function of making the student’s response explicit through conveying it to the whole class what the teacher has just heard. Finally, the teacher terminated the discussion of the word with an informing act which entailed an extension of the teacher’s preceding utterance in line 7, ‘Like you have an inspirational hymn. You listen to some songs. They will inspire you’. Table 7 shows an episode that illustrates the teacher’s unqualified accepting or relaying which is followed by an evaluating act.

Table 7.

Episode 3 Illustrates the Teacher’s Unqualified Accepting or Relaying which is Followed by an Evaluating Act.

Line	Speaker	Non-verbal	Verbal	Types
1	T		How about ‘inspirational’?	Eliciting act: Checking eliciting
2	Ss	A few raise hands		Bidding act: Solicited bidding
3	T		S4	Nominating act: Nominating
4	S4		Prompted thought	Replying act: Replying
5	T		Prompted thought	Acknowledging act: Unqualified accepting or Relaying
6			Very good	Acknowledging act: Evaluating
7			Like you have an inspirational hymn. You listen to some songs. They will inspire you.	Informing act: Extending

In Episode 3, the teacher failed to guide students to elaborate on their preceding utterances with the use of unqualified accepting or relaying as acknowledgements. In addition, the positive evaluating act, together with an informing act, signaled a termination of the discussion of the word. Taken together, the turn-taking allocations, although systematic and well-managed, were rather rigid. The students were typically nominated to speak only after they had bid for their turns. They were expected to reply only after the teacher had questioned, without exceptions to these implicit rules.

In summary, there was hardly any negotiation of meaning of words in the reading comprehension lessons. The interactional patterns between the teacher and the students were static and conventional, with the teacher dominating the classroom discourse with his elicitation, acknowledgement, and informing acts. The students performed only the replying acts and their turns consisted of only a few words. In addition, there was no interaction among the students. Our results corroborate the more recent classroom discourse studies of Wolf, Crosson, and Resnick (2005), Molinari, Mameli, and Gnisci (2013), and Vaish (2008). Such a non-interactive environment was clearly not in line with the constructivist perspective of learning, adopted by Ruddell and Unrau (1994: 1042), ‘where the teacher creates an instructional environment in which the students are involved in active comprehension processes as they approach the text’. Ruddell and Unrau’s emphasis on meaningful dialogues and negotiated meanings is largely absent in the current reading comprehension practice. This lack of interactional opportunities for learners was attributed to the types of teacher’s elicitations and acknowledgements.

Conclusion

The aims of this study were to examine the classroom routine, and interactional patterns of Grade 5 English Language reading comprehension lessons through delineating the speech act functions of the classroom discourse based on Malcolm’s sociolinguistic model (Malcolm, 1979a; Malcolm, 1979b; Malcolm, 1982; Malcolm, 1986) and to investigate whether the current classroom discourse has met the four levels of vocabulary learning opportunities.

The classroom routine that characterizes our teacher-fronted reading comprehension lessons is as follows: teacher’s informing, teacher’s elicitation, children’s bidding, teacher’s nomination, children’s replying, teacher’s acknowledgement, and teacher’s informing. The classroom routine concurrently shows that the initiation, response, and feedback (IRF) was the predominant sequence in the observed lessons. The present study found that the teacher has achieved the first three levels of vocabulary learning opportunities that can be afforded through classroom discourse. The high frequency of the teacher’s inputs reflects that the teacher has effectively focussed the learners’ attention on the target words. The teacher’s inputs appeared in his eliciting, acknowledging, and informing acts. The low frequency of the students’ outputs suggests that their noticing of the target words might have been covert, instead of overt. The reason is because the learners were able to produce the meanings of those target words. In other words, the teacher was successful in eliciting the meaning of the target words from the students; and most successful elicitations took very few turns, i.e. between one and four turns. The unsuccessful attempts were limited; and when they occurred, they took elaborated turns, i.e. more than eight turns. Through a close examination of the types and characteristics of teacher’s discourse, we found that the teacher had failed to achieve the fourth level of vocabulary learning opportunities, that is, to provide interactional opportunities for the learners to process the target words. Our analysis shows there was hardly any negotiation of meanings which Long (1981; Long, 1996) proposed as critical for second language learning. In this study, the teacher elicited the instructional sequences with mostly checking elicitations and multiple elicitations. The elicitations which required the learners to produce factual responses were low-level and closed-ended questions. The multiple elicitations used were ambiguous and difficult to answer. Such multiple elicitations were followed by a lack of sufficient wait time for the students to reply.

We acknowledge some limitations of this small-scale and exploratory study. First, this study has adopted a qualitative single case study methodology. The analysis was based on a very small quantity of the classroom transcripts of the teacher’s fronted English language reading comprehension lessons. One of the inherent limitations of a single case study research lies in the challenge of generalizing the findings of a single case to the general population. Consequently, the results of this study might not represent Grade 5 English language reading comprehension lessons in Singapore. Instead of generalization of the sample to the wider population, our aim was to provide a descriptive account with an evaluative perspective of the current classroom interactional patterns (see Duff, 2012; Firestone, 1993). Second, this study has reported only observable behaviour (e.g. the teacher’s inputs, the students’ outputs and their retrieval of the meanings of the target words, and the interactional opportunities), but not the mental processes of vocabulary learning (e.g. silent rehearsal of words or meanings).

Notwithstanding the above limitations, the present study has contributed to the existing body of knowledge in classroom discourse analysis. The study has illustrated explicit vocabulary instructional discourse of a classroom teacher for English Language reading comprehension lessons in an elementary school in Singapore. Through delineating the speech act functions of the teacher and students based on Malcolm’s sociolinguistic framework (Malcolm, 1979a; Malcolm, 1979b; Malcolm, 1982; Malcolm,1986), this study has revealed the predominant classroom routine and interactional patterns of the lessons. It has further identified the common types of the teacher’s eliciting and acknowledging acts. Without due attention to the nature and functions of talk, one cannot understand the complexities of classroom discourse (Mercer, 2010). It has further shed light on whether the instructional discourse has provided the learners with opportunities in vocabulary learning. We stress that the results of this study point to evidence of vocabulary learning opportunities afforded through the discourse, and might not necessarily be vocabulary learning. Even so, this is a useful focus, given that researchers and educators are seeking evidence of classroom discourse in facilitating learning and such evidence, that would better inform classroom practices and policies, is presently scarce.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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