Teachers’ Understanding-Check Practices and Learners’ Following Orientations in EFL Classroom Interaction: A Conversation Analytic Study

Abstract

Classroom discourse is typically dominated by question and answer routines in which teachers ask most of the questions, a practice constituting one of the principal ways in which they control the discourse and push learners to contribute to classroom interaction (Brock, 1986; Walsh, 2006). Most of previous research on teachers’ questions mainly focused on identifying and discovering different question types which believed to be helpful in creating the opportunities for learners’ interactions. Drawing on conversation analysis through adopting socio-cultural perspective, this study, however, aims to examine how EFL learners orient to the teachers’ understanding-check questions in three sequential contexts (activity-boundary, post instruction and within-activity) which emerged in this study. Informed by the tenets of conversation analysis, we have observed, videotaped, and transcribed line-by-line 6 EFL teachers’ naturally-occurring classroom interaction. Analyses of 8 episodes from the data suggest that learners seemingly orient to the understanding-check questions used by their teachers as preferring no-problem, which is marked in their orientations to show no-problem responses in the preferred format and yesproblem responses in the dispreferred format. The findings of this study have implications for teacher education.