Before the start of this last Spring semester at Le Jardin Academy, where I currently teach IB Mandarin grades 9-12, I wanted to increase my L2 usage for giving classroom directions. I tried my best to remember directions I was routinely providing in English. I typed up a quick list, and created new wall signs in Mandarin to print out and post up. I replaced nearly all of my previous wall signs. The image here is a photo of from that new change, showing only a small fraction of the new signs. As the Spring semester came to a close, I reflected on which signs I used frequently (pointing to the sign while saying the direction in Mandarin Chinese), which directions I used only sparingly, and which I (almost) never used. I pulled down every sign and began a new summer project, to systematically list all segments of our lessons in sequence, and, from those lesson segments, create classroom directions. I did this all in English so the document could be used as a resource for teachers of any language to adapt. As I started working on this new list of classroom directions, I became curious about how much and how complex a teacher's L2 usage might be when directing students in L2 classrooms. Teacher directions can help L2 development by providing high and sustained frequency in the input--we give similar directions in every lesson, across every day, every semester, and every year. Classroom directions create and sustain the classroom context, and so are needed regardless of what language we use to deliver them. I used the MindNode app (link) to list an idealized sequence of what we (teacher and students) do in and around one typical language class meeting. I started with main segments (welcome, whole class work, small-group work, breaks, and more), and filled in each main segment with smaller events (agenda, warm-up, etc.). Then I imagined directions teachers might say for each smaller event ("This needs to be finished today", "Let's read this question together," and more). During the writing of all lesson events and teacher directions, I focused as best I could on my sense of what I as a teacher would say in each situation, or what I have typically seen other teachers say in classrooms (L2, content courses, various age groups). I did not check across sentences to ensure any special type of words or grammar were being used, and my attention was mainly on communicative intent. My only attention to form was on being understandable to students. I was curious about frequencies of usage of words, but I did not perform any edits to specifically affect frequencies of usage of words. Any such influence would be unintended and outside my awareness. I exported the completed file from MindNode into PDF format (attached below). Inside the PDF version, I highlighted each unique verb--regardless of inflection/conjugation, and I inserted a list of all verbs highlighted into the upper right corner, numbered, alphabetized, and in bare verb form. What did I find? First, classroom directions, even when kept short as I designed them here, can be highly varied and abundant, due to their need across many segments of a lesson. I counted 53 unique verbs. Nearly all were generally useful (ask, be, bring, cause, check, choose, come, etc.). Only 8 out of the 37 directions (21.6%) in the "small group work" context were distinctive to that context, meaning students will likely observe 78% of the verbs from directions for small group work in the other classroom sub-contexts (whole class work, breaks, release, etc.), so, directions for small-group work will not add much in terms of unique verbs for input. Future empirical work could look at real data (recordings, transcriptions) collected from L2 classrooms of an immersive type, where teachers are mainly using the L2 to give directions.
Further reading on the topic of institutional language usage in interaction (Heritage & Clayman, 2010) and L2 classroom language usage in particular (Kunitz, Markee, & Sert, 2021), below: Heritage, J., & Clayman, S. (2010). Talk in Action: Interactions, Identities, and Institutions (Vol. 44). John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444318135 Kunitz, S., Markee, N., & Sert, O. (2021). Classroom-based Conversation Analytic Research: Theoretical and Applied Perspectives on Pedagogy (1st ed. 2021, Vol. 46). Springer Nature. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52193-6
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Reed Riggs (Author)I hold a Ph.D. from the University of Hawai‘i. My research looks at entrenchment, frequency effects, and salience along with interactional behaviors from Usage-based Linguistics (UBL) and Conversation Analytic (CA) perspectives. Archives
June 2023
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