A dynamic systems approach to wait time in the second language classroom

Jim King,Lesley Smith

doi:10.1016/j.system.2017.05.005

Abstract

This study discusses how wait time—the silent pause after a teacher elicits a student response—alters classroom discourse. Previous wait time research suggests overall positive changes in both teacher and student discourse where wait time is over 1 s. However, such studies are primarily structuralist in nature and tend to reduce the intricacy of classroom behavior to distinct variables, which can be easily altered to achieve a desired result. The data presented here comes from a series of structured observations of a UK university postgraduate L2 classroom. The findings were as follows: 1) Wait time played an intricate role in determining classroom discourse patterns and heavily favored an IRF turn-taking sequence; 2) student-initiated discourse was low in all observations and favored higher proficiency students; 3) the length of individual student-initiated turns appears to have been more important than the overall number of student-initiated turns in determining the quality of classroom discourse and was not directly related to changes in wait time length; 4) extended wait time (over 2 s in length) temporarily shifted discourse out of an IRF pattern and into a new, more student-driven phase. While previously thought of as only a pedagogical tool to increase student speech, wait time is shown to be a phenomenon which develops and changes with the composite forces that affect other aspects of classroom discourse.

Highlights

1.1 Introducing Wait TimeRecently, educational researchers have begun to extensively study silences and pauses in the language classroom to determine their significance within classroom discourse and to improve teacher/student perceptions of these gaps in spoken discourse (Harumi, 2011; King, 2013; Nakane, 2007, Yashima, Ikeda and Nakahira, 2015)
This study examines how wait time functions within the complex dynamic system of classroom discourse and how its variation is related to various occurrences of speech found therein
Quantitative analysis focused on the relationship between wait time and student response length, where n represents the number of wait time and corresponding response samples in the data set

Summary

Introduction

1.1 Introducing Wait TimeRecently, educational researchers have begun to extensively study silences and pauses in the language classroom to determine their significance within classroom discourse and to improve teacher/student perceptions of these gaps in spoken discourse (Harumi, 2011; King, 2013; Nakane, 2007, Yashima, Ikeda and Nakahira, 2015). Some researchers have found wait time to be a conscious product of discomfort with classroom silence, yet for others it is an unconscious and unnoticed pausing behavior after eliciting a response (Honea, 1982; Swift and Gooding, 1983). Most contemporary research referentially mentions wait time within larger classroom discourse processes, noting that its manipulation is an important pedagogical technique, but at times overlooking contextual classroom differences that may influence the various effects (both positive and negative) of lengthened teacher pauses (Ingram and Elliott, 2014; Kirton, Hallam, Peffers, Robertson, and Gordon, 2007). If wait time is related to improved classroom discourse, it seems that teachers would benefit students by making a conscious effort to lengthen these pauses

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion