A Functional Analysis of Teacher Talk in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom at Al-Asmariya University

Abstract

This study is conducted to concentrate on the analysis of classroom discourse, specifically, teaches talk in the EFL classroom at Al-Asmariya Islamic University, Zliten. It attempts to realize the interpersonal meaning built in the male and female teachers' interaction in the classroom, and the difference between the male and female roles based on the interactional MOOD ANALYSIS of Systemic Functional Grammar model which is presented by Halliday (1985, 1994, 2004 & 2014). In this study, discourse analysis and descriptive-qualitative textual analysis are applied as research methods. The data were collected through the method of observations by recording the conversation between the teachers and the students during the lectures. Questionnaire is used in the study to collect more data and support analysis. The utterances of the spoken language collected were analysed within the concept of SFG. The analysis was performed on the Mood structure of the clause in order to realize the interpersonal meaning constructed in the interaction. (Bloor and Bloor, 2013) clarifythat Functional Grammar is the study of how meanings are built up through the choices of words and other grammatical structures. The study resulted in that the speech functions had been used differently by the male and female teachers to create the interpersonal metafunction in their interaction with the students. The female teacher tended to apply interrogative clauses of Mood dominantly while the male teacher used declarative clauses mostly. Therefore, they play different roles in the teaching process.