Classroom Interactional Competence of Young Learners with Story-Based Lessons in an EFL Context

Abstract

Making use of the methodological framework of conversation analysis, the present study aims to investigate story-based classroom discourse with young learners of English in an EFL context. The data were collected from a private IB school following the Primary Years Programme (PYP) curriculum. The participants were 24 young learners who were under the age of 6 and two teachers. To present the interactional organisation of the classroom interaction, 16 hours of story-based lessons in two kindergarten classrooms were audio-recorded and transcribed in detail. The data was analysed from a discourse-analytic perspective. Although the study had hypothesised that learner initiatives would be more frequent in the post-story stages, the findings showed that the pre-story stages created more engaging learning environments. Based on the findings, the implications were provided for EFL classrooms as well as suggestions for further research.