Abstract
Abstract Real-time verbal interactions between foreign language teachers and their students are of vital importance for language development, but classroom interactions are also multi-faceted and complex. The way a teacher understands and responds to learner utterances can be a powerful pedagogical strategy to scaffold learner language development. In this paper we present the Questions and Answers in English Language Teaching coding scheme which can be used to observe and describe the dynamics of teacher questions and student responses in language classrooms. We piloted the instrument in English as a foreign language lessons of four experienced teachers teaching 16 lessons in total. State Space Grids were used to visualize classroom dynamics and quantify intra-individual variability of each lesson. The results show that interactions between teachers and students have the tendency to self-organize and stabilize in one specific area of the grid. Lessons taught by three of the teachers revealed a dominant pattern formed by closed questions and short student responses. One teacher taught lessons in which more complex question and answer sequences were prevalent. These patterns of variability and stability show that teacher-student interactions have the properties of a shallow attractor state. The analysis of moment-to-moment turns in classroom interaction indicate that students in this study generally adapt their response to the level of teacher questions, but that teachers do not seem to adapt their questions to the level of the previous student answer. This suggests that, even for experienced teachers, scaffolding and adaptive teaching might be easier said than done.
Highlights
In a globalized world in which English is used as a lingua franca and digital out-ofschool exposure to this language is virtually everywhere, language teachers are facing several challenges (The Douglas Fir Group 2016)
The horizontal axis shows the level of teacher questions; the vertical axis shows the level of Figure 2 shows a lesson taught by Doris
We have presented a complex dynamic system method for analyzing teacherstudent interactions on the micro timescale of the language lesson
Summary
In a globalized world in which English is used as a lingua franca and digital out-ofschool exposure to this language is virtually everywhere, language teachers are facing several challenges (The Douglas Fir Group 2016). Opportunities for rich and meaningful classroom interaction are essential elements in a language lesson This includes frequent student participation and shared meaning-making (Gao 2019; Lyster and Saito 2010). The way teacher and learners respond to each other and the way this varies or stabilizes during the learning process is called co-adaptation (Larsen-Freeman and Cameron 2008; van Geert and Steenbeek 2005a). Understanding the characteristics of co-adaptation is important in the process of shared meaning-making at an appropriate level of challenge (Larsen-Freeman and Cameron 2008; van de Pol et al 2010; Wood et al 1976)
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