THE IRF EXCHANGE AS A PEDAGOGICAL TOOL: A STUDY OF ESL CLASSROOMS IN POKUASE TOWNSHIP, GHANA

Abstract

<p>The classroom is a place where teachers and their pupils or students engage in interaction in order to promote effective learning. Such interactions can follow different patterns, and one such pattern is the IRF (initiation-response-feedback) exchange structure, developed by Sinclair and Coulthard (1975, 1992). This study examines the use of the IRF exchange pattern as a pedagogical tool in the English language classrooms of some Basic Schools in Pokuase, a town in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana. It investigates the way teachers and pupils initiate, respond to, and provide feedback for effective language acquisition. In order to achieve this objective, a qualitative case study was adopted to analyze 11 hours and 40 minutes of classroom recordings and 100 minutes of interview data. Results regarding the IRF structure show that the various acts within the initiation move included nomination, directing, and prompting; the acts in the response move were replying and reacting, while the acts within the feedback move were acceptance, praise, criticism, and expansion. This result is an indication that there were more initiation and feedback acts than response acts, suggesting the teachers dominated the use of the exchange pattern, leaving the pupils to only provide responses. Results of the teachers’ role indicate that they are engaging in teacher talk as a way of providing explanation, organizing the lesson, and redirecting learners in the interaction. The teachers also provided prompt guidelines by creating conducive environment for the learners to be able to write, read, also provided specific and individual feedback to either correct learners’ language input or to encourage them to learn more. Based on the results, it is argued that teachers, especially at the basic level, should endeavour to employ the use of the IRF pattern because it has the potential to contribute a great deal to ESL teaching and learning.</p><p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0845/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>