I have always wondered if I give my students enough opportunity to talk during my classes. I have a feeling that sometimes I speak too much myself, interrupt them for various reasons such as their being too slow or using wrong words or making mistakes. While correcting their mistakes or helping them with the right words I take initiative and start talking myself, thus not giving them a chance to practice the target language and making them passive listeners. I feel that if I don’t interrupt them while they talk and leave some mistakes unnoticed, they will be more motivated and use the target language to a greater extent. I decided to measure the proportion of my participation in conversations with my students against their participation and to analyze the reasons for my talking in order to see if I could reduce my part in the conversation and let my students talk more.
настроение: researching
ключевые слова: interaction pattern, giving opinion, explaining new material, helping with the right expressions, correcting mistakes, providing a model for language, evaluating, individual work, collaboration, group work, self-assessment
город: Samara
My target group comprised Business English students whom I taught at the Institute of Continuing Education for Teachers in Samara, Russia. The students were 15-17 years old. They went to different schools and took BE as an extra-curriculum class. They wanted to improve their English and explore the business side of the language. They are low-intermediate students and are highly motivated. We meet twice a week. As a course book we use Business Objectives published by Oxford University Press. We also use audio-visual aids during most of my classes.
I started my action research by searching published materials for what is considered to be the ideal proportion of Student/Teacher talk time. Russian methodologists (A. A. Mirolubov of the Moscow State Pedagogical University and L. N. Filimonova of the Samara State Pedagogical University) believed that the ideal conversation time split between the teacher and students was 20 % for the teachers to 80 % for students.