BurbanoJaimeArturo2015

Transcription

THE IMPLICATIONS OF UNCONVENTIONAL INTERACTIONAL EXCHANGES
IN AN EFL COURSE
A CLASSROOM-ETHNOGRAPHY DISCOURSE ANALYSIS STUDY
Jaime Arturo Burbano
UNIVERSIDAD DISTRITAL FRANCISCO JOSÉ DE CALDAS
FACULTAD DE CIENCIAS Y EDUCACIÓN
M.A. IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS FOR THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH
2015
THE IMPLICATIONS OF UNCONVENTIONAL INTERACTIONAL EXCHANGES IN AN
EFL COURSE.
EFL COURSE.
A CLASSROOM-ETHNOGRAPHY DISCOURSE ANALYSIS STUDY
THESIS DIRECTOR: Alberto Abouchaar Ph. D.
THESIS SUBMITTED AS A REQUIREMENT TO OBTAIN THE DEGREE OF M.A. IN
APPLIED LINGUISTICS TO TEFL
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EFL COURSE.
ACUERDO 19 DE 1998
Artículo 177: “La Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas no será responsable de las
ideas expuestas por los graduandos en este trabajo”
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Note of Acceptance
________________________________
Alberto Abouchaar Ph. D
THESIS DIRECTOR
_________________________________
Professor Edgar Lucero M.A.
JUROR 1
__________________________________
Professor Álvaro Quintero Ph. D
JUROR 2
DATE: ___________________________
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the source of all that there is and will always be, for guiding me
through such an amazing and challenging experience. I would like to thank the almighty for
having given me the strength, which was required to climb when there was no other choice but
fail.
To my family, watching me fight, supporting my battles and healing my wounds. To the superb
and relentless encouragement that I received from my beloved woman: Angélica. I am at this
point, writing these words, making this possible because of their unconditional support.
I would also like to thank Dr. Harold Castañeda-Peña for all his advice, his guidance and
encouragement to make the most out of my potential.
To my thesis advisor, Doctor Alberto Abouchaar who extended his advice beyond the realm of
being an advisor. He was the source of wisdom I needed to grow in my core and my intelligence
as a human being and a professional teacher.
To my jurors professor Edgar Lucero and Álvaro Quintero. Ph. D. because without their wise
suggestions, this paper would not have been finished and refined.
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Contents
Chapter
Abstract
Introduction & Rationale………..…….………………...…………………………………......14
Statement
of
the
problem…...………………….……………………………………………….18
State
of
the
art……………………………………………………………………………...……30
Authentic interaction in the language classroom……………………………………..………32
Classroom
conversational
negotiation…………………………………………………………32
Off-task
interaction
and
the
use
of
L1
in
local
contexts……………………………………....33
Literature Review ………………………………………………………....…………………...
33
6
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The
use
of
L1
in
the
L2
classroom
at
ILUD……………………………………………………33
Interaction and discourse………………………………………………………………………
34
Students’
participation
and
“off
the
radar”
interactions……………………………………..35
The
role
of
improvisation
in
interaction
and
discourse……………………………………….36
Communicative competence and interaction………………………………………………..38
Interactionism:
the
cognitive
perspective……………………………………………………...38
Interaction
as
a
holistic
competence……………………………………………………………39
The importance of context in interaction……………………………………………………..39
Contextual language use…………………………………………………………………….….40
Meaning negotiation and the concept of unconventional exchanges……………………….41
Code
switching
in
interactions…………………………………………………..41
the
observed
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The
pragmatic
and
paralinguistic
dimensions
of
interaction…………………………………42
The
interaction
engine…………………………………………………………………………..43
Interaction
as
a
living
thing
created
in-
situ……………………………………………………45
Research Design……………...………………………………………………………………....47
Type
of
study
and
methodology….……………………………..………………………………47
Research
context
and
participants……………………….…………………………………….48
Population…………………………………………….……………………………..…………..50
Instruments……………………………………………………………………….……………..51
Field Notes and Post- Facto Notes…………………………………………..……………..…51
Transcriptions
of
audio
and
video
recordings….…………………….…………………….….52
The
researcher’s
role………………………………………………………………………...….53
Data Analysis................................................................................................................................54
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The Initiation-Response-Evaluation Model and unconventional exchanges…………….….54
Unconventional
exchanges…………………………………………………………………..….55
Methodology………………………………………………………………………………….…56
Data analysis procedure………………………………………………………………….….…57
Evidences of the emergence of the unconventional exchanges found……………………….59
Students’ Ways….……………...……………………………………………………..………61
Unit
of
Analysis………………………...…………………………………………………..……62
Unconventional interactional abilities to generate effective communication processes…....64
Using
humor
within
exchanges…………………………………………………………..……..64
Contribution of the pattern to classroom interaction and language learning………………69
Getting
involved
in
the
class
dynamics
by
using
code
switching…….…………….......……...73
Using
slangs
to
…………………………..……….…………………83
facilitate
communication
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Conclusions……………………………………...…………………...…………………………96
Assimilation………………………………………………………………………………….101
Paralinguistic colloquialism………………………………………………………………….101
Humorous language choices…………………………………….…………………………….101
References…………………………………..…………..…………………………………....104
Charts
Table
Table 1: Data Collection Instruments and Usage: Explanation……….…….…..…..… 63
Table 2. Data analysis. Using humor within exchanges………...................................65-68
Table 3. Data analysis. Getting involved in the class dynamics by using
L1:……………………………………………………………………………….…….…73-77
Table 4. Data analysis. Becoming aware of transactional discursive devices in the
classroom……………………………………………………………………..….86-89
Diagrams
Number One. Data analysis. Unconventional exchanges in the classroom interactions
analyzed………………………………………………………………………………………....
60
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Annexes
Annex One. Field Notes: Problem Statement. Sample ……………………………………114
Annex Two. Audio Recording. Transcription sample. ………………………………115-128
Annex Three. Video recording. Transcription sample. ……………………………...…129132
Annex Four. Memos. Sample. ……………………………………………………………...133
Annex Five. Field Notes. Sample……..……………………………………..………....134-135
Annex Six. Consent Form. ILUD……….…….………………………………………….136
Annex Seven. Consent Form. Students…………….…………………………….……137-138
Annex Eight. Consent Form. Teacher…………..………..……………………………….139
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Abstract
This project sought to address a learning environment at a language institute in Bogota by
analyzing interaction in the unconventional exchanges that emerged within the development of
speaking activities. Through the observation of classes of a basic level by exploring interaction
using the tradition of classroom ethnography. This Project looked into the learning environment
of a language class at the Instituto de Lenguas de la Universidad Distrital (Hereafter ILUD). It
analysed naturalistic data of unconventional interaction exchanges emerging during speaking
activities through field notes, post-facto notes, audio and video – recordings of students’ based
responses. Interpretations of discursive elements were coded with parameters taken from
classroom ethnography and grounded theory. The main interactional pattern found described
unconventional interactional abilities to generate effective communication processes. Three areas
for description emerged: 1. Using humor within exchanges, 2. Code – switching for classroom
involvement, 3. Using slangs to facilitate communication. The analysis unveiled unconventional
exchanges as moments that facilitate and are preparatory for language learning. A constant
process of reflection upon behavior and interaction, based partly on the grounded theory,
directed the interest towards the moments in which unconventional, unexpected exchanges
emerged, to see how they contributed to the language learning process. Educative researchers
may find here a relevant educative issue to address because unconventional exchanges and their
exploration move along the pragmatic, sociolinguistic and cultural aspects created in language
learning classrooms.
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KEY WORDS: Unconventional exchanges in language learning, interaction, pragmatics in
language learning, sociolinguistics in language learning, culture and the EFL classroom.
Introduction & Rationale
There has been an extensive research interest in the field of language education, upon the
topic of classroom interaction. Among others, we can find interesting topics such as the
following: meaning negotiation, classroom discourse, paralinguistic devices created within
classroom discourses, power relationships, semiotics of the classroom, and teacher-student
relationships. These have displayed the importance of discourse and the way its impact within
the walls of a classroom once a lesson starts. Discourses, above all, create learning dynamics
within given courses in English as a foreign language (Hereafter EFL) learning. As stated by
Hall (2001) classroom discourse is the oral interaction that occurs between teachers and students,
and among students in classrooms. Such interaction, when observed in oral tasks, moves along
different lines or fluxes that go from the planned activity and planned language into the domains
of the unplanned and unconventional. The discourses created within this dynamic pertain to
research fields that move along ideology, cultural backgrounds, identity, power-relationships,
and factors aimed to the understanding of language use. However, by highlighting the
importance of discourse analysis, this project sought to focus its discussion on the possible
contributions that unconventional exchanges may bring into the learning of a foreign language.
This project aimed to analyze discourse through a rather intrusive approach, as participants
agreed to have their everyday conversations in the classroom recorded. To this respect, Poole (In
Kaplan 2012) affirms that in spoken language instruction, there are inherent differences that
characterize authentic language. This, at the same time, represents the tension between the goals
of instruction and the authentic interactional environment of the classroom. She states that
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discourse analysis in the classroom hast the capacity to address this tension by revealing how
communicative tasks affect interaction, and how authentic contexts reveal authentic interaction.
Having analyzed the theoretical trend on interaction, I developed a research study about
unconventional types of interaction. Such interactions use discursive devices that did not belong
to what was expected from the official curriculum and the teacher. A tension between the
imperatives of the official curriculum and the demands of the practical became apparent.
Formality in the practice needed to be broken at times, and students kept using language in a
deliberate way, in their own terms. This problematic situation emerged from a process of
classroom observation to an EFL course of young adults at ILUD.
ILUD is a 10 year- language institute located in Bogota. Through the years, its name has
gained importance in the teaching of foreign languages such as French, Portuguese, Italian,
German, and predominantly: English. The Institute originally started in one building that served
as the main center of language studies. However, with the increase of population that Bogota has
experienced through the last ten years, the Institute had to ask for other spaces due to the demand
of people who want to learn a foreign language, especially English (ILUD’s Program, 2014).
With the time, ILUD had to look for new venues and spaces for their language courses. Currently
ILUD offers language courses in different shifts to which people can enroll without any
affiliation to Universidad Distrital. It provides multimedia resources in three of its branches,
where students can develop autonomous work, helped by the monitors who are commonly
students from ninth or tenth semester from the undergraduate program of Universidad Distrital.
ILUD helps students and work staff from the university to have access to the courses at a lower
price. It offers free workshops to the students as speaking clubs to which students can attend
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freely, as long as they belong to an advanced course. Such free workshops are in English and are
included in the price students pay for their course.
This study located its scope within the research domains of the Masters of Arts Program
in Applied Linguistics to TEFL at Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas. Bygate (2012.
In: Kaplan, 2012) advocates the understanding of the psycholinguistic and interpersonal factors
of speech production, the forms, meanings, and processes involved, and how these can be
developed. The second domain is that of Discourse Analysis and Classroom Interaction. As
established, the interest of the project moves along the unconventional, to which Poole (2012. In:
Kaplan, 2012) states that in spoken language instruction, however, inherent differences
characterize the authentic language representing the goals of instruction and the authentic
interactional environment of the classroom.
Classroom Discourse and Interaction
The analysis of classroom discourse had the potential to address the abovementioned
tension (i.e. the tension between the expectancy from the curriculum, the textbook, and the
teacher in the spoken outcomes, against the actual outcomes, their variations and unconventional
forms of speaking that emerged as a result of a given activity) by exploring how communicative
tasks affected interaction and, in turn, how such interaction compared with traditional language
learning activities to more authentic contexts beyond the classroom. Hall (2001) highlights the
importance of classroom discourse by acknowledging the importance of the patterns of
interaction through which learning occurs. She states participation of learners in classroom
activities as having a direct incidence on interaction, and therefore, it is vital for the learning
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process not only in the event under analysis, but having incidences in their future educational
events.
The main interest for this research project was what I called Unconventional
interactional exchanges. An unconventional exchange is a type of response that is informal,
unexpected as well as non-official. It is informal, because of the degree of colloquialism used,
and because of the attempt of the user of such exchange to familiarize the concept with terms
that he/she has a clearer comprehension. It is unexpected, because it is a response that implies a
variation in the flux of a conversation that can either stop it, or demand a similar response in
return in order to continue. It is non-official because the possibilities of response that are present
in the textbook, and the possibilities the teacher gives, both pertain to formal levels of language
that generate familiarity to the formal domains of language interaction The latter are the reasons
why this project attempted to analyze the different unconventional interactions that can foster
language apart from the ones present in the official curriculum and the textbook: because it
becomes a sociolinguistic and pragmatic phenomenon outside of the official curriculum that can
constitute a contribution to EFL learning. Regarding interaction and the topic of meaning
negotiation, the third domain for the project, Gass (2012. In Kaplan: 2012) states that the learner
directs attention to areas of L2 about which she or he may not have clear information, and
formulates hypotheses to discover the meanings for the information that is required. This is not
to say that learning necessarily takes place during a conversation; the interaction itself may only
be the first step in recognizing that there is something to learn.
Language institutions and schools of languages in curriculum development can also
become interested in the creation of more authentic interactional practices for both teachers and
students. However, such interest requires an on-going process of reflection if we want to
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understand the complexity of the classroom as a space for language learning. At the end of the
day, the intention of this project is to analyze interaction and promote a starting point of debate
and research that may capture attention in the applied linguistics beyond the scope of a mere
typology that may be portrayed as a result of the analysis of unconventional exchanges.
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Statement of the Problem
The group selected for the purposes of this study, consisted on a group of EFL students
whose ages range from 18 to 25 years old. The teacher of this group comes from the pacific
region of Colombia (Chocó-Quibdó) and he is part of the observation in this study. I included his
directives and methodology in the overall analysis. This project attempts to analyze the different
unconventional interactions that can foster language apart from the ones given by the official
curriculum and the textbook. It seeks to describe how these “moments” within the class happen,
what is fostered through them, and what are the possible implications that unconventional (i.e.
not planned, out of the teacher’s radar, improvised, colloquial, humorous, among others)
exchanges have both linguistically and in the learning process.
Within unconventional exchanges, we will find examples of Spanglish, spontaneous
interactions, jokes, colloquialisms, slangs, harsh language, among others. Students at way stage,
or elementary level (Hereafter A2), according to the Common European Framework of
Reference for languages: learning, teaching, assessment (Hereafter CEFR) see language and
learn it from a perspective of interaction that is often linked to mother tongue (Hereafter L1),
which may provide space for the unconventional exchanges to make part of the interaction. This
necessity to familiarize L1 with the target language is an interesting object of analysis in research
by theorists like Cook (1992) on her notion of multicompetence, Anton & DiCamilla (1998) and
their analysis of language development among beginning-level adult learners of Spanish. Their
research contributes in the understanding of such dynamics as collaboration gained through a
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collective attention that was only possible by means of the use of L1. They establish there is a
bridge between the two systems, and they affect each other as the process of learning occurs.
Even though target language (Hereafter L2) hast its explanation from a formal perspective given
by the teacher, the textbook, and the development of the curriculum. Students’ level is Basic 1
and 2, according to ILUD’s placement. It attempts to move students into level B1 of proficiency,
according to the CEFR. During the development of this course, I could observe that interaction
not always unveiled in terms of grammatical, structural content, after an explanation. Being this
the case, students made sense of what they had to do in a given activity, by means of interpreting
and re-interpreting what the exercise was about. The tool they used for such interpretation was
code switching, and L1 became their major referent. Inside these observed moments in
interaction, language input and interaction collaborated to construct meaning in ways that did not
follow an expected line of development. Students and teacher used diversions of language that
took the form of joking, teasing, body language, and others, that emerged as a result of a
controlled-practice activity.
Higareda et al (2013) states that there is still a deliberate use of L1 as a fact that occurs as
a random event that could be used and justified as a pedagogical tool that is not only used for
transactional reasons. Research has shown repeatedly how the use of L1, apart from being
deliberate, is necessary for students to contrast and support their learning, as stated by Anton and
Di Camilla (1998) who also conclude that in addition to helping students access particular forms
in L2, their use of L1 helped them to maintain a shared understanding of the task. In the case of
this project, I wanted to focus my attention on the natural exchanges that happened as a result of
a task. We can say that transactions in L1 such as colloquial expressions, happen spontaneously
and as a result of the task itself, and there is a necessity to observe how to react to them from an
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academic point of view. In this process, I became an observer, an active note-taker who enjoyed
his role as a “silent analyzer”. The nature of the ethnographic perspective is present in the study
due to the fact that a constant process of observations of the participants was systematically
elaborated. I documented their interactions, their reactions, and the creation of dynamics that
belonged to the culture of the classroom, which was unique to this specific group.
The systematic observation that I was following reminded me of my days in the
undergraduate program, when I was an observer of methodology classes, which attempted to
explain the main approaches for the teaching of English. ILUD’s program contained one of
these: the communicative language teaching approach. The well-known communicative
approach as explained in Hall (2001), proposes communication as the primary goal of additional
language learning, and validates communication as the foundation upon which every teacher
should attempt to approach the classroom, methodologically speaking. Upon this criterion, Hall
(2001) states that our communicative activity does not entail the spontaneous, unpredictable
expression of ideas. She states that much of the language we use is conventionalized, tied to the
contexts in which it is used. Being a teacher for the institute and part of their team, I wanted to
contrast if there was a concordance between what the methodological approach described, and
the practices in the classroom, and see how these practices permeated interaction. One of the first
finding I could obtain from my observations, was the fact that the lines that describe the
communicative approach are now a blurred construct among the community of teachers, as
everyone seems to have their own view of what the learning of a language from this perspective
means. As I observed Will (The pseudonym for the teacher of my sample) I realized he had his
own interpretations on what was a “good” learning environment, including the description of
what a “good” learner was.
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Hall (2001) explains that, when we approach communicative activities, the goals, our
social roles, and the uses and interpretations of the language we use are familiar to us. The
context of EFL under analysis revealed the tendency to move interaction in two moments. The
first one being the interpretation of the communicative event, and the second one, being the
deliberate development of such event within the scope of familiarity, demonstrated through
linguistic resources that had a shared nature among participants. Reflecting upon these ideas,
taken from some general observations during the first week, I continued my inquiry by designing
an open questionnaire which contained ten questions about the learning of English, the
expectations on the teacher, and the expectations of the group in their new course. After doing
this, I started looking for some sort of repetitive responses, and I could find that out of 15
students, their answers looked very similar in what they expected. Students claimed, as seen in
the following excerpt (See: Annex 1), that they liked the English class better when the students
and the teacher were involved in different interactions during the development of a class:





Un momento donde se puede aprender inglés interactuando.
Que el idioma se convierta no en algo fácil pero si divertido, amoroso comprensible.
Que siempre esté en disposición, lúdica y didáctica, dinámica, de fácil aprensión.
La socialización y participación divertida, entendible.
Total conocimiento, paciencia, que explique en Español lo que habla en inglés.
Excerpt. August 2014. Key Words from Students Questionnaire.
“The English Class” as the main communicative event to be analyzed, had now
complemented itself with important cues given by the students. As already mentioned, the
understanding of such hints in the teaching practice is crucial. This understanding can generate
engagement and elaboration of speech acts within the framework of the development of the tasks
given in a class, which are key aspects for understanding interaction especially when the
unconventional emerges as a result of a task given. Within the framework of the communicative
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approach, interaction is mainly a means for transactional information, which replicates as a sort
of audio-lingual methodology, where the linguistic aspect is the most important. Considering
this, I found there was a mismatch from the theory from a communicative perspective and all the
dynamics that are present in authentic classroom interaction. Such competences, described in
Van Ek’s model: linguistic, sociolinguistic, discourse, strategic, socio-cultural, and social
competence are factors that even though teachers recognize as part of the learning process,
depend on their subjective interpretation of the communicative approach.
Having the latter reflections in mind, I kept analyzing the program. According to the
documents, this institution expected teachers to foster the use of interaction in such a way that
enhanced substantial practice, and this implied communicative activities that were useful and
relevant for students (Programa ILUD, 2014). In the evaluative form that the institute provided,
interaction was the type of treatment a student should display with his or her teachers, as an
isolated item of the qualitative assessment that is described as follows:
INTERACCIÓN: El estudiante mantiene un trato cordial y respetuoso con el profesor y
sus compañeros
Formato de Evaluación de Progreso, ILUD, 2014
I found that there was a gap between what the proposal of the program conveyed, and
what the term interaction really was in terms of the students’ communicative development and
classroom discourse in general. This finding would help me locate the problematic situation
within such gap. Even though the intention of the project was not to actually fill in this gap, it
was the place where the lack of understanding was.
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ILUD’s objective upon interaction in classes had the following description:
To foster the use of interaction in which spaces of substantial practice is present, so that
the communicative activities learned can result useful for students.
ILUD. Course Program. Author’s Translation. (2014).
The course under analysis uses a series of textbooks that guides students to achieve level
B1 of proficiency, according to the Common European Framework. The name of the textbook is:
Total English. Crace & Acklam (2011) Regarding speaking, the introduction of the textbook in
the Teacher’s Book explains what to expect from the activities in the book, what learners are to
do, and the general structure for the development of this skill:
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Taken from: New Total English. Pre-Intermediate. Teacher’s Book. Crace & Acklam (2011)
The speaking skill description in the textbook, assumed that interaction can foster
students’ learning process, and describes in what ways it can be helpful, however, terms like:
fluency, learners talking about topics they want to talk about, motivation, self-expression, among
others, are taken for granted as skills that learners at this level already have. Hall (2001) states
that we learn structures of language, the conventions for using and interpreting its components,
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and the social meanings, values and attitudes attached to those conventions in the process of
interacting with others and being aware of the means by which the communication is
accomplished. The analysis of interaction (focused on unconventional exchanges) becomes of
great importance, because of the improvisational nature they entail. The authors of the textbook
described speaking within a framework of components that they had already selected. In their
selection, variations of discourse seemed very unlikely to happen. Such analysis is provocative
of questions such as: How can the language-learning environment become challenging
cognitively and communicatively speaking so that learners can use language as a means for selfexpression and thorough competence? How can teachers provide students with more choices to
explore the opportunities they have in the class for using language? How can the cognitive
perspectives move into a more applied perspective that understands all the competences within
the communicative approach?
By observing language learning from the practical perspective described, the ability of
the students to read contexts and participate actively in communicative activities was not under
consideration. After all, interaction is a complex communicative behavior, a skill to study within
the student’s communicative development, something individualized, a personal path that
surpasses the walls of their classrooms, and it is a social skill, acquired and enhanced by means
of each new interaction, as stated by Edwards & Coll (1996). In the following field note, I could
see the complexity of what I was about to analyze:
The students laugh as they interact and develop the scripted exchange of language proposed in
exercise 3 as a speaking activity. Their exchanges of language depend largely on what is scripted
and proposed, the dynamics of play (in this case role playing) become important for interaction
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to occur. At the same time, students change some pieces of information in the scripted
conversations, correct each other’s pronunciation, create dynamics of interaction that will help
them participate in the development of the exercise. All of this by switching codes, playing with
language as they develop what the teacher expects as an answer.
Annex 1. Field Notes: Problem Statement.
For instance, a common phenomenon that occurs in activities, as described in the
previous excerpt, is that of meaning negotiation as a means of the language acquisition process.
This moment happens when students are developing their tasks, and most commonly happens by
using code switching, or simply, translating in order to define what a word is. However, these
translations are not always strictly about the words given in the scripts. Students joke, invent new
words, and even make up stories around one given concept. In its essence, meaning negotiation,
as described by Hall (2010) deals with the fact that a teacher serves as a guide to provide
sufficient meaning so that learners can communicate clearer and grammatically correct and
pronounced utterances. This phenomenon also happens between learners. The conception of the
teacher as a guide who provides meaning to students leaves students’ process aside, just as if the
teacher held all the knowledge that was necessary for a lesson or task to be developed. What
about the validation of background knowledge students have? How does it influence a given task
in the interaction when the teacher is not observing closely? Again, the main issue is not on what
is expected, but on the unexpected. I wanted to find the triggers of the unconventional
exchanges, and see how they contributed to language learning.
As already mentioned, the course development at ILUD uses the Total English textbook
series as the main mediational means for students to guide their interactions. As a consequence,
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the contents of the textbook and their interactional activities are not only modeled types of
activities in which meaning negotiation takes place by following scripted language, correcting
mistakes and providing feedback on pronunciation, but they also turn into activities in which
consequences of participation can be examined under the light of research. This was possible due
to the particularities of each activity, and because of their importance in the individual
development of communicative competence, as explained by Hall (2001). It became necessary to
know what came out of the preparation of a speaking activity when students interacted before
their presentations, and to observe the way teacher guided discourse. I wanted to observe if he
really did as he said talking about language use, based on the tradition of EFL of yelling at
students “In English!” every time they attempted to use L1.
Under such discursive analysis, not only language learning was present in its
unconventional, improvised, and natural scope, but I was also going to be able to identify the
different interactional scenarios, which showed into activities. These scenarios became known as
a result of a unique set of interactional devices that were unique and that we must know that
differ from one classroom to another. This way, I would be able to explain if the classroom itself
could start building its own discourses, beyond the cognitive aspect of providing comprehensible
output. For instance, a different interactional dynamic happens when the teacher provides
constant feedback and support instead of closing the cycle when mistakes appear, as reported by
Brown (2004). As we will observe later, feedback can take variations depending on the kind of
interaction created in the teacher-student relationship.
Kumaravadivelu (2001) explains that realities in the classroom are situational, in other
words: a different stage for performing the communicative act of an English class is present from
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one classroom to another, and this uniqueness is what makes mediational means relevant for
interaction to take place. The reflections upon the communicative activities that this project
proposes, respect these dynamics that the meditational means facilitate for learners, mainly
because they become social constructions created by learners when the teachers allow this to
happen. This of course, varies from teacher to teacher, but the structuration provided by the
formalities from the textbook and curricular development is always present. It is worth noting
that no pedagogical intervention is to take place during the process of analysis and observation,
the project uses the tradition of the ethnographic method to observe the classroom as an
ethnography.
Watson-Gegeo (1997) states that classroom ethnography refers to the application of ethnographic
and sociolinguistic or discourse analytic research methods to the study of behavior, activities,
interaction, and discourse in formal, and semi-formal educational settings such as school
classrooms, adult education programs, and day care centers. This project sought to discover how
the behavioristic and discursive analysis of the group selected along with unconventional
exchanges contributed to the process of learning English while the teacher-researcher was insitu.
Regarding interaction, Hall (2001) establishes that what generates an inclusive dynamic
in the class depends on three crucial aspects for this demanding task to happen: first, affirm
student responses, second, use language to create group bonds and rapport, and third, use humor
to reduce tension, to relieve embarrassment, to save face, or to entertain. As we will observe in
the analysis of data, the environment created in this classroom by the teacher and the students,
uses these three components, having humor as a key component that plays a crucial role in the
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analysis of the types of interactions of my interest. In addition to this, in another strategy used to
collect the initial data, I asked students in informal talk, and in Spanish if they had any other
opportunity different from the class to practice their English. I gave an account of their answers
on the field notes collected for the problem statement:
“The group provided answers such as: “I sometimes revise the contents of what we
studied during the previous lessons at night, and this doesn’t take more than ten minutes”, “Not
at all, I have to work”, “If I start speaking English in my house, my family will give me a weird
look”, “No teacher, this is the only space I have for practicing my English”. It also became
another fact for this class, that students’ level of proficiency in L2 made it difficult for the
teacher to deliver instructions and the class itself completely in English, for interaction to take
place, the teacher needed to sometimes resort to L1. Not only this, but T found it difficult to be
coherent with the “only in English” rule he tried to impose at the beginning.
Annex 3. Field Notes. September (2014)
Duff (2002) establishes that sociocultural research involves conversation analysis,
discourse analysis, narrative analysis, and micro-ethnography, and examines language and
content. The observation displayed above, along with the first justification of the importance of
this research in terms of how students’ unconventional exchanges (by means of interaction in
communicative activities proposed) attained the ability to identify how they could develop a
given communicative activity. It would start to study the connection between language learning
development and its sociocultural contexts of the use of unconventional exchanges both
linguistically and most importantly, pragmatically speaking. Through the latter reflections, this
project would seek the resolution of the following questions:
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1. What unconventional exchanges emerge among students in one basic course at ILUD? And at
what moments of the language class?
2. What do those unconventional exchanges based on communicative activities in L2 reveal
about interaction in language development, in one basic course at ILUD?
Within this exploration, the project aims to accomplish the following objectives:
1. To study the dynamics of unconventional types of interactions in language learning in one
basic course at ILUD
2. To determine the contributions that unconventional forms of interaction have upon language
learning at a course at ILUD
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State of the Art
Research concerns attached to the variables derived from what this project calls
unconventional exchanges are present in topics like discourse analysis and pragmatics. For
instance, findings such as the ones found in Youn (2013) indicate that L2 learners with
established grammar and advanced proficiency still lack in using various syntactic structures in
pragmatically appropriate ways, such as the use of past tenses and the progressive aspect with
conditional clauses as mitigation devices. As such, the term coined for this project as an
unconventional exchange defined itself progressively through the analysis of the theoretical
trends already mentioned and the ones in the following literature review. Research in the domain
of discourse analysis, as established in Bahrani & Tam (2012) has shown that one of the
problems that language learners in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) contexts face is that
social interaction in English, which seeks to boost language learning, does not exist or is very
limited. Above all, the underlying concern that lies between pragmatic uses of language and
social uses of discourse helps the unconventional exchanges term to emerge. The latter builds a
bridge between the conventional and unconventional ways of language practice and
methodological implementations, which, as already stated, generate the tension that this project
sought to analyze through the use of unconventional exchanges and see if these could contribute
to language learning and how they correlated with pragmatic meaning both in L1 an L2. Related
research as the results found in Schauer (2006) state that in an EFL context, where access to
native-speaker input is mostly limited to classroom interactions with higher status teachers and
where the examination requirements of secondary or higher education institutions predominantly
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concentrate on grammatical correctness, participants tend to focus more on grammar rather than
pragmatics.
Although there seems to be no definition for unconventional exchanges or synonyms as
such, the comprehension of this term sounds closely similar to other concepts such as the terms
that follow:
Authentic Interaction in the Language Classroom
Research in Herazo (2010) states that for oral communication to be authentic there needs
to be a considerable degree of spontaneity and a true exchange of meaning to which the
interacting parties are oriented and in which they are interested. Additionally, when the
interaction gives no room for the uncertain, for managing it in terms of its linguistic realizations
and its topic, little opportunities are present for students to develop automatic language use.
Research in this field states that learners adopt a rather passive role when the teacher talking time
in negotiations of meaning takes more time than students opportunities to participate. In relation
to this trend of research, unconventional exchanges deal with authentic interaction and focuses
its attention on how students integrate their commonly used expressions to relate to language
learning, employing the concept of familiarity to approach language learning.
Classroom Conversational Negotiation
Hall (2001) defines this type of interaction as the use of speech modifications such as
clarification requests, repetitions, recasts, and comprehension checks. This type of research has
concentrated on the impacts that such negotiation has in language learning, as seen in Pica
(2013). The Interaction Hypothesis as explained by Long (1996, in García & Mayo, 2014) claims
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that incidental learning is facilitated through negotiation of meaning when interactions are
modified among conversational partners to avoid breakdowns in communication. The overall
finding of these studies is that interaction facilitates L2 learning. Researchers affirm this because
it provides positive input sometimes uniquely modified to suit learners' needs (comprehensible
input), learners produce comprehensible output, that is, they modify their own contributions to a
conversation in order to make themselves understood (modified output), and also because
learners may receive corrective feedback in numerous forms in response to their output.
Research on this topic adds to the interactional corpus, the modifications in output that not only
takes into account comprehensible words, but also words from Spanish used in the local context.
The dynamic then becomes relevant, by creating a type of negotiation that contains expressions
taken from colloquialisms, and that emerge as a result of merging L1 slangs and harsh language,
with English, as students deliberately play with language before they look for the actual quest of
obtaining comprehensible output.
Off Task Interaction and the Use of L1 in Local Contexts
The tendency of the group to use their own diversions into the language exchanges they
demonstrated shows that such analysis can establish an initial expansion on the topic of
pragmatics, from a perspective commonly perceived as off-task. In Colombia, a related research
topic by Fortune (2012) discusses the uses of L1 in the classroom, although the term:
“unconventional exchanges” is not present in her research study. In this study, topics such as L1
prohibition, the English only rule, and the use of L1 as being beneficial to EFL learners had the
potential to become the contributions this project attempted to present and call attention to. The
relevance of such interest as the analysis of L1 use as a pedagogical tool in the Colombian
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context can help to alleviate the already mentioned tensions that exist in the learning and
teaching process in EFL.
Above all, the interpretation of discursive devices in the local context can help to bridge
L1 and L2 into pragmatic interpretations that can promote language learning and facilitate
curriculum development to the teaching of a foreign language through the enhancement of
teacher – student, student - teacher communication. The validation of local discursive devices
and the familiarity it brings into the learning process also helps to demystify the labels that
learning a foreign language can have such as complicated, difficult to pronounce, disconnected
from reality, imposed, among others.
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Literature Review
In this chapter, I would like to start by exploring the major strands that underlie the
interpretations of interactionism and discourse in the classroom. The main task of this project
depended on the observation and the analysis upon what I called “students ways”, which is their
agenda for achieving tasks. This particular way in which students do things, along with the
directives a teacher gives, constitute the genesis of what this project is interested in exploring:
the moments in which unconventional and improvised exchanges emerge because of a given
task. We will see how these exchanges do not only belong to the task itself, but how they are
present along the development of speaking activities. Research conducted by Baleghizadeh &
Shahri (2014) set the reflection upon the great importance given by students to their speaking
ability as the most important measure by which their won proficiency was observable and
language learning became tangible. Yet, these interactions given under the scope of the
communicative approach differed from learner to learner. The variety of linguistic resources in
the classroom selected exemplified the gap that exists between levels of proficiency in every
course.
The Use of L1 in the L2 Classroom Selected at ILUD
Some students tried largely to speak in English and use the tools given by the course, but
even the most compromised learners had to resort back to Spanish to be able to work in their
group. Cook (2001) states that this rule (the “Only English allowed in this classroom rule”
coming from a tradition of foreign language instruction) is reminiscent of the way of teaching
deaf children language by making them sit on their hands so that they cannot use sign language.
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He continues by arguing that indeed, the two systems (L1 and L2) coexist linked so closely that
what one does or learns to do in one, has a significant impact on what one can do and learn to do
in the other. To this respect, Harmer (2001, P. 131) discusses how attempts to make students use
L2 have the tendency to be eluded by learners, and how this dynamic, “can drive teachers wild”.
The debate of the use of the “EOR”, or the English-only rule has been claimed by Atkinson
(1987, P. 241) to be unfashionable, limiting. Fortune (2012) discusses widely the topic of the use
of the mother tongue in the L2 classroom as being “the forbidden fruit”. In her article, she
demonstrates how, among others, the advantages of the use of L1 include improved rapport,
saving time within the development of classes, improvements in grammar and vocabulary
teaching, bilingual dictionary use, acknowledgment of social identity, and its incidences on
group work dynamics.
Interaction & Discourse
To observe a first contrast in the definition of interaction, Haugen (1972: 325; In Creese
& Martin, 2003) defines the term as the study of the linguistic exchanges between any given
language and its environment. The main concept in Haugen’s proposal is that a given language
does not exist as a separate entity from its environment. In contrast, Ericksson (1983) coins the
term ‘linguistic improvisations’ and the way the phenomenon of unconventional interaction is
understood beyond the mere hypothesis of Learner-to-Learner (L-L) or Teacher-to-Learner (T-L)
interactions, negotiations of meanings, or Initiations-Responses-Evaluations (IREs).
In regards to L2, English as a Foreign language is a subject to which people in general
within the educational system is but obliged to learn as a requirement for obtaining better job
positions, or opportunities for improving professionally, or to be able to apply for job positions
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outside the country. This fact helps us to understand interaction from the premise that every
student who takes a course wants to learn English for a different purpose. In relation to this,
theory states that years of classroom experience allow students to have very specific expectations
of how teachers should act in the classroom. What we are interested in, is in the disruption that
promotes the unconventional, and what triggers such exchanges. Weber & Mitchell (2004) state
how the diversity of discourses condition what we may observe in each setting we teach. It is in
such diversity that responses can become unexpected, improvised, out of the record,
unconventional, and the breakdown that appears becomes of great interest in order to observe if
these moments contribute or not to language learning. Delpit (1988, In Nieto 1999) states that
teachers need to be authoritative –that is, knowledgeable, clear and direct- rather than
authoritarian in their interactions with students. They need to teach students the kinds of skills
they must have in order to act upon the world with their learned tool: L2. The classroom
interaction, then, needs to becomes a set of dynamics that need the guiding role of the teacher by
letting learners know they will also have their place within the classroom, and that their
background knowledge will be validated.
Students’ Participation and “Off the Radar” Interactions
The concept of active participation from a learner becomes deceptively simple, perhaps
self-evident: The more students study or practice a subject, the more they tend to learn about it.
Likewise, the more students practice and get feedback on their writing, analyzing, or problem
solving, the more adept to its learning they should become, as stated by Kuh (2003). Teacher’s
directives are crucial components in this understanding, because their interpretation from the
group can lead to active participation, creativity, and curiosity. The project sought to understand
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how unconventional exchanges occurred and unfolded among students’ interactions and
teachers’ directives constitute an important starting point for further interactions in the class.
This fact becomes a subject of great interest, as I want to observe how, by means of the
directives and feedback provided, students understand they can or cannot play language games in
the field of the unconventional. This will also permit to understand how these elements have an
effect on the different discursive actions that students perform in their learning process: is the
unconventional a strategy for problem solving? If so, what are the contributions of this dynamic
in the end for language learning?
O’Conner (2009) contributes with another piece of understanding for the interactional
discussion by highlighting a phenomenon called “cohort culture”. The term refers to the
attitudes, values, and practices that students in a particular group portray through interaction with
one another and in reaction to the requirements and expectations placed on them by their
institutional context. To this regard, Edwards & Coll (1996) points out that Education is a public
process in which even apparently internal and private processes are characteristics that are done
and defined interactively so they can become part of education. Theorists have discussed that
school is a social space where there are particular forms of communication, and where discourse
has a distinguishable structure and a specific type of language, as stated by Edwards & Westgate
(1994). The latter helps us understand that all the participants in the communicative event called
“the language class” are part of an event full of variations within a given structure.
The Role of Improvisation in Interactions and Discourse
Once students understand what the structure is, and how to use it, they will tend to
accommodate such structure to their specific type of language use, and this use will inevitably be
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deliberate. This starting point of the understanding of unconventional demonstrations of
interaction will also help us understand how discourse is something that is not ruled or governed
by fixed starting or finishing points, and rather opens the door to a more dialogic teaching and
learning perspective. Nevertheless, it is necessary to understand that the unconventional is also
determined by the students’ understanding of the structures of language.
Edwards & Coll (1996) also state that in this sense, interaction in the classroom is much
like scientific texts, and like dialogues held in a courtroom, in psychotherapy, and even in
everyday conversation. All of these are discourses in which the participants have to treat about
the truth and the error, cognition and reality, the pertinence of the limitations and the institutional
goals, and the quest (or prudent avoidance) of arguments, disputes and resolutions. All of these
are interactively sensitive. The latter discussion locates interaction within the possible fluxes that
discourse can have. By comparing interaction in the classroom with every day conversations, the
reflection upon familiarity while learning English becomes more apparent. In our case, the more
I understood discourse and interactions, the better my observations were towards language
learning, in the case of the population given (18 to 30 years-old). Expanding from this latter
construct, Ericksson (1983) states how the conversation between students and teachers –a
conversation that is not only intelligible but also adequate and effective from the point of view of
the situation- can be counted as the collective improvisation of meaning and the social
organization in different moments. Once the instruction is given, students have a process that
belongs to them, a space within the class that is their own territory. Again, the understanding of
interaction does not intend to eliminate the authoritative role of the teacher as a guide, as a
facilitator, but it helps to prevent the disruption of the great importance that, psychologically
speaking, a good relationship with the teacher and peers has, as observed by García, et al. (2013)
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The research study on the topic of teacher-student / student-teacher relationship by
García, et al. (2013) has portrayed the importance of the understanding of interaction not only
from the traditional cognitive hypothesis given - based on structuralism, and instrumental
principles that consider language as an end- His study found that characteristics such as: interest
in students’ development, pride, empathy, respect and trust, availability, among other traits, are
crucial for maintaining good teaching/learning processes. The quest to understand interaction
within the framework of linguistic and learning aspects in this project started, as already stated,
by observing how teachers and students are the readers and interpreters of the learning context
upon which they act. Theory in Gutierrez (1994) illustrates how participants of the
communicative event first get to know their interactional dynamics, and then they are be able to
merge this knowledge with the teaching/ learning event.
Communicative Competence and Interaction
Ericksonn (1982) states that people need “communicative competence”, because only by
acquiring this ability, the participants will be in the ability to communicate effectively and
adequately. The intention of this author along his text is to highlight the different ways
communication can happen beyond a mechanical view of language, like for instance,
communication that happens in non-verbal exchanges. Later in his text, the author states how
classes are, in general, speech acts characterized by the presence of frequent cognitive and
interactional “slips”, and, as a consequence, actions of re-composition. The latter helps to create
an initial discussion upon unconventional exchanges promoted within sociolinguistic and
pragmatics brought up by what the author may call “slippery speech acts” as part of the theory of
discourse as improvisation he proposes. This study ultimately understands the teaching act as an
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event that is detached from the mechanical structuration of knowledge; it wants to contribute to
the understanding of the importance of the nature of all the underlying factors that contribute to
the most efficient transfer of knowledge and communication in the EFL classroom. All of these
implications help to reinforce the debate promoted within sociolinguistic and pragmatics brought
up by the unconventional exchanges. All of this taking into account the nature of language:
something that is never fixed, because language is not only used to state formulas of perfectly
elaborated structures and understandable utterances, but language also expresses human
experiences, describes them, and creates possibilities for the expressions of a community of
learners to take place, as stated by Creese & Martin (2003).
Interactionism: The Cognitive Perspective
Deville (2003) summarizes different arguments that state that while language learning
does address issues related to language use; it remains a psycholinguistic ability model. This
assertion on the topic leaves aside the external world of the learners and frames them as entities
affected only by the way they (through an individual construction of language) share their worlds
with others by establishing mechanic isolated constructions and re-interpretations. This leaves
the learning domain to be dependent on a task given after a concise explanation has happened.
Again, something linear and measurable in the assessment, which as discussed, is not always the
case.
Interaction as a Holistic Competence
In defining and explicating interactional competence, Kramsch (1986) writes: successful
interaction presupposes not only a shared knowledge of the world, the reference to a common
external context of communication, but also the construction of a shared internal context or
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‘sphere of inter-subjectivity’ that is built through the collaborative effort of the interactional
partners. In addition to this, Snow (1994, P. 14) affirmed that “the interactionism emphases of
cognitive theory now interprets cognition as situated; that is, rather than being located in
persons’ heads, the structures and processes of knowing, understanding, reasoning, and learning
are activities defined by relations between persons and tasks, or between persons”.
The Importance of Context in Interaction
In relation to this, Young (2000) emphasizes that learners’ resources are not set in
advance but are dependent on the specifics of the dynamic social context. He discusses
interactional competence in terms of recurring, stable episodes of contextual interaction. In
relation to the latter concept, the language user develops a set of preferred abilities that are
typically activated in contexts with particular features. All of this built in a localized setting. It is
likely that language users at different proficiency levels call upon different or differentially
developed abilities. Furthermore, their learning experiences would help determine the associated
resources they are likely to engage in a given context. As seen, all the constructs based on the
topic of interaction guided the discussion towards the establishment of a discussion on
interactionism that understands better the communicative act that the language class is. The role
of orientation upon classroom participants becomes crucial. This is why teacher’s directives were
also part of the analysis.
Philp & Tognini (2009) state that interaction allows learners a chance to try out language
to notice and resolve problems in language with the collaboration of their partner. Noticing formmeaning connections (Van Patten et al. 2004) and anomalies in the learner’s own comprehension
or production is significant to second language development. It becomes a first step towards
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restructuring and refining existing second language knowledge, as stated by (Gass 2003; Gass
and Varonis 1994; Long 1996), who also claim that the importance of scaffolded interaction
within the classroom receives importance with the fact that it can also promote better
relationships in the setting. Not only is this present within the room in which the classes are
given, but also by making students skilled in the art of interacting externally. Such validation of
background knowledge can help students to get to know each other, and even learn to respect
different visions of the world by expanding their views with the experiences gathered and share
them in a specific given context: the L2 classroom.
Contextual Language Use and Meaning Negotiation
The interactional dimension of language learning as discussed here, takes common
language such as colloquialisms, and includes them into the class in order to, for instance,
provide feedback and expand conversations. In this regard, it has been discussed how L1 plays a
crucial role in doing so, and how the transitions generated in code switching can encourage lowproficient students within their investment in language learning. A study conducted by Philp and
Tognini (2009) analyzed how several verbal behaviors also contributed to a reduction of teacher
dominance and increased learner participation. They observed an open and direct approach to
error correction; an appropriate use of real-life conversational language when giving feedback;
the provision of sufficient wait time for response, and scaffolding by providing key vocabulary
to prevent a communication breakdown. Philp & Tognini (2009) expanded on the concept of
cooperation between learners in that the greater part of descriptive research in FL contexts
suggests that the incidence of negotiation for meaning is limited to a linguistic, cognitive
learning strategy. In the same scenario, other interactional strategies are more prevalent.
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Code-Switching in the Observed Interactions
Rolen-Ianziti & Brownlie (2002) suggest that strategies such as translating L2 words into
L1 and making contrasts between L1 and L2 forms may facilitate acquisition. Turnbull and
Arnnet (2002) cite evidence that code switching can enhance input by making linguistic items
more salient. Code switching in interaction does not imply that the strategy may apply for every
exchange, but it is a crucial aspect of the interactional dynamic used deliberately by learners,
especially in an EFL setting. Bygate & Samuda (2009. In Kaplan: 2012) state that for both,
adults and children, the kind of interaction that might facilitate learning is not easily reproduced
in instructional contexts; to some extent this has been achieved by the use and creation of
different tasks, games, activities, and all the interactions generated by these and the textbook
itself.
The Pragmatic and Paralinguistic Dimensions of Interaction
For instance, Ortega (2007, 47) suggests that we need to pay more attention to the
context of learning and, in particular, to learner experience, recognizing it as something that is
“lived, made sense of, negotiated, contested, and claimed by learners in their physical,
interpersonal, social, cultural and historical context”. Learners attend their classes in order to
experience learning in the language offered. At the same time, as stated by the author, they also
learn conversational cues, subtleties of body language, language codes, or devices to
communicate among themselves. They even learn how to use language for constructing
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friendship, thus, constructing a pragmatic type of interaction that becomes part of an affective
dimension that may happen as a result of the use of unconventional exchanges, as it becomes the
language of understanding a social dynamic, in other words: a social skill as a result of
interaction. The understanding of unconventional interaction as a crucial part of the umbrella
term of interaction must help in the understanding of language functionality from a paralinguistic
and more pragmatic perspective, as stated. It can also provide learners with intentions, scenarios,
and situations that can use a same language unit.
Hall (2009) affirms that the substance of learners’ language knowledge links to, and
indeed arises from, learners’ extended involvement in the regularly occurring interactional
practices constituting their specific contexts of learning. These interactional practices, aimed at
language learning, and their understanding leaves the great task of being patient, believing in the
process of the creation of the classroom semantics, and fostering a process that does not take one
class to be completed. If a group dynamic is always existing as a course develops, interactional
systems develop within it. An organic dynamic takes place, and one must understand that this
extended and varying involvement is what potentially generates learning, not through
interaction, but in interaction, as stated by Ellis (2008, 209; emphasis in the original. In Li and
Walsh, 2014) In this scenario, learning through interaction may be the equivalent to the
structural, instrumental, practical, mechanical view, whereas learning in interaction comprehends
EFL from a constructivist point of view, which understands individuals use language and
become acculturated, as stated in Hall (2001). The concepts this project examines are the result
of the involvement of participants in particular communicative activities, and then (if possible) to
provide an account on language learning because of such participation.
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The Interaction Engine
Levinson (2006) also refers to this discussion upon the involvement factor of interaction
as the interaction engine, which consists of a collection of cognitive capacities and motivational
dispositions including perception, categorization, memory, and problem solving. It also includes
social cognitive skills such as the motivation to seek cooperative interaction, the ability to track
actions and to infer the motivations, stances and intentions behind them, and the capacity for
creating and interpreting communicative actions in multiple modes, i.e., gesture, gaze, facial and
other verbal channels, simultaneously. This engine is what makes language as a means of
communication possible and thus provides the building blocks for a second layer of shared
knowledge on which individuals rely for sense making in their interactional dynamics.
The abovementioned interactional engine is composed of dispositions grounded
ethnographically, and expectations about individuals’ social worlds. These include knowledge of
culture-specific communicative events or activity types and their typical goals and trajectories of
actions by which the goals accomplish. Also included is the knowledge of the prosodic,
linguistic, interactional and other verbal and nonverbal tools conventionally used to infer
meanings of turns and actions, to construct them so that their interpretation by others appears in
the ways that they are intended to be, and to anticipate and produce larger action sequence
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configurations, as stated by Levinson (2006). The concept of the engine is not convention-based.
It implicitly takes the conventional dimension of language and integrates it in discourse as the
means for achievement in which diversions in interactions occur. Here, we have established
how, among others, there are actions that build around the semantics of the class. In the same
scope, we must also understand how these discourses and signals display as we interact, because
as participants, teachers and learners do things with the language, verbally and non-verbally. As
observed in a study by Ochs (2002), the linguistic intervention of a student within his or her
learning group by means of interaction, leads to a set of changes within the dynamics of learning
that provides the student with a more active, vivid role into his or her learning process.
Ellis (2008) notes that ‘there are no mechanisms for such top-down governance’. Rather,
the collections develop from the ground up, as structured inventories of various kinds of
linguistic constructions with meaning acting as the central organizational key. The inventories
include the more conventionally recognized lexical and syntactic units as well as less
conventionally recognized units including routine formulas, fixed and semi-fixed expressions,
and collocations or groupings of units. Formulaic expressions, for instance, will have
functionality within the different reports of students beyond the mere use of the formula. This
fact is also discussed by Ellis (2008), who establishes that additional evidence from usage-based
approaches to language development helps us to understand that the source of such knowledge is
in interaction, with individual language knowledge being a derivative phenomenon, emerging as
‘a massive collection of heterogeneous constructions. Each of these constructions deal with
affinities to different contexts, and are in a process of constant structural adaptation to usage.
There is existing knowledge that creates this possibility for approaching language learning to the
classroom participants.
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Interaction as a Living Thing Created In-Situ
Macbeth (2004, 62) states that the work of teaching and learning, then, is done ‘not
propositionally or behaviorally but praxeologically, as practical tasks and orientations’ The
things we do with language learning and teaching, are what create and validate the sense of
community from the praxis. Being in an EFL context, the stated praxeology of language learning
is present in the way students interact by using the textbook units, the activities brought into the
classroom by the teacher, and the use and creation of discourses that they will observe by getting
involved in such activities. In this regard, Wang (2010) notes that when the students ask the
teacher questions, interaction between the teacher and learners transpires and the resulting
teacher talk can attract the learner’s attention and may be more facilitative of acquisition of the
target form.
To sum up, we have observed the phenomenon of unconventional interaction as an
opportunity to build the classroom as a space with its proper discursive and interactional life.
This discussion comprehends how this awareness can contribute to the interpretation of
interaction as something that is constructed and de-constructed. There is nothing fixed in the
communicative acts of teaching a language. Interaction itself goes through such diversions of
verbal and non-verbal exchanges (both being conventional or unconventional) that the sole
capacity to interpret the phases in which the interaction is can help tremendously to achieve
communication and the necessary calibrations within an apparently “lost” class, also labeled as
lazy, problematic, not-disciplined, misbehaved, unteachable, and many other tags that teachers
have before entering a classroom.
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Research Design
In order to delve into the development of this chapter, let us remind the research question
of this study:
Within this exploration, the project aims to accomplish the following objectives:
Type of Study and Methodology
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Since this research aims at determining the dynamics of interaction in the form of
unconventional exchanges in an English course at ILUD at a basic level. I decided to approach
the study from an Ethnographic-qualitative perspective. Watson-Gegeo (1997) affirms that
classroom ethnography has its emphasis on the sociocultural nature of teaching and learning
processes, it incorporates participants’ perspectives on their own actions, and offers a holistic
analysis that is context-sensitive to levels in which interactions happen. As seen, an ethnographic
perspective calls for a focus on the sociocultural nature of teaching and learning processes
through fieldwork. It also relies on participants’ perspectives of their own behavior.
This is an ethnographic and qualitative type of study. It understands the classroom as an
ethnography. Watson-Gegeo (1997) states that classroom ethnography refers to the application of
ethnographic and sociolinguistic or discourse analytic research methods to the study of behavior,
activities, interaction, and discourse in formal, and semi-formal educational settings such as
school classrooms, adult education programs, and day care centers. As established, the crucial
aspect of this analysis centers its discussion in the concept of unconventional, out of the scope,
improvised, exchanges in interaction. The term “unconventional exchanges” also helps the study
to enhance the terminology of its discussion, by attempting to demystify L2, and place it on a
more grounded every-day type of ability, not as an ability given to a selected and gifted few,
starting from the teacher. The exploration of this project seeks to establish a thorough
comprehension of the concept of unconventional interaction that goes beyond the analysis of
speaking and the typologies it may produce.
Research Context and Participants
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Students of levels Basic 1 & 2 level attended their classes with one specific teacher. This
level attempted to help students go from level A2 of proficiency, to the B2 level of proficiency.
The students of the group arrived to the classroom some time before 8 a.m., and had to wait
before the previous course left. The classrooms were big enough to teach groups up to 30
students, and they had a smart TV set that did not have the power cable. The cable was in the
office of the person who was in charge of the resources office. At the point of the development
of this project, the mission of ILUD consisted on contributing to the development of integral
human beings who were willing to promote changes in their environment through insights
generated through learning languages within the frame of non-formal education. This mission
was in the documents called “Programas” for each course at ILUD.
The abovementioned participants were part of a convenient selection. It is worth noting
this was a convenience group, as I had access to the students and the teacher (convenience
sampling). The project utilized a setting where language use had specific ways to produce
comprehensible output, mostly given by the textbook. However, strategies such as code
switching were ways of integrating the cognitive dimension with the affective dimension by
expressing solidarity as stated in Higareda, et al. (2013). As we will observe later in the analysis
of data, the collection of strategies used by students, the ones that were not expected, or the
already mentioned: unconventional exchanges
Population
The population consisted of 12 students of the Basic level at ILUD. At the beginning,
there were 14 students in the course, two of them left in further classes because they did not
belong to this group. Their ages ranged from 18 to 35 years old. Some of these students were
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attending college and technical institutions in Bogota. They belonged to one to three social
economical strata, and lived in different parts of the city. Students who benefit from this type of
education have access to English courses offered at reasonable prices. If a student belongs to any
of the programs at Universidad Distrital, he/she can ask for a discount that the university
provided as an economic assistance. The latter also includes teachers at Universidad Distrital,
and employees.
In the group selected for this project, the recordings took place when groups of students
were preparing themselves to develop speaking activities. At the beginning, this experience was
not a comfortable one for them, because they felt they had to restrict what they said when the
recorder was on. Right at the beginning of a class, I explained them again they were free to have
as meny types of conversations as they wanted for the development of their activities, as my
focus was on the analysis of conversation in general. This helped tremendously, as the students
started interacting freely; to the extent, they sometimes forgot about the recorder. The teacher
(‘Will’, his pseudonym in the project), came from the pacific region of Colombia (Chocó Quibdó). He had a wide experience in the institution (ILUD) and the language-teaching domain
of more than ten years. He also worked for SENA, a public institution in Colombia that offers
technical courses and English courses through both virtually and face-to-face classes. All of the
participants filled in a permission format provided by the researcher and the directives of the
institute at the beginning of the study. The group offered the opportunity to observe and be part
of the classroom at the same time. At the very beginning of the course in a short talk, I explained
students what I was about to do. I first talked to teacher Will, and then with the students, who
signed the permission formats and all of them asked to have a pseudonym in the extracts, too.
(See annexes 6, 7 and 8)
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By the time I developed this study at ILUD, I was part of the staff of teachers at the
institute. I was teaching a course at a different branch (ILUD - Venecia) and I had to travel from
my house to this building every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to be in the classroom at 8:00
a.m. I then placed myself in one corner of the room, took out my notebook, the cellphones and
the video-camera, and got ready for the observations. I introduced myself to the teacher and the
group at the very beginning of the course, and I told students their identities were going to be
pseudonyms. I explained to them I had graduated from the undergraduate program of
Universidad Distrital four years ago, and that I was a student of the Masters Program at
Universidad Distrital. My work commitments included two levels that I taught on Saturdays. I
introduced myself as a member of the staff, as part of the teachers’ team of ILUD, and I
explained the necessity of the project as a contribution for the curriculum development of the
institute.
Instruments
The instruments I chose allowed me to explore the interactions that occurred within a
regular class. These instruments had as common objective, the collection of specific information
related to the possibilities given through the interactions in the classroom when students were
e.g. off-task, improvising, and using unconventional ways to develop their given activities.
Although it seems to contradict its own research tradition followed, this study utilized the
perspectives of participants in an implicit and vital sense. As stated some lines above, the process
of data collection required an explanation to the participants on how the dynamics of research
were to take place. I had to explain again, in a second session, that my intention was to record
real interaction, no matter what types of interaction emerged. The first group I obtained forced
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students to speak in English, because in an informal talk, they stated that they thought I was
going to report my results to directives at the institution; some of them remained silent because
they thought my intention was that of supervising how good the classes were. After I made this
clear, and even though the EOR rule was present, students started to interact in different ways,
using more devices and means, including L1. Their contribution from this point on was that of
having conversations in which they forgot about the recorder, and simply interacted for the sake
of the development of the activity. Without their contribution (which constitutes the crux of the
study), my analysis would not have been possible. It is worth noting that this result could have
also been negative, have the group rejected to speak freely, using all the tools they had to
interact. However, they took this explanation and understood that their real interactions were the
core of my observations. By doing this, I got involved in the intensive study of their interactional
exchanges over a period of four months (the duration of the course) in which, through a
descriptive style, I could derive my reflections based on teacher Will and students’ contributions.
They unfolded their perspectives on interactional dynamics and showed the elements that could
help to the characterization of the setting, Secondly, the analysis that took place, derives its
conclusions from the theoretical constructs studied. Finally, the complexity of the study attempts
to be analytical, rather than anecdotal.
To this point, the project could pre-establish that the target language could sometimes
become the last means by which communication happened in this class. As we will observe later,
when English was used against the promotion of interaction, it could deter the communicative
approach and even create disengagement in students. This is why it became important to explore
how unconventional interaction promoted the building of classroom discourses, and what were
the contributions it may brought for the learning of a second language. The particularities of the
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setting also helped this study to a great extent, as Spanish was the common native language used
by the group.
Unit of analysis
The unconventional behaviors and responses constituted part of the students’ ways given
in the communicative situations promoted by the activities, a fact understood as the unit of
analysis for this study.
In the table of the following page, we can observe the instruments used, the type of data
obtained as well as how I utilized the instruments:
INSTRUMENT /
DATA OBTAINED FROM
USE OF THE
Intensity of application
THE INSTRUMENTS
INSTRUMENTS
FIELD NOTES /
Every class
Unconventional exchanges
At
moments
where
the
Unconventional moments
unconventional or the improvised
Moments of improvisation
was generated.
Changes and/or improvements in
the social networks of the
classroom.
VIDEO RECORDINGS /
Every class
Teacher’s Directives
At the beginning of each activity.
Teacher’s Unconventional
Teacher’s
exchanges and unconventional
grammatical explanations
directives
feedback
or
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Students’
unconventional During the communicative
exchanges
Students’
activities
given
by
the
conversational teacher.
AUDIO RECORDINGS /
Every Class
devices
Students’
ways
of
elaboration
upon
the
activities
MEMOS /
Researcher’s reflections
After the coding process.
Once coding was done
Table 1. Data Collection Instruments and Usage: Explanation.
Transcriptions of Audio and Video-Recordings.
I placed recorders around the groups and pairs of students in order to pay particular
attention and analyze their types of interactions. I wanted to be as non-invasive as possible, and
observe how the unconventional exchanges could constitute moments of the construction of
interactional dynamics, beyond the mere concept of meaning negotiation. In the words of Burns
(2003), audio and video recording are a technique for capturing in detail naturalistic interactions
and verbatim utterances. They constitute the richest sources from patterns of interactional
behavior. Both instruments are examples of what Burns (2002) explains as non-participant
methods for observation.
Field Notes and Post-Facto Notes.
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Field notes were an instrument that helped to take notes during the classes when
something unexpected happened that was not part of the focus of any of the recording
instruments (videos or audio recordings). Sometimes after watching the videos or listening to
the recordings, I complemented these notes. By doing this, I started writing some notes in the
form of questions and other short kinds of short messages in the form of post facto notes, which
became reflections that I later wrote in the memos. In the field notes, I wrote in my notebook all
the behaviors and responses that could emerge in all the classes I observed. I followed a hunch
while using this instrument. Having the unconventional as the crux of my analysis, I needed one
part of the analysis not to follow a strict methodology, taken from the research tradition. I used
the combination of both elements (the post facto notes, and moments of reflection upon the notes
written as memos in my cellphone) as a permanent tool for the elaboration of field notes in the
study could help me understand in a very detailed way, how interaction happened in Will’s
classroom. These types of observed data, as stated by Lankshear & Knobel (2004) are pieces of
information collected by means of systematically watching people going about their daily lives
or watching events as they unfold.
The Researcher’s Role
As I stated some lines above, I defined myself as a constant observer of the dynamics of
the classroom. I tried to leave aside all the conceptions and definitions that might have biased my
observations, as in qualitative research, stepping aside becomes an impossible task. For doing
this, I double-checked each transcription with my advisor and in classes at the M.A. program,
where the revision of the type of information was extensive, and I sometimes needed to
reformulate as the project lost the scope for what it intended to collect. There was nothing right
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or wrong anymore, no intervention from my part whatsoever. I was there to observe and interpret
the communicative acts of the English language class. I was there to unveil one of the reflections
taken from the communicative approach that when learning a language, being a student or a
teacher: you do not always obtain what you expect to receive in return. I was there to observe
this paradox in context, because the unconventional, very often is what turns out to be
conventional in the communicative approach. As already mentioned, students contributed with
their most truthful interactions as it can be observed in the transcripts. The ethical rule derived
from the teaching exercise found its guidance in the curriculum, the textbook, and of course, the
transfer of knowledge provided by teacher Will during his classes. Teacher Will’s major concern
was that he could not make himself clear at certain moments of the class. In an informal talk, he
said he felt it was necessary to use L1,evene if it was a contradiction to his own rule, because
otherwise, explanations would be time consuming, which was a concern attached to the
development of the curriculum.
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Data Analysis
This chapter contains the detailed description undertaken in order to analyze and provide
interpretation to the data collected in the study. The main purpose of this section is to answer the
research questions proposed for the study:
Research objectives:
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The Initiation-Response-Evaluation Model and Unconventional Exchanges
As previously stated, students demonstrated during the first observations a breakdown in
the Initiation-Response and Evaluation (IRE) model in contrast to what was expected by the
teacher and the course development. The expectation from the teacher and the course advocated
formal and informal exchanges and their negotiated means by which students achieved a
communicative purpose. The theoretical background upon the analysis of classroom discourse
based on IREs, suggested, “correct” responses to be elicited in each exchange. Traditionally,
colloquial language and code switching are but means of negotiation within the framework of
theorists to which they do not provide much importance. However, as stated before, teachers and
institutions have a myriad of interpretations of what the communicative approach is, and one of
the main standardized concepts that is used in second language classrooms is the “no Spanish
allowed” policy. Teacher Will tried to establish this rule at the very beginning of the course, and
as the course developed, he started using Spanish. Finally, in a short conversation after one of his
classes, he justified the use of the mother tongue saying that: “Sometimes it feels like the
necessary thing to do”. As I observed, it was during moments of code switching, translation and
language games between English and Spanish that these exchanges occurred the most. The
research tradition based on interaction utilizes concepts such as: code switching, use of L1,
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meaning negotiation, IREs, peer collaboration strategies, among others, to describe what happens
inside a regular English class, as stated by Hall (2001).
Unconventional Exchanges
I observed that in this classroom, the students and the teacher, as participants of a
communicative event, generated unconventional, unexpected language exchanges in relation to
what was unfolded as they developed the activities. This was not “on the script”, the exchanges
were not part of a conventional IRE, they were not used as a means to negotiate meaning, on the
contrary, they happened in bursts of thoughtfulness when a student commented something, it
happened when a joke emerged as a result of a given exercise, and both languages were present
in such exchanges. The process in-between the initiation and the response is a phenomenon that
appears mainly because students play with language in many different ways. Included here, we
need to remember that non-verbal communication can also lead to learning, and this pragmatic
and paralinguistic dimension can have implications in the development of this analysis, as we
will observe.
Methodology
I collected data using video and audio recordings, and field notes. For the analysis of data
I used traces of Charmaz’ guidelines about constructing grounded theory (2006). The author
explains Grounded Theory is a qualitative research approach that places priority on the
phenomena of study and sees both data and analysis as created from shared experiences and
relationships with participants. In this study, the shared experience that created the exchanges
was the development of the English course during the four months it took. The relationship with
the participants was comfortable after some sessions, and I could change my location in the
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classroom to make my observations and analyze at any time. Sometimes students asked me for
definitions of words, and although I tried to suggest them to look for them up in the dictionary,
my teaching reflex made me provide the definition, sometimes by mimicking it. As the course
developed, groups of students were established and became fixed. The evolution of relationships
among participants framed within the ethnographic nature of the study, allowed me to tackle
interaction and how unconventional exchanges begun to emerge as the phenomenon unfolded
class after class. The relationships receive categorization by transforming all initial data into
codes, carrying out a process called: coding. To gather the data, I went to the selected classroom
during the three days of the week that classes took place. I sat in a corner of the room, and
collected information in the form of field notes. In addition to this, once the communicative
activities were about to start, I took out my camera and recorded the exchanges the teacher used
in order to generate the Initiation phase of the activity. Later, when students were working in
their groups, developing their activities, I came close to them and placed one of three cellphones
used in each class in order to use them as voice recorders of the actual interactions happening
before the Response phase occurred. Finally, in order to analyze the way teacher Will talked to
students in his directives, I used video recordings and transcribed them to analyze his uses of
unconventional, unexpected language. This in order to observe how the uses of unconventional
exchanges uttered from the teacher functioned in the overall picture of the communicative event,
characterized specifically by unconventional exchanges in the analysis.
Data Analysis Procedure
There are three steps for analyzing data explained by Charmaz’ (2006).These steps are:
open or initial coding, axial coding, and selective or theoretical coding. However, grounded
theory is not limited to these three steps. It is worth noting that this extensive research tradition
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includes creating a conditional relationship matrix and then the formulation of a new theory,
which is the final stage. Having in mind only some portion of such a vast theory, this project
includes the steps and procedures from grounded theory to analyze its data, bearing in mind it is
not reaching an extensive corpus of analysis. One of the reasons the project was like this is
because the state of the art in the area of the project did not have an extensive theoretical support
in the domain of what the project understood as “unconventional”.
In the first step, open coding, I read the transcripts and reflected and conceptualized upon
the unconventional exchanges. This identification consists in keeping an open mind to any types
of concepts that may emerge as one observes the data collected. Constantly, there is a necessity
of comparing the collected data to the categories established. The latter in order to determine
how consistent these terms are. Charmaz (2006) establishes coding as the pivotal link between
collecting data and developing an emergent theory to explain these data. Whilst doing the
transcription, I identified fragments of the different exchanges that took place in a regular class. I
observed that the categories explained in the theoretical framework about interaction in language
learning, perhaps, did not suffice the types of exchanges given in these samples, as they appeared
to belong to a different kind of interaction. Such interaction happened when there was freedom to
use language as a vehicle to create, negotiate, and elaborate, because the speaking practices were
most commonly non-controlled after the teacher gave a directive. The frequent comparison
among extracts, and the reflections which open coding promoted in this part of the study, helped
me to identify groups of concepts during further revisions. Then, I elaborated some initial
thoughts based upon the observations and the codes. I elaborated a series of informal memos on
how the group was frequently showing the unconventional exchanges, and how these were
constantly taking part during the language learning process. I kept all these free reflective
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moments as free writings on my cellphone, as I was on my way to work, or in a bus, when I was
going home. Through such moments, I was following the steps that were necessary for axial
coding, another glimpse of the wide tradition of grounded theory which I used for the analysis of
the data.
The constant appearance of information related to colloquialisms, teasers, jokes, and
many other expressions in the conversations created the necessity to pin down all the labels
created into categories. Strauss and Corbin (2008) explain the latter phenomenon as the process
of codifying that happens around all the alignments that pertain to a given category. During this
stage, attempting to create an initial theoretical elaboration upon the data, and right after all the
connections were present among the different categories, another type of explanations became
necessary for the data to be analyzed. Firstly, I needed to find what triggered these moments to
occur after the teacher provided the orientations for an activity. Secondly, my exploration needed
to explain where during the process of interaction, an unconventional exchange occurred.
Thirdly, the appearance of unconventional exchanges appeared because of the specific
circumstances that were present in the group selected for this study. In this process, I looked for
more and more accurate categories that could constitute the triggers of unconventional exchanges
I was looking for. Within this process, I searched for conditions, strategies, consequences,
devices, or any other language elements, and I grouped them into patterns. Taking into account
the descriptive tone of the paper, I used a more descriptive manner to present the unconventional
exchanges, their role in classroom interaction and their contributions to students’ language
learning. This was possible by observing frequencies, and by the elaboration of memos. Having
these three key elements used in the grounded theory, I could both start to explain the data
collected, and then, elaborate new concepts that constituted a potential contribution to the EFL
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learning and teaching domain. Finally, in the selective or theoretical coding, the final stage of the
research tradition of grounded theory, along with the elements of ethnography described in the
research design, I elaborated a narrative description of the already mentioned process.
Evidences of the Emergence of the Unconventional Exchanges Found
Once again, let us first remind ourselves about the research questions for the project:
Kurata (2011) investigated about learners’ informal social exchanges by delving into their
social networks. Among others, she exemplified how personal and social factors were constantly
influencing language choice. At the same time, she inquired and reflected upon how these
choices were contextually and socially negotiated and elaborated. This project seeks to develop a
micro-analysis on learners’ natural discourses within a particular, given network of interactions.
Subsequently, the analysis to portray in this paper deals with indoor L2 learning, and the
unconventional exchanges created inside the micro-social networks that exist in the classroom.
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The following diagram illustrates how the process resulted in the concurrency of
unconventional
interactional
factors
that
occurred
in
this
setting:
GENERATING
HUMOR WITHIN
EXCHANGES
CONSTRUCTING
UNCONVENTIONAL
INTERACTIONAL
ABILITIES WHILE
LEARNING
ENGLISH
GETTING
INVOLVED IN THE
CLASS DYNAMICS
BY USING CODE
SWITCHING
GETTING
INVOLVED IN THE
CLASS DYNAMICS
BY USING CODE
SWITCHING
Diagram 1. Main Category and Subcategories for the analysis.
These categories attempted from this point to respond to the research objectives proposed:
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Students’ Ways
As already observed before, the unconventional exchanges, that students elaborated
because of their participation in this course used the ethnographic perspective in the analysis. In
the first observations, I could differentiate that what students did was not an ‘off-task’ reaction to
the activity proposed. Although teacher Will was repetitively shouting around the classroom “In
English!” demonstrating another EFL tradition, students elaborated their exchanges on their way.
Once they had understood the activity, they started speaking in Spanish in a lower tone of voice;
they started to correlate the situations given to settings and experiences they had lived before. As
a result of this, expressions and vocabulary emerged concurrently, joking and teasing appeared
as a result of the interaction proposed by the activity. Colloquial expressions generated a sense of
familiarity, and ideas emerged which complemented the development of the task. All of this
finds an interpretation as ‘off-task’, but it was actually a strategy for developing the activity. All
these moments of interaction became later patterns in this study as other patterns immersed
within a main category. Such sub-categories were consequences of what we have called:
“students’ ways”, understood in this project as a set of actions in which classroom participants
trigger unconventional exchanges within the activities given to them during a class. All of them
characterized by the unconventional essence that generates either a moment of social dynamics
that can foster language production, or a moment that can generate language learning.
It is important to note that the teaching experience played a crucial role. The teacher
generated a welcoming environment. Such environment could sometimes negotiate with the
unconventional and the improvised, due to the predominant age of the group selected (18 to 35
years old). Although this project does not look at the pedagogical dimension per se, it was
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necessary to acknowledge this dimension at times, and provide reflections on how the data could
contribute into the further analysis of curriculum development and other teaching areas.
Unconventional Interactional Abilities to Generate Effective Communication Processes
This set of skills is part of a process shaped through time in learners within a given group.
Whilst analyzing the data, it was observed how the denominated “students ways” (in this study, a
set of unconventional actions and discursive devices utilized by the students to develop
communicative activities) were present in this EFL classroom, and how the unconventional
exchanges integrated into students’ cognitive processes when learning a foreign language. Above
all, I will demonstrate how the unconventional exchanges have a role; they constitute moments
of learning, and should be re-interpreted every time they happen. All the elaborated and related
descriptions are given as a result of this first concept, as the process of the analysis will illustrate.
Using Humor Within Exchanges
It is the capacity that students showed to connect to each other with humor, to elaborate
from what participants either write or say, and then to create a punch line in the right moment so
others can laugh and promote more interaction. In such exchanges, further interaction in the form
of curiosity, comradery, teasing, and some other humorous moments demonstrated how this
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repetitive device generated understanding and linguistic competence. The latter might also be an
emotional factor that was necessary within groups in the classroom. To this respect, Brown
(1994) states that the affective domain is the emotional side of human behavior, and it may
juxtapose to the cognitive side. Factors such as empathy, anxiety, risk taking, and inhibition
became evident in the observations when the unconventional exchanges started to occur. It is
important to note that the value of respect was a generalized behavior for the generation of a
good environment for everyone. Even in the exchanges when teasing was part of the exchange,
and both, students and the teacher seemed to understand that the moment of the class when
humor was present could also constitute a learning moment.
Let us observe some examples of this pattern in the next table:
Using humor within exchanges
Example
A:
Taken
from
Audio Example
Recordings
B:
Taken
from
Video
Recording
1. Edwin: Girl of the life happy (To the Teacher: Guys: write your names, and give
teacher) Teacher: one question: How it to me, please. This very moment. Write
do you say: chicas de la vida alegre?
your name. Your full name, please. Thank
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I say: girls of the happy life --------
you. Thank you. It was very easy, or it was
Teacher: How do you say: Chicas de complicated? A kind of hard for you? Not.
la vida alegre? Teacher! Teacher:
Wasn’t. It was a piece of cake. (To
How do you say: chicas de la vida
Yolanda) Yeah, please, your name, I’m
alegre? How do you say: Chicas de
telling you.
la vida alegre? (The question finally
Students start talking as Will collects their
reaches the teacher, he smiles as he
exercises.
thinks, the group of Edwin, Sarah,
So, what is number 1? When is Kim doing?
Raúl and Diana, laugh altogether)
Number one. WHEN? Teacher provides
2. Teacher: (Smiling) Oh my God! I
feedback and students respond to his
know how to say that… (Nodding as guiding questions based on the exercise.
he says this)
3. Edwin: Girls of the happy life?
Teacher: And, they’re going to be surfing
4. Teacher: (Laughs out loud) Ok,
and…?
(pauses) whore…
5. Edwin: ¡Uy! (To Diana) ¡Escribe
Some students: Swimming
Teacher: (as he writes on the board) but
eso! ¡Escribe eso! ¡Anótalo! (laughs, you need to put “swimming” in this way
to Raúl) ¡Cla…ro! ¡Toca saber!
6. Teacher: (To Diana) What is the
most common word for that?
(Some students) : No!!! Ay no!
Carlos: ¿Se puede con doble I?
Erika laughs
7. Diana: Eh… I don’t know
Teacher: Anyway. If you, for example, have
8. Teacher: Whore
only one M, don’t worry, if you only wrote
(Teacher laughs out loud)
it with one m, I collaborate. I collaborate
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9. Diana: No…!
you
10. Edwin: Bitches! Ah no! Because the
Edwin: Eso! (As he applauds Will kindness
bitches no cobran! (All the group
with their spelling mistake) A positive point
laughs, including the teacher)
for the teacher
Teacher: So, guys. Look at this: You
remember last class was about…
Class continues with content from the book.
Example C: Taken from Memos
Example D: Taken from Field Notes
It is a fact now that the center of the activity Students keep coming into the classroom
may not be the communicative purpose although it is already late. Teacher reminds
itself, but the joking, the moments of students
about
punctuality.
Yolanda
laughter generated impromptu. If there is a responds to the teacher’s comment.
moment that students like about the class is Teacher: Guys: you know it is important to
the communicative moment, they start be here on time. I want to ask you about
laughing even before they approach their punctuality.
partners, there are moments in which their Yolanda: Teacher: but it’s Friday!
complexion
changes
even
before
the Teacher: I know the traffic is complicated at
explanation on the activity is finished. this hour, but try to be here on time.
There is an important participation of the As the teacher speaks, Axl gets into the
teacher in this, as this environment for the classroom. The student tries to get into his
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unconventional is triggered and permitted group, but his attempt results in noises and
by the teacher in the interactions.
an interruption to the class. The teacher
observes what he is doing and he says:
Teacher: (To Axl) Ok, organize first, and
then I speak, because this for me is very
complicated. (Teacher pauses as Axl gets
into the group. Around half a minute pause.
Teacher addresses Axl) Menos mal vino,
porque si no, estas niñas… (using a
mocking tone and a mocking expression.
Students in the group laugh, including Axl)
ES QUE ÉL ES EL CONSEN…TIDO DE
LA CLASE (In a louder tone of voice, as he
smiles)
Students in general: A…y! (In a raising
tone, acknowledging the ambiguity of what
the teacher has just said. To Axl) Thank you
for coming! (All students laugh)
Table 2. Data analysis. Subcategory 1: Using humor within exchanges
Example A is an extract from a speaking exercise on the topic of Should / Have to / Can:
Obligation and Permission. Having provided his explanation about the activity, a group of Ss
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interacts. They have to create a set of instructions using the modal verbs. For doing this, students
can select any place they want; for example: a SPA, a hotel, a restaurant, a school, a park, etc.
The data in this excerpt suggests that there is a slip in the elaboration of the activities that
generates the unconventional to emerge:
Example A. Taken from audio recordings.
1. Edwin: Girl of the life happy (To the teacher) Teacher: one question: How do you say:
chicas de la vida alegre? I say: girls of the happy life -------- Teacher: How do you say:
Chicas de la vida alegre? Teacher! Teacher: How do you say: chicas de la vida alegre?
How do you say: Chicas de la vida alegre? (The question finally reaches the teacher, he
smiles as he thinks, the group of Edwin, Sarah, Raúl and Diana, laugh altogether)
2. Teacher: (Smiling) Oh my God! I know how to say that… (Nodding as he says this)
4. Teacher: (Laughs out loud) Ok, (pauses) whore…
5. Edwin: ¡Uy! (To Diana) ¡Escribe eso! ¡Escribe eso! ¡Anótalo! (laughs, to Raúl) ¡Cla…ro!
¡Toca saber!
6. Teacher: (To Diana) What is the most common word for that?
8. Teacher: Whore
(Teacher laughs out loud)
9. Diana: No…!
10. Edwin: Bitches! Ah no! Because the bitches no cobran! (All the group laughs, including
the teacher)
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In example B, above all, humor triggers the unconventional exchanges to occur within a class; at
the same time, we must consider it is part of the commonly held interaction, as there is a
tendency from students to generate humor in their exchanges. Example B is an extract from a
listening exercise. I recorded this video extract as Will provided instructions on a listening test he
conducted for his class.
Teacher: Guys: write your names, and give it to me, please. This very moment. Write
your name. Your full name, please. Thank you. Thank you. It was very easy, or it was
complicated? A kind of hard for you? Not. Wasn’t. It was a piece of cake. (To Yolanda) Yeah,
please, your name, I’m telling you.
Students start talking as Will collects their exercises.
So, what is number 1? When is Kim doing? Number one. WHEN? Teacher provides feedback
and students respond to his guiding questions based on the exercise.
Teacher: And, they’re going to be surfing and…?
Some students: Swimming
Teacher: (as he writes on the board) but you need to put “swimming” in this way
(Some students) : No!!! Ay no!
Carlos: ¿Se puede con doble I?
Erika laughs
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Teacher: Anyway. If you, for example, have only one M, don’t worry, if you only wrote it with
one m, I collaborate. I collaborate you
Edwin: Eso! (As he applauds Will kindness with their spelling mistake) A positive point for the
teacher
Teacher: So, guys. Look at this: You remember last class was about…
Class continues with content from the book.
If teachers had to plan humor, it may not be as humorous as expected, or it may turn into
a different section of the class. It would be part of the lesson plan at some point: Warm Up (10
minutes) – Joke about Honest Politicians (no more than five minutes. Deliver punch line
properly) – Presentation of the topic: City life (20 minutes) – Elicit suggestions to create another
humorous moment that can come from students (10 minutes, make sure they all understand what
the joke is about) As teachers, we are facing a competence to deal with the unexpected, the
unconventional, and then return to the class. In short, it is a choice illustrated by the teacher’s
response, and by the behavior of the students in the classroom. If humor is present in the
classroom as a pedagogical tool, the unexpected moment can be a short part of the lesson that
releases both a psychological and a physiological release. The tension created by the
explanations or the difficulty of the grammatical aspect being explained can actually be
diminished by the use of the linguistic ability that humor contains.
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In examples C and D, the discussion about the unconventional exchanges that result in
humor continues by adding that above all, humor generates some additional emotional factors
that can contribute to language learning. Research in Hall (1993), for instance, shows how one
woman was able to transform her involvement in a group and the activities they considered
important. She manipulated the conventional resources used for the activity, and played with
them to generate a great deal of humor, which helped her become visible within the group. The
role of humor within the unconventional in learning English also has a role. It constitutes a
moment of ease that provides a pause in the activity, which at the same time facilitates a
preparation and a disposition to learn. This is not to state that all moments of humor constitute
opportunities to learn, but to analyze its uses while also addressing the dichotomy to take humor
seriously and observe its functionality within the domain of English language learning:
Example C. Taken from Memos
It is a fact now that the center of the activity may not be the communicative purpose
itself, but the joking, the moments of laughter generated impromptu. If there is a moment that
students like about the class is the communicative moment, they start laughing even before they
approach their partners, there are moments in which their complexion changes even before the
explanation on the activity is finished. There is an important participation of the teacher in this,
as this environment for the unconventional includes the teacher to appear in the interactions.
Example D. Taken from Field Notes
At twenty past eight, Will continues with his class that started five minutes ago. One of
the dynamics of this class is that students do not have a restriction about the time they arrive to
classes.
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Students keep coming into the classroom although it is already late. Teacher reminds students
about punctuality. Yolanda responds to the teacher’s comment.
Teacher: Guys: you know it is important to be here on time. I want to ask you about punctuality.
Yolanda: Teacher: but it’s Friday! (Using Spanish intonation for the expression)
Teacher: I know the traffic is complicated at this hour, but try to be here on time.
As the teacher speaks, Axl gets into the classroom. The student tries to get into his group, but his
attempt results in noises and an interruption to the class. The teacher observes what he is doing
and he says:
Teacher: (To Axl) Ok, organize first, and then I speak, because this for me is very complicated.
(Teacher pauses as Axl gets into the group. Around half a minute pause. Teacher addresses Axl)
Menos mal vino, porque si no, estas niñas… (using a mocking tone and a mocking expression.
Students in the group laugh, including Axl) ES QUE ÉL ES EL CONSEN…TIDO DE LA
CLASE (In a louder tone of voice, as he smiles)
Students in general: A…y! (In a raising tone, acknowledging the ambiguity of what the
teacher has just said. To Axl) Thank you for coming! (All students laugh)
The positive environment generated by humor is contagious. In general, the observations
showed how language learning happened within the errors made, the teasing that an error
generated. A joke that was made of L1 and L2 mixture of expressions (Example D) was a
combination of Spanish intonation in an L2 expression. This all led to a sociocultural axis that
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had the role of providing a pragmatic moment, which eased the tension generated by the
formality given by the grammatical unit explained by Will at the beginning of the class.
The expectations of a student when they enroll in an English course at an institute are too many.
As seen in a previous excerpt above, taken from the first phase (the problem statement) among
such expectations and beliefs, students understood the English class as a space for different
things to happen, a different moment, a space where learning and playing concurred. Overall,
humor, within the unexpected and unconventional evidenced itself as a linguistic fact that joins
groups and solidifies processes through time. This is a pragmatic competence that is underlying
interaction in groups, especially when learning a foreign language, and it requires understanding
from the teacher and the group for it to occur freely, otherwise, it will be seen as a threat, a lack
of respect to the teacher, a or an impertinent moment in the thread of the lesson being taught.
Contribution of the Pattern to Classroom Interaction and Language Learning
In the data, some other excerpts show in a repetitive basis how students look for many
ways to play with language so that a humorous exchange can emerge. It is an invitation
promoted by the act of translation and code switching, a moment in which the most accurate
corresponding term in which we use both languages in order to promote understanding. When
students find the meaning of a word, the usually try to change this given meaning to something
that is more related to their immediate interpretation, a synonym that is most commonly related
to colloquialisms, demonstrating the search for familiarity, and evidencing risk taking. This
moment within the activity, as observed, also reaches the teacher, who accepts the
unconventional by showing empathy and understands it as part of the class’ continuum. The final
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answer provided by Edwin, a mixture of L1 and L2 to create a humorous exchange, is a concept
understood by the whole group by now, this exemplifies how within these type of exchanges,
language construction exists. The dynamics of the classroom created under such moments also
generated this: a culture, a set of behaviors and practices that became part of the communicative
act of the language class. In general, the teacher did not deter the unconventional to happen,
although he claimed to be formal and to have a structured vision of curriculum.
There were classes in which teacher Will adopted a serious tone, as trying to return to his
position of authority, mostly because he sometimes saw himself as a moderator of humor in the
classroom. Above all, humor, as part of unconventional exchanges is a linguistic resource that
may emerge, it may happen, it may be present there, and it is a two-side type of skill and
competence to deal with every time a communicative activity is given. I could observe that every
time Will did not know how to deal with humorous unconventional exchanges, his tendency was
to recuperate control by means of stopping laughter. There was an underlying role of control that
Will needed to calibrate permanently, because if students used too much of it, humor could have
led them to disengagement.
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Getting Involved in the Class Dynamics by Using Code Switching
This pattern of interaction refers to the opportunity that students had to negotiate
meaning, clarify concepts, and expand language scope by means of the unconventional
exchanges that emerged within a given activity such as using Spanish as a vehicle for
understanding. Instead of developing tasks as expected, the “students ways” portrayed in this
subcategory showed their capacity to communicate what they knew in order to construct
learning, even if colloquial words, sayings, everyday Colombian expressions, and language
transfer appeared. The understanding of this analysis of this pattern defined the ability that
students used in order to accept help from their teacher or peers in classroom activities. This
happened even if the selected language was not English, or even if the expressions selected did
not have an appropriate translation into L2. The following samples from the selected instruments
can help us identify this phenomenon of collaboration:
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Getting Involved in The Class Dynamics by using L1
Example
A:
Taken
from
Audio Example
Recordings
1. Edwin: Ok. Eh… What is the
B:
Taken
from
Video
recordings
Teacher explains the topic of superlative
meaning of: I have never? ¿Yo
adjectives and selects Yolanda as the
nunca?
subject for all of his examples
2. Sarah: Yo nunca (Affirming tone)
3. Edwin: Ok. I have never. I have
1. Teacher: So, in the superlative we
neve…r… playe…d squash, I have
say: the funniest. Who is the
neve...r--listened eh, rock music…
funniest in the classroom? Again:
4. Sarah: Nooooo? (Amazed by this
latter opinion)
Yolanda is the funniest (as he writes
on the board)
5. Edwin: No
6. Sarah: Aaaaaah! (Taking her hands
2. Yolanda: Ush juemadre!
to her face in horror, teasing Edwin
at the same time with her tone of
3. Teacher: Ah no, ya no vamos a
voice and body language. Laughs)
mencionar más a Yolanda, ya
Si es lo más chimba, en serio ¿Por
Yolanda está como aburrida, (to
qué son asì? (In a soft tone)
Yolanda) Yolanda: Are you stressed
7. Edwin: (Ignoring her comment) I
with me?
have neve…r, eh…, I have never,
eh…, smoked… It’s *very* bad for
theee *boty*, eh…finish! And you?
4. (Class laughs)
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And you? (To Sarah)
8. Sarah: I have never smoked
5. Yolanda: No! (Laughs)
6. (Teacher laughs)
9. Raúl: Very bad
10. Sarah: It’s very very bad (laughs) ¡Is
badísimo! (laughs loudly)
7. Teacher: (To Yolanda) Do you have
something to say? Don’t worry.
11. (Raúl laughs)
12. Edwin: The reggaeton
13. Sarah: The reggaeton is badísimo,
8. Yolanda: In the word “English”
there is not an E in the beginning
¡badísimo! (Laughs)
14. Edwin: (Not reacting to her
9. Teacher: (As he observes the board
laughter) For me, the reggaeton is a
and the example he had written) ah,
music eh only for party animal, for
ok, so I need to correct this (The
the moment… eh, I listen this music
word was misspelled: Inglish) into
but in moments no… all the time
this (As he writes the correct word)
15. Sarah: Right
Thank you
16. Edwin: Eh, for me is not bad this
music
17. Sarah:
but… but… for parties is good, but
listening to they, and… bah
(expression of nausea)
18. Edwin: O…k, because…, only the
moment
10. Yolanda: Ok teacher
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19. Sarah: Yeah
20. Edwin: For the moment, for the girl
21. Sarah: (Laughs and looks up) Ha!
For the girl-----
Code switching is sometimes used at the The activity proposed takes around 20
risk of language transfer to occur. The use minutes. Students interact, laugh, some
of Spanish triggers the unconventional to students come into the classroom from other
happen in the form of unexpected questions, courses to ask for chairs. Some students
comments, jokes, and some other language from the class come late to class and start
devices that enhance language learning by joining the groups and interacting. Teacher
expanding
the
conventional
into
the addresses the group:
unconventional. Spanish is used as a linker,
it merges into grammatical examples given,
1. Teacher: Ey! What’s your opinion
it seems to be the preferred device upon
on… reggaeton?
(Class laughs)
which students rely. The uses of L1 also
Mucho perreo? Mucho bellaqueo?
permit low proficient students to become
part of the activities, to take part from time
2. Yolanda: Ush, profe! ¿Qué es eso?
to time, to include themselves in the
3. (Students laugh)
dynamics by stating they are understanding,
although
they
cannot
provide
clear
4. Teacher: Yes, Stella
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examples in L2. These students usually take
notes, or adopt the role of note-takers in
5. Ss: U…sh
their groups.
6. Axl: Ya se le aprendieron el nombre
7. (Students laugh)
8. Teacher: What’s that?
9. Yolanda: Que ya te le aprendiste el
nombre
10. Teacher: Yes. That is the challenge!
That is the challenge! Ese es el reto.
Table 3. Data analysis. Subcategory 2: Getting involved in the class dynamics by using L1.
Example A. In this class, Ss work on a speaking exercise that reviews the topic of past
tense and present perfect. T provides the directions for the activity: they have to work in pairs,
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asking and answering questions and filling up some blanks with the information collected.
Today, Ss interact more in English at the beginning of the class. The activity takes around 20
minutes to be completed. Ss interact, laugh and try to elaborate their responses upon the
questions of the exercise. Some Ss from different courses get into the classroom to ask for chairs.
Some students from the class come late, they get into groups, although the instruction was to
work by pairs. These students start asking about the activity for the class, and how to solve it. T
does not really pay too much attention to these interactions, he is interested in the students who
are already talking about the exercise, and providing feedback to them. One of the pairs of
students are next to another pair of students (Raúl and Diana) They speak around the activity,
sometimes addressing the other couple. I will concentrate my attention on Edwin and Sarah’s
exchanges:
Students had an ongoing understanding that communicative activities generated all types
of improvisations and twists that would not pertain to the exercise given. By using L1, students
supported what they wanted to say in a more natural way, even if they had to translate this
opinion later into L2:
1. Edwin: Ok. Eh… What is the meaning of: I have never? ¿Yo nunca?
2. Sarah: Yo nunca (Affirming tone)
3. Edwin: Ok. I have never. I have neve…r… playe…d squash, I have neve...r--listened eh,
rock music…
4. Sarah: Nooooo? (Amazed by this latter opinion)
5. Edwin: No
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6. Sarah: Aaaaaah! (Taking her hands to her face in horror, teasing Edwin at the same time
with her tone of voice and body language. Laughs) Si es lo más chimba, en serio ¿Por
qué son asì? (In a soft tone)
7. Edwin: (Ignoring her comment) I have neve…r, eh…, I have never, eh…, smoked… It’s
*very* bad for theee *boty*, eh…finish! And you? And you? (To Sarah)
9. Raúl: Very bad
10. Sarah: It’s very very bad (laughs) ¡Is badísimo! (laughs loudly)
11. (Raúl laughs)
13. Sarah: The reggaeton is badísimo, ¡badísimo! (Laughs)
14. Edwin: (Not reacting to her laughter) For me, the reggaeton is a music eh only for party
animal, for the moment… eh, I listen this music but in moments no… all the time
15. Sarah: Right
16. Edwin: Eh, for me is not bad this music
17. Sarah:
but… but… for parties is good, but listening to they,
and… bah (expression of nausea)
18. Edwin: O…k, because…, only the moment
19. Sarah: Yeah
21. Sarah: (Laughs and looks up) Ha! For the girl-----
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The atmosphere of inclusion that allows errors to be present in these kinds of
unconventional exchanges using Spanish, promotes two metacognitive skills in the linguistic
domain adjacent to collaboration assimilation, and another one we can call proximity. Both of
them demonstrated what in other words is comradery (a term used in this study to indicate that
friendship and a spirit of group work appeared). Slang words and colloquial terms appeared and
helped to communicate within exchanges, and despite their unconventionality (See Line 6,
Example A. Line 2, Example B. Line 1, Example C), they were a tool for communication that
could help to enrich the exercise at some moment. This was an exercise of expectancy and
acceptance. Students expected that L1 unconventional exchanges could expand language
learning by means of correlating colloquial expressions or slangs with L2, thus, expanded the
scope of their linguistic exchanges once they presented the activity.
In example B, both the teacher and the student negotiated meaning by using L1 and the
result is a correction of a misspelled word written by the teacher. The teacher commonly
revealed his acceptance of the use of L1 in unconventional exchanges. At first, the teacher
suggested not using L1 in the classroom, but as the course developed, he established he
sometimes felt the necessity to speak in Spanish so that students would not get lost. The use of
L1 in this example shows that in terms of language learning the participants used it as a tool to
tease the other and to provide the example:
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1. Teacher: So, in the superlative we say: the funniest. Who is the funniest in the classroom?
Again: Yolanda is the funniest (as he writes this teasing statement on the board)
2. Yolanda: Ush juemadre!
3. Teacher: Ah no, ya no vamos a mencionar más a Yolanda, ya Yolanda está como
aburrida, (to Yolanda) Yolanda: Are you stressed with me? (Will smiles at Yolanda)
4. (Class laughs)
5. Yolanda: No! (Laughs)
6. (Teacher laughs)
7. Teacher: (To Yolanda) Do you have something to say? Don’t worry.
8. Yolanda: In the word “English” there is not an E in the beginning
9. Teacher: (As he observes the board and the example he had written) ah, ok, so I need to
correct this (The word was misspelled: Inglish) into this (As he writes the correct word)
Thank you
10. Yolanda: Ok teacher
The latter example shows the importance of the use of colloquialisms from L1 while
negotiating for meaning, a process that not always has translation and synonymy as a means for
understanding. The unconventionality of the uses of L1 also constitutes a socially agreed use that
may not be easy to understand in a context where the teacher is a “native” speaker. Subsequently,
the foreign teacher, capable of communicating fluently in L2, would not have an easy task
relating to the unconventionalities that Spanish contains. The foreign teacher could not relate to
the socially agreed constructions of language that can promote language learning by means of
understanding the background of the learners. All the possible meanings a word or an expression
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as: “¡ush, juemadre!” can have in a given moment, can be elicited within an exchange when L1
is used in the EFL classroom, all of this based on the learning theories, understood by the
Colombian, local teacher.
Analyzing example C, it can be established that the risk of language transfer is imminent
when L1 becomes a tradition in the language classroom. In this sense, the colloquialisms in L1,
and L1 use are inevitable as it has been and will be illustrated. In the observations, lots of
mistakes from the teacher were observed, and the confusion generated by this was something
that the teacher needed to solve permanently, as some students were able to notice the mistakes
provided:
Participants use code switching at the risk of language transfer to occur. The use of
Spanish triggers the unconventional to happen in the form of unexpected questions, comments,
jokes, and some other language devices that enhance language learning by expanding the
conventional into the unconventional. Spanish is used as a linker, it merges into grammatical
examples given, it seems to be the preferred device upon which students rely. The uses of L1
also permit low proficient students to become part of the activities, to take part from time to
time, to include themselves in the dynamics by stating they understand, although they cannot
provide clear examples in L2. These students usually take notes, or adopt the role of note-takers
in their groups.
One of the first rules of the teacher for this course at the beginning was: “Do not use
Spanish in this class” (Taken from Field Notes #1) Although teacher Will tried to accomplish
this goal for as much as possible, he started to break his own rule, to the point he also recognized
it was an unattainable goal. The necessity for explanation, the necessity of clarity, or the
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accuracy that is vital when teachers give their instructions so that students develop an activity
right after they receive instructions, forced Will to use L1. This fact also led the unconventional
exchanges to occur, because there was a tendency to associate vocabulary and expressions to the
closest and most familiar concept. Once I found an unconventional expression, the assimilation
of the terminology led to language learning, because the consensus in the definition had made
this possible. Again, example A exemplifies this tendency to look for familiarity:
2. Raúl: Very bad
3. Sarah: It’s very very bad (laughs) ¡Is badísimo! (laughs loudly)
4. (Raúl laughs)
6. Sarah: The reggaeton is badísimo, ¡badísimo! (Laughs)
7. Edwin: (Not reacting to her laughter) For me, the reggaeton is a music eh only for party
animal, for the moment… eh, I listen this music but in moments no… all the time
8. Sarah: Right
9. Edwin: Eh, for me is not bad this music
10. Sarah:
but… but… for parties is good, but listening to they,
and… bah (expression of nausea)
11. Edwin: O…k, because…, only the moment
12. Sarah: Yeah
14. Sarah: (Laughs and looks up) Ha! For the girl-----
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Students in general knew their main tool for the elaboration of communicative exchanges
was not exclusively the target language. English suggested learners a formal way of
communication that came from the book, the transformation happened in the exchanges that
students created. This happened mainly because some other logical sequences in conversation
appeared, and the modifications in cultural and social aspects of conversation when they were
contrasted with the exchanges proposed by the formality of the course, the textbook or the
teacher. Among others, unconventional exchanges in L1 are a tool for observing how flexible
and deliberate language use can be, and students want to establish this parallelism all the time,
also because they do not want to lose their persona in the use of a second language. In the
example given, students’ intonation did not try to emulate correct English pronunciation; they
emulated a Colombian Spanish tonality. This learning strategy was not a deliberate
disengagement from correct pronunciation; it was more a device for establishing a linguistic
resource that was both semiotic and pragmatic: the local touch, which permeated interactions and
triggered the unconventional to occur.
Example D supports the ideas discussed so far about the unconventional exchanges using
L1 while developing communicative activities. In the example shown, the participants of the
exchange clearly merged expressions from Spanish into the use of English:
The activity proposed takes around 20 minutes. Students interact, laugh, some students come into
the classroom from other courses to ask for chairs. Some students from the class come late to
class and start joining the groups and interacting. Teacher addresses the group:
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1. Teacher: Ey! What’s your opinion on… reggaeton? (Class laughs) ¿Mucho perreo?
¿Mucho bellaqueo?
2. Yolanda: Ush, profe! ¿Qué es eso?
3. (Students laugh)
4. Teacher: Yes, Stella
5. Ss: U…sh
6. Axl: Ya se le aprendieron el nombre
7. (Students laugh)
8. Teacher: What’s that?
9. Yolanda: Que ya te le aprendiste el nombre
10. Teacher: Yes. That is the challenge! That is the challenge! Ese es el reto.
As explained above, the local touch permeates interactions due to the nature of the course
and the population. Local interjections are a part of language that may not have a translation
more than in the pragmatic interpretation, which may lead to another approach for further
analysis. The use of the unconventional expressions in L1 merges English and Spanish into a
dynamic understood only by local users of a language, understood as socially negotiated and
constructed. By doing this, the participants are bringing their understanding of their own
language into the use of a second language. The expressions used by the teacher such as “perreo”
and “bellaqueo” took students by surprise, but not because they did not know them, but because
they were unexpected and unconventional. Coming from the pacific region of Colombia
(Chocó), the teacher used two expressions that may had different meanings in Spanish. By doing
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this, students also had an example on how diverse language use can be, especially within the
unconventional. In the exercise, students had to elicit a somewhat formal list of items for the
question: “What’s your opinion on…?” The list included cellphones, education, friendship,
languages, and the city, a list that they used to generate opinions on reggaeton, as shown in
example D. By acknowledging such detour, the teacher used the terms “perreo” and “bellaqueo”
as tools for explanation, and although this generated some reactions from students, it captivated
their attention, and he used them as part of his explanation. This helped to explain the intention
of the teacher to make himself part of the group. He positions himself as a Colombian person,
expert in as many colloquial and slang exemplifications as his students. Teacher Will plays with
language because he knows how to use both codes in order to do what students also do regularly
in the development of the activities given. Fortune (2012) claims how before teachers “blame”
all of their students’ problems in the L2 on the negative influence of their mother tongue (Cook,
2001, p. 15) they should consider Deller’s claim that the student L1 is an “important resource”
(2008, p. 3) in L2 teaching and learning. Teachers should be open to a certain amount of code
switching in class, which can help avoid the “artificially monolingual communicative setting”
(Llurda, 2004, p. 317).
Using Slangs to Facilitate Communication
In the examples provided below, students helped each other to achieve a common
communicative goal using slangs. The conceptualization of this third pattern of interaction,
which this study defines as the use of slangs to facilitate communication is an unconventional
way of classroom interaction that deals with the way students used verbal and non-verbal
language in order to approach their peers or their teachers. As the project will portray, the display
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of these pragmatic linguistic resources, exemplifies the necessity that learners had to
communicate with their immediate context, at the same level of discourse.
We can observe the samples selected for this pattern in the following table:
Using slangs to facilitate communication
Example A: Taken from Audio Recordings
Example B: Taken from Video Recordings
1. Carlos: The fruits is plural -----
So, you know, we have a new expression
hablamos muy chibchombiano
for today, if you want to increase your
2. Raúl: No…, es que esto va aquí
vocabulary. It is this one. Edwin! In your
(referring to the worksheet)
opinion, what’s the expression in Spanish
3. Diana: Looking at Raúl and Carlos’
for this expression? ----- Do yours that I do
worksheet Tu tienes que poner: a/ an mine…
4. Raúl: es a/an/ o some
Edwin: tu eres
5. Carlos: ¿Sabe qué? Pond es
Teacher: Ok, tell me, in your opinion
estanque… Po…nd Es…tan…que
Edwin: Tu eres lo que… uy no
(To Raúl) ¿El estanque tiene agua?
Teacher: Who has a different opinion?
6. Raúl: (Ironically, mocking,
What is mine?
laughing) No… güevón!
Yolanda: Mío
7. Carlos: Pues---pues---pues si, pero
Teacher: Mío, ok. Yours? Yours? Yours?
puede estar desocupa…do, osea, ¡Es
¡Jay Dios mío!… I’ll revise that topic
el estanque y el tanque y el estanque
Axl: Whose?
tiene tierra y tiene cemento weón!
Teacher: (Expressing a negative answer
(both students laugh)
with a linguistic expression from Spanish)
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Ah-ah you say: “your” es: “tu”, but: “your”,
es: “lo tuyo…” do yours: Haz (pointing
with his finger outside of himself)
Edwin: ¿Lo tuyo es mío?
Teacher and class laugh
Edwin: Lo tuyo es mío y lo mío es tuyo
(Class laughs)
Teacher: Ok, Haz
Erika: Ah, haz lo tuyo
Edwin: Que yo hago lo mío
Teacher: ¡Bie…n!
Edwin: ¡Ah! Entonces más bien: ¡No sea
sapo!
(Teacher laughs)
Teacher: Ok, something like that. Es: Haz
tus cosas, que yo hago lo mío.
Students
have
unconventional
realized
can
be
that
part
of
the Teacher says: One thing is a beach, another
the thing is a bitch
exchanges. Although what they want to say (Class laughs)
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may not be formal, they include their Yolanda: Ush (In a burlesque tone showing
unconventional exchanges as part of the a funny facial expression. Class laughs
exercises. This results generally in the again in reaction to this)
inclusion of learners into activities that A student enters the classroom and she
would not be part of the group if they could stumbles as she crosses the door. The class
not understand the devices used. If the is interrupted because the majority of the
approaching is too formal, the student people in the classroom noticed, including
displays a face that does not match, and he the teacher.
or he goes to another group where the tone Teacher: Oh! Good morning! (Class laughs
is more informal. Even so, learners always again, and the girl takes his right hand to his
look for groups where they can play with face, laughing, showing embarrassment at
language, where they can feel at ease. the same time) That’s a new way to say
Paradoxically, such moments makes them hello in Colombia! (Teacher imitates her,
more attached to the formalities of language stumbling and saying hello to the class
required by the tasks at the end, by while waving his hand)
following structures precisely, even though (The student sits in her usual group)
the unconventional is included.
Erika: ¡Ay por Dios! ¡Me hicieron bullying
por llegar tarde hoy! (She laughs and
continues to ask her partners what to do in
the activity)
Table 4. Data analysis: Subcategory 3. Becoming aware of transactional discursive devices in the
classroom.
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In example A, the tone of the conversation may be rude and to some extent, harsh in the
use of language:
Example A: Taken from Audio Recordings
1. Carlos: The fruits is plural ----- hablamos muy chibchombiano
2. Raúl: No…, es que esto va aquí (referring to the worksheet)
3. Diana: Looking at Raúl and Carlos’ worksheet Tu tienes que poner: a/ an
4. Raúl: es a/an/ o some
5. Carlos: ¿Sabe qué? Pond es estanque… Po…nd Es…tan…que (To Raúl) ¿El estanque
tiene agua?
6. Raúl: (Ironically, mocking, laughing) No… güevón!
Carlos: Pues---pues---pues si, pero puede estar desocupa…do, osea, es el estanque y el
tanque y el estanque tiene tierra y tiene cemento weón (both students laugh)
However, the latter example contains an underlying tool that students use to understand
the unconventional exchanges: assimilation, or the ability to take an otherwise insult, and
continue an interaction without making it relevant, only part of a regular device used in
conversations. The latter fact includes the capacity to go beyond the immediate exchange and
consider that within conversations, there will always be a component of the unconventional.
Such component moves the learner to set the same tone, the same words, the same level of
expression that his or her partner is using, so that communication can happen successfully. If this
example had had the interpretation of it being an insult, for example, communication would have
broken down, and Carlos would have stopped the conversation to move on to work with a
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different partner. On the contrary, Carlos stayed, understanding the unconventional exchange as
part of the exchange that was taking part. He did not respond aggressively, neither physically nor
verbally, he just continued the conversation understanding that the linguistic device used by Raúl
was serving the function of an ironic comment, teasing him after his question. These type of
devices are usually present in paired interactions, and tend to disappear in in-group interactions,
as paired interactions seem to be more private and the tendency to make mistakes does not
threaten the face of the students as members of the group.
Example B shows the same type of discursive devices coming from the unconventional,
this time associating L1 with L2, having the teacher as the participant of the exchange:
8.11 a.m. There are only 7 Ss in the classroom. Students start coming in as the class develops.
Today, only buses from TM and SITP (Private Public Transportation Enterprises) are working
due to a strike on regular transportation. At 8.15, T states he should start class by now. He starts
talking about the oral project, which students will have to present at the end of the course. He lets
them choose upon the topics freely. However, he says he will provide the evaluation criteria,
which he will send via email. He takes some minutes of the class to write on the board all the
usual aspects distributed in his board layout: to the upper right corner, he writes the quote of the
week (Do yours that I do mine).
Right after this, T starts explaining the meaning of this saying in L2. Edwin tries to explain the
saying in L2 by guessing:
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So, you know, we have a new expression for today, if you want to increase your vocabulary. It is
this one. Edwin! In your opinion, what’s the expression in Spanish for this expression? ----- Do
yours that I do mine…
Edwin: tu eres
Teacher: Ok, tell me, in your opinion
Edwin: Tu eres lo que… uy no
Teacher: Who has a different opinion? What is mine?
Yolanda: Mío
Teacher: Mío, ok. Yours? Yours? Yours? ¡Jay Dios mío!… I’ll revise that topic
Axl: Whose?
Teacher: (Expressing a negative answer with a linguistic expression from Spanish) Ah-ah you
say your, es tu, but your, es lo tuyo… do yours: Haz (pointing with his finger outside of himself)
Edwin: ¿Lo tuyo es mío?
Teacher and class laugh
Edwin: Lo tuyo es mío y lo mío es tuyo (Class laughs)
Teacher: Ok, Haz
Erika: Ah, haz lo tuyo
Edwin: Que yo hago lo mío
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Teacher: ¡Bie…n!
Edwin: ¡Ah! Entonces más bien: ¡No sea sapo!
(Teacher laughs)
Teacher: Ok, something like that. Es: Haz tus cosas, que yo hago lo mío.
The first person to grant these types of exchanges was the teacher. Not only in this
example, but also in many others, the teacher referred to colloquial expressions, jokes, serious
expressions, bantering, teasing, and many other devices to make his point clear when he was
explaining something. Once the level of formality was broken, the teacher and the students had
to deal with the unconventional first, and then continue working on the proposed activities.
Another point about this subcategory in this example is the fact that proximity with language
devices used in Spanish were crucial to generate understanding. After this class, several times
this expression was present, and its use had the intention given by Edwin at the end, in the most
unconventional interpretation: “snitches get stitches”. Again the unconventional is promoting a
language detour that moves from the formal interpretation given to the saying by the teacher to
an unconventional exchange.
Example C shows how language creates inclusion and exclusion within given activities in
the classroom, and how the understanding of the language devices used is crucial for the learner
to include himself into a group:
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Students have realized that the unconventional can be part of the exchanges. Although
what they want to say may not be formal, they include their unconventional exchanges as part of
the exercises. This results generally in the inclusion of learners into activities that would not be
part of the group if they could not understand the devices used. If the approaching is too formal,
they do not integrate the student, and he or he goes to another group where the tone is more
informal. Even so, learners always look for groups where they can play with language, where
they can feel at ease. Paradoxically, such moments makes them more attached to the formalities
of language required by the tasks at the end, by following structures precisely, even though the
unconventional is included.
In the case of this study, language inclusion happens when the students are in the
capacity to interpret the scenarios as prominently unconventional. As a result of this, the
flexibility provided by these types of exchanges expands communicative activities and generate
understanding and team work. This is what the project called: proximity. Something attached to
this finding is the fact that groups worked better when their discursive devices were present.
There was a paralinguistic set of devices joining groups together. Gestures and expressions at the
moment of speaking. Specific slang words being part of explanations. Words coming from new
technologies and mass media, being part of the exchanges became the glue that maintained
cohesion among groups. This makes evident the disruption in communication that happens when
one student attaches himself/herself to the conventional and expected and the other deals a lot
with the improvised and unconventional. Proximity is broken. Sometimes, students did not work
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at all, all of this because of a couple of minutes conversation that helped students conclude that
their devices did not match. What happened after they saw they would not understand each other
because the conversational devices did not match, was the interruption of the activity due to a
lack of mutual understanding about what was said, and how an activity was supposed to be
elaborated.
Example D illustrates how the understanding of a comment could also have led to
misunderstandings, or a bad environment in the class. The student in this sample faced the
misfortune to stumble as she crossed the door of the classroom when entering. She was already
late, the class had already started, and the class was almost completely silent. The teacher then
had the opportunity to tease her in front of the class, using irony and a bold way to generate
laughter from what had just happened to her:
A student enters the classroom and she stumbles as she crosses the door. The class is interrupted
because the majority of the people in the classroom noticed the event, including the teacher.
Teacher: Oh! Good morning! (Class laughs again, and the girl takes his right hand to his face,
laughing, showing embarrassment at the same time) That’s a new way to say hello in Colombia!
(Teacher imitates her)
(The student sits in her usual group)
Erika: ¡Ay por Dios! ¡Me hicieron bullying por llegar tarde hoy! (She laughs and
continues to ask her partners what to do in the activity)
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Her reaction was sincere, she was not upset, nor was she ignoring the teacher. Her main
concern was to get into a group and develop the activity, but she knew she had made a mistake,
and because of this, she understood that because of the tone of the voice of the teacher, and
because of the environment generated in this classroom, she had nothing to fear, as she was not
being insulted. This unconventional action, this moment of embarrassment was part of the class,
and the teacher made it part of the event by teasing Erika, but from the first moment, she
understood that this was the intention of the teacher. At the same time, the teacher acknowledged
her presence, he did not make a comment about her being late, he just welcomed her using
humor, and the entire group understood it as such, using both, proximity and assimilation.
The samples that I have shown in this chapter reflected upon what the unconventional
exchanges can contribute to language learning in an EFL setting. As already stated, the tradition
states the agenda, and the teacher establishes the activities. There is an apparent formal moment
in the class, which is evident in its execution and observable in the teacher, the textbook, and the
students’ behavior. Within this moment, students proceed to develop the speaking activity in
terms of what is expected. However, students in the different observations come up with what is
unexpected, unconventional. Consequently, such a formal scheme provided by tradition and
literature was difficult to fulfill thoroughly. It was this latter fact, the one I could not find in the
literature, the center of discussion for this project. As seen in the descriptions along the
document, unconventional exchanges triggered predominantly by humor can create a
communicative tension in several areas if not managed properly. As observed, they link
themselves to the objectives of the project in the sense of the analysis provided to the
unconventional interaction. Among others, this analysis expects to have moved a step away from
the formal traditions of research that have lacked to show that these types of things happen in
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classrooms. The point here was to exemplify how the unconventional, the improvised ways that
classroom participants have whilst developing activities within the communicative approach,
help students as they learn a foreign language using a series of unconventional and non-formal
ways of correlating existing knowledge.
Conclusions and Implications
Students face a variety of challenges when they need to organize and present their ideas
in communicative activities. In speaking activities, students’ verbal exchanges expect to be
coherent and related to the expectations of the course, the textbook, and the teacher (the official
curriculum so to speak). The speaking ability implies and assumes an initial level of formality,
a set of exchanges that combine the communicative abilities of the learner with the grammar
and vocabulary learned during a given unit. The resulting examples of these activities are
usually present in terms of the abovementioned expectancy: scripted language that exemplifies
language structures and language used within expected and common scenarios. There are
communicative moments happening between the first and the last phase of the process. As we
have established, our process of analysis based its framework on the Initiation-ResponseEvaluation scheme as described in Hall (2001). By doing this, students describe, exemplify,
enact, communicative situations using the language that the course expects them to use.
However, there are communicative moments happening between the first and the last phase of
the process.
What Unconventional Exchanges Emerge Among Students in one Course at ILUD? And
at what Moments of the Language Class?
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As we have established, our process of analysis based its framework on the InitiationResponse-Evaluation scheme. The moments of free choice and improvisation trigger a
productive and communicative type of interaction. Such assertion was observable in the
selection of words, the construction of sentences, and the selection of scenarios that do not
pertain to the portion of culture offered by the book, but the culture of the classroom itself. This
small portion of culture created by the inhabitants of that living interaction created within the
walls of a classroom looks for improvisation and unconventional interactions as a means to
calibrate discourses from learners and the teacher. The members of a diverse group like the one
analyzed in this project, being it open, democratic, and with an important age-gap of about
seventeen years, all match the core fundamentals of the communicative approach. Their
selection of words becomes unconventional because they deliberately and spontaneously merge
everyday language, humor, comradery, and teasing with their familiar ways of exerting their
use of language in their own realities.
Of course, the conditions that made this project possible, among others, were the age of
the population (18 to 35 years old), the balanced methodology offered by teacher Will, and the
socio-economical background of the group selected. Teacher Will baptized every class with a
grammatical objective. He had a disposition of elements on the board that were always present:
the date, the number of the session, the grammatical objectives, and a saying, which he always
translated into Spanish in its most accurate significance. He used a black marker to write on the
board and no displayed no further visual aids. He did not use graphics, or flashcards, and the
use of videos was of three times during the course. However, the unconventional in teacher
Will became evident when he spoke, when he interacted in the class, when he provided
explanations. Pragmatically speaking, teacher Will’s body language was formal; his gestures
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showed he wanted to present himself as a very conservative teacher. In contrast, when he
spoke, and when he laughed, and when he varied the tonality of his voice when interacting, the
unconventional was unveiled in him. This tendency helped learners to demystify L2, make it
more approachable, and feel free to play the games they tended to illustrate while interacting.
What do those Unconventional Exchanges Based on Communicative Activities in L2
Reveal about Interaction in Language Development in one Basic Course at ILUD?
The disruption that occurs when the unconventional exchanges appeared evidenced the
first tension I had established before: a diversion from what is conventionally expected and
what participants obtain in return. In the final product, the students’ background and language
games emerged because it was the way students used to locate language use within familiar
contexts, upon which, language was also familiar to them. An unconventional exchange is the
communicative device that becomes the tool by which students relate to language learning, and
make their interpretations of the world visible among language use. Among others, the
cognitive process involved in the acquisition of L2, demands L1 to be present in such endeavor.
It becomes difficult to picture the idea of learning English or any other language in the same
way we did when we were children. However, the main tool to use is familiarity: the type of
association made when codes switch in order to make the target language usable and
understandable. Culturally speaking, as observed in the different extracts analyzed in the data,
a tendency to look for familiarity (beyond a practical use of language obtained in the
negotiation of meaning by obtaining the most practical definition of a word, or expression)
unveils a demonstration of how students demystify language and make it more approachable in
terms of every-day use. Besides the unconventional can constitute a cognitive skill linked to
such process in the context described in this paper.
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The factors described above (age of the participants, their socio-economical strata, the
way teacher Will used both verbal and non-verbal language, generating a disruption in his
tendency to be conventional and formal) were the basis for a compilation of characteristics that
triggered the unconventional and made it possible to explore such phenomenon. Firstly, a
characteristic which we could call ‘youth culture’, that uses its own interactional dynamics
where humor permeates most of the linguistic exchanges. This characteristic of language
exchange uses comradery, teasing, joking. It also utilizes code switching due to the mass media
and new technologies being part of their everyday life. Such factors help cohorts to revolve
around such terminologies in classrooms. On the other hand, students also used expressions and
terminology that has been common in Colombia for ages, surprisingly, among these two, the
fact that most triggers the unconventional, is the set of expressions coming from our
background and idiosyncrasy. Subsequently, if there is a crucial condition for the exploration of
the unconventional, it is humor. This condition is contained in the majority of expressions used
in the exchanges portrayed here. Humorous colloquialisms permeated all types of interaction,
starting from the teacher. Humor, then, was unveiled as a condition for group cohesion and
understanding among peers. It flows in levels of intelligence that could add to the
understanding linguistic abilities, for the students who had the tendency to be humorous,
evidenced less reluctance to speak, and promoted language use with though-provoking
comments that usually led to humor.
There were also the students’ ways, or the students’ agenda when solving a given activity.
This moment of the preparation of a speaking activity encouraged language to flow through a
myriad of language choices and improvisations, and students had the freedom to decide the
types of devices they would use as tools for developing a speaking activity. Students were not
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only able to use humor or L1 in their unconventional exchanges, they also started to develop an
ability to recognize pragmatics and semiotics within discourse and how their choices would
affect communication.
Pedagogical Implications
I also learned, on a pedagogical level, that the teacher could foster individual and
teamwork, promoting understanding among participants by getting target language to be close to
their interpretations of the world. The latter contrasts with the commonly held idea around
institutes in Bogota that a foreign teacher is a better teacher, leaving behind the fact that a local
teacher may also have the capacity to teach students beyond the practical, instrumental uses of
the target language. The foreign teacher, capable to communicate fluently in L2, would not have
had an easy task relating to the unconventionalities that Spanish contained in this course. A
foreign teacher could not have related to the socially agreed constructions of language that
helped to promote language learning by means of understanding the background of the learners.
All the possible meanings a word had in each case were elicited when L1 had the possibility to
be interpreted and used in language exchanges due to the fact of having a Colombian teacher,
teaching Colombian students how to master a foreign language.
As a result of this, the assessment process changes and becomes a twofold process in
which learners acquire both language awareness and metacognitive skills, which at the same
time reduces characteristics of the affective filter such as fear to take risks, and anxiety. In the
same way, the teacher becomes the cultural and local filter and the key element of a teaching
dynamic that generally presents foreign culture and ideal conversations in ideal situations.
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Although this project did not delve into the pedagogical dimension per se, it was
necessary to acknowledge and reflect upon this dimension at times, and provide reflections on
how the data could contribute into the further analysis of curriculum development and how other
teaching subjects could benefit from this. The local and cultural component already discussed
can be of great help to design and create contexts that are more meaningful for students who
want to acknowledge their background knowledge while taking a course. This theoretical
discussion, which has been unveiled and reported in extensive educational research about the
value of the local knowledge and community-based pedagogies, has exemplified how literacies
become tangible objects of pedagogy by the use of the immediate contexts of the learner. In such
documents, by mingling the learning of the world with the learning practices of a course,
students do learn; this fact can make use of the unconventional for curriculum design. The
disruption between the pragmatics of the people and the pragmatics of the academy creates a gap
that can have results such as disengagement and dropping out, among others.
As a result of this, the flexibility provided by these types of exchanges expands
communicative activities and generate understanding, providing practices of team work through
the validation of local practices and local language use. Something attached to this finding is the
fact that groups worked better when their devices were all common, when they understood each
other. There was a paralinguistic set of devices that joined groups together, and that is the reason
why breaking groups when an activity is being prepared, makes it difficult for students to work
better at first. Sometimes students did not work at all. This breakdown was generated by a couple
of minutes of conversation that helped students conclude that their devices did not match, and
they would not understand each other because the conversational aspect given by the devices,
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was stopped by a lack of mutual understanding about what was said, and how an activity was
supposed to be elaborated.
The speaking ability is typically an additional exercise for language classes, a
requirement from the curriculum, the institution, or the textbook that is immersed within the
steps of the communicative approach. At the beginning of the activities, teachers usually
provide all the vocabulary needed for the completion of the speaking exchange. The
explanation of the activity is given, and students ask questions before they start solving it by
themselves. The teacher sets a time scope for the activity to be developed, and students start
developing the activity with the information given. Nevertheless, at the end of the majority of
the speaking activities, the results are quite different from what the teacher expects: short
sentences, bad use of grammar and vocabulary, and utterances explained more than once.
However, this can be interpreted as “normal”, or expected, as students are in the process of
learning a new language. This happens when students discover by themselves that two or three
words from the vocabulary given cannot express the ideas contained in the exchanges that were
elaborated as a result of their free creations. Such ‘mediocre’ results, as seen by the teachers,
are the resulting product from methodologies strictly based on the pre-while-after methodology.
Within this framework, students must learn how to speak by following the premises of a
process from the communicative approach which, as seen some lines above, has had misled and
mostly subjective interpretations. As seen, the process of the so-called: before-while, and after,
that affects the four skills as it does with the speaking skill, needs to be interpreted within the
framework of the improvisational nature of language, which may lead to unconventional
exchanges, colloquialisms, and the search for language proximity that generates more
opportunities to create and learn.
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Above all, speaking should be a process that causes a constant set of reflections portrayed
in utterances, and it should promote the stimulation of curiosity and creativity. The latter is
easier said than done, because the constant revision for accuracy, a fixation brought from
another misinterpretation of the communicative approach, makes teachers provide language
samples that bring the learner “back on track” every time he or she tries to elaborate something
that looks slightly different from what is required. The speaking skill should unfold at the same
time as the content of a course develops. However, curriculums exist with all types of
constrictions mainly given by time. In this dynamic, the teacher runs against the clock, and
contents “have to be taught”, even if students still do not understand the content that has just
been “taught”.
The speaking ability is a daily basis piece of classwork, through simple exercises such as
open-ended provoking questions. The more comprehensive the activities in terms of culture
and local language devices the students address, the better their speaking practices will be, as
there will be more concrete ideas, exhibited through the samples provided in the books and coconstructed in the class. Real language used in examples for what students want to express
provides language awareness about structures and words.
By addressing speaking comprehensively, without stopping unconventional exchanges,
students feel more eager to express their ideas, because the teacher will be there to help them
and he or she will understand and promote the unconventional exchange to occur, which will in
turn generate more vocabulary and language functions to be unveiled. As a result of this, data
also exemplified how the teacher in the group selected became part of the trigger, a participant
who could relate to the exchanges by understanding them, merging them into the activity, and
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letting students continue with their exploration and the elaboration of their co-constructed
exchanges.
A course that integrates speaking development revises the fact that some learners are not
born as ‘gifted speakers’ whose speaking capacities exceed the rest of the class. There is a
struggle transferred from L1 into L2, and it is the fact that no word in English is pronounced as
it would sound in Spanish, and courses are not overtly focused on pronunciation, another fact
that makes teachers obsessed: correct pronunciation in a course that is not based on phonetics,
but merely on models of pronunciation. It also understands that some people do not like to
speak in front of others, and it provides clear instructions to organize speaking by writing,
starting from the basics: understanding words, then sentences, then paragraphs, then complete
texts. It integrates different forms of unconventional exchanges, such as jokes, humor, stories,
anecdotes, irony, sarcasm, comradery, among others, because all of them teach us something
we can later transform into a communicative exchange. It also integrates different learning
styles bringing multimodality into the classroom dynamics. By doing the latter, a wider range
of tools and possibilities emerge for students whose speaking skills are low.
Language Awareness
Language awareness is present when students realize that language has a set of fixed rules
that make it structural. However, language flows through contexts, cultures, situations, needs,
communities, and many other scenarios that enrich its use and expand it as individuals
communicate. Therefore, students learn to interpret the discursive elements of the scenarios in
which they need to use language. Due to this fact, they start to interpret and use discursive
devices in their communicative events. In the same way a set of paralinguistic devices also
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appear, due to the signs and the multimodality of the contexts in which they interact. The latter
exemplifies the development of metacognitive skills promoted because of the use of the
unconventional exchanges that we can call: assimilation, paralinguistic colloquialism, and
humorous language choices, or the ability for integrating comedy into understandable
exchanges.
Assimilation.
This concept refers to the capacity of a person to flow with discourse and see what
happens next without the necessity to interrupt, or respond immediately to what someone said.
It constitutes an element of turn-taking within the unconventional which helps to interpret the
words that were used to see the best possible way to respond. Such awareness requires a
cognitive skill that supports the unconventional and makes it possible. Assimilation constitutes
a new interpretation of thinking before speaking, mainly because it needs to interpret the
unconventional expression and build a response upon this interpretation.
Paralinguistic Colloquialism
The ability to interpret, use, and integrate common local gestures, expressions, and
mannerisms, commonly colloquial into a required activity. This ability helps learners to tackle
anxiety and fear; it gives them a sense of not losing face when learning a new language.
Humorous Language Choices
Linked to the other two concurrent patterns of unconventional exchanges, humorous
choices are language games elaborated when reinterpretations are possible. These type of
choices become evident when students use humor as a way to obtain laughter, which acts as an
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invisible glue for group cohesion and the creation of the before mentioned cohort culture, stated
by O’Conner (2009).
Additional Considerations
It is important to note that the results presented here constitute only the analysis that was
possible to implement to one class at a basic level. However, considering this local context
while acknowledging the unconventional, we become aware that students may take many paths
to produce a final version to create a speaking exercise. Altogether, teaching and learning
speaking are a set of opportunities for the production of meaningful insights that empower
learners to become visible by means of their own devices, or their so-called voices.
If I had the opportunity to address this experience differently, I would create speaking
activities that complemented the textbook modules and I would ask the teacher if he or she
could possibly apply them. I would also collect data in an extensive research in different
contexts and institutions around Bogota, to observe how the discursive devices of the
unconventional can promote language learning under different situational circumstances,
always asking participants to contribute with their most naturalistic displays of interaction. I
would also take into account how accurate code switching is, as it can feed the units of the
course. The latter would help the unconventional be seen as something that is a set of random
expressions promoted by the fact of a spontaneous interaction per se, but a set of accurate
114
EFL COURSE.
devices that can be used and enhance communication and intercultural communicative
competence (ICC).
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ANNEXES
1. Field Notes: Problem Statement.
123
EFL COURSE.
2. Audio Recording Sample: Transcription.
Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas. M.A. In Applied Linguistics to TEFL
Date: September 19 / 2014 Topic: Should / Have to / Can: Obligation and Permission Number
of Students: 13
Research Questions:
 What unconventional exchanges emerge across activities in an EFL setting? And at
 What do those unconventional exchanges based on communicative activities in L2
reveal about interaction in language development, in one basic course at ILUD?
Research Objectives:
 To characterize unconventional exchanges in an EFL course at ILUD
 To determine the possible implications that unconventional forms of interaction have
upon language learning at a course at ILUD
INSTRUMENT: Audio Transcript
Teacher Discourse & Students’ Responses
Laughter & Humor
124
EFL COURSE.
Uses of L1
Teacher’s Responses
Open Coding
CONVENTIONS
(-) Determines seconds of pause
(…) Elongation of vowel sound
(*Word*) Spanish pronunciation of letters in a
given word
(Stage direction) Short description of events that
are happening at the moment of speaking
(Highlighted word): Indicates a possible
disruption that can become an exemplification of
an unconventional exchange
(CAPITALIZED WORDS): Increased tonality
of voice, as when speakers make clarifications,
or have to repeat a concept.
T: Teacher
Today’s interaction is an extract from a speaking
exercise on the topic of Should / Have to / Can:
Obligation and Permission. Having provided his
1. Using slang to
125
EFL COURSE.
explanation about the activity, a group of Ss
connect to
interact, they have to create a set of instructions
others 38,
using the modal verbs. For doing this, students can
2. Using slangs
select any place they want; for example: a SPA, a
to call
hotel, a restaurant, a school, a park, etc.
attention to be
on task
3. Combining
1. Edwin: (To Diana)Britney’s Hotel, Marbelle
L1-L2 to show
Shakira hotel
2. Diana: ok ( as she writes the name of the
empathy
T1. Teacher: Yes!
4. Combining
place) ---------- I am a receptionist, you are a
L1-L2 to
cli- cli
emphasize
3. Edwin: Client
4. Diana: (affirming) a client
5. Edwin: You are the receptionist and the
owner
In the background,
the teacher elicits
suggestions for
places
language use
19, 36, 38, 72,
88,
5. Using humor
6. Diana: (laughs)
to connect to
7. Edwin: Bueno, ¿entonces me vas a
the other 41,
responder de lo que estábamos hablando? ¿o
61 to 64, 83,
te da miedo?
88, 90,
8. Diana: No, no, no toca empezar
6. Using humor
9. S in the background: ¡ay teacher!
to maintain
10. Edwin: ¿No ves que es nota? (to the teacher)
communicatio
126
EFL COURSE.
¡teacher: this activity, is a … ¿tiene nota?
n 41, 54 to 57,
61 to 64, 69,
11. Edwin: ¡Miercoles! No hay que improvisar,
hay que hacerlo bien entonces (Laughs)
72, 83, 88, 90,
7. Using
12. Diana: (Laughs)
imperatives in
13. Edwin: No… esta re fácil: ¡Un museo! -----
L1 or L2 to
o una biblioteca--- ¿No es más fácil? ---
encourage
Welcome to a friky hotel; entonces yo te
participation 8,
digo: Hello, Puerto Rico! (using the tone of
30, 38,
a TV show and announcer)
14. Diana: Okey, yo digo: welcome to the Friky
hotel, what do you want?
8. Using
questions in
L1 to search
15. Edwin: ¿Y yo que digo?
for validation
16. Diana: (exemplifying) I want, they want
38,
17. Edwin: I want ah… one room wi..th…
9. Combining
Jacuzzi, with sauna, win a, with a… bed
grammar
very big, with a big TV for watch the…
between L1-
movies, a…nd
L2 with a
18. Diana: single…
humorous
19. Edwin: No, eso ya no es very big ----- No,
purpose: 1, 11,
pero entonces si, que, o sea la habitación,
19, 38, 41, 44,
pero… no puede fumar eh… (Edwin listens
54 to 57, 61 to
to his two girl partners talking in the back
64, 69, T7, 83,
127
EFL COURSE.
about likes and dislikes regarding men.
88, 89, 90,
After a 35 seconds pause, he speaks,
10. Teasing 7, 41,
changing the subject) O sea, yo a una mujer
47 to 51, 69,
le critico hasta el pelo weón (Diana and
72, 74,
Sarah look at him silently, smiling to these
comments)
20. Diana: ¡Re-criticón!
11. Harsh
T2. Teacher:
language from
(Affirming) Statue
L1 to indicate
21. Edwin: ¿Yo que hago? Hay que escoger
comradery 30,
bien, o sea, hay que mirar bien (To Diana
50, 77, 79, 54
and Sarah, who are in the group)
to 57, T8, T10,
22. Sarah: Pues nosotras vivimos dejandonos
criticar de ustedes
23. Edwin: Y nosotros de ustedes (referring to
women, looking at Sarah and Diana) como
83,
(Teacher ignores this
12. Combining
and continues to
L1-L2 to ask
provide feedback in
questions 25,
no son --- ah Bueno – ah Bueno ----- super – another group)
85, 104, 71,
fastidian: ustedes son re: uy no, es bajito, uy
78,
no, es feo, uy no, uy no, no tiene esto, no
tiene aquello.
13. Using
suggestions
24. Diana: ¿Cómo se dice: poner atención?
from peers
25. Sarah: ¿Cómo se dice?: Put attention!
without
(Laughs)
26. Diana: (Laughs)
27. Edwin: (Laughs) Pay attention
verifying other
sources 86, 89
14. Using
128
EFL COURSE.
28. Diana: Pay attention, si
colloquial
29. Ss in the group talk unintelligibly. Edwin
words from L1
talks after a 15 second pause.
as humorous
30. Edwin: (To Raúl) Yo no sé pero páseme ahí
expressions: 1,
las reglas ya, hermano. Usté es el que me
lleva las maletas. ¡No, cambiemos!: usté
cuando llega me lleva las maletas. Y yo
llego a la recepción y pregunto que quiero
un servicio al cuarto --- con mujeres de la
38, 44, 54 to
T3. Teacher: (As he
writes the word on
the board) You say:
bellboy
vida alegre…
32. Edwin: (Laughs out loud) --- que se
despierten con una rumba ---------- ¿Y él
(Raúl) cuando habla?
33. Raúl: Cuando… quiero que me lleve las
maletas
34. Edwin: (To Raúl, impersonating the
83, 90,
15. Off-task
exchanges in
L1-L2 using
31. Diana: (Looking at Edwin) --- Ah ya ¿Y los
huéspedes?
57, 69, 72, 79,
humor: 19 to
T4. Teacher: You’re
28, 38, 41, 54
welcome
to 57,
16. Using L1 to
construct
communicativ
e exchanges
30 to 35, 36,
character) ¡No, quiero que me lleve las
41, 72, 73, 83,
maletas ya! Que me lleve las maletas ya a la
88, 90,
habitación
35. Diana: Es millonario
36. Edwin: ¡Por eso!--- Y él me pregunta que si
129
EFL COURSE.
me lleva las maletas... Y yo le digo: “Mire:
tiene que llevar las maletas” o sea, yo le
digo: “You have to!” ¿Cómo se dice llevar
mis maletas? ¿Cómo se dice llevar mis
maletas?
37. Diana: I go with the… I don’t know
38. Edwin: I go with my backpack and my…
with my bags to my room. Go! Ya –
Entonces usted va y corre con mis maletas y
– ¿gracias? --- (Edwin looks at my old
cellphone, serving as a recorder, placed on
his desk, he does not touch it, he just referes
to it) Parce: este celular se ve todo guerrero
(Partners ignore his comment)
39. Ana María: Teacher: ¿Is statue? ¿Statue?
*¿Istatu?* ¿Es estatua?
40. Edwin laughs as he looks as the teacher
mimics a statue. The teacher thought the
best way to explain the word was to
impersonate a statue. Edwin comments on
this:
130
EFL COURSE.
41. Edwin: (Laughing) El profe ya: ¡Ugh!
(Imitating the teacher’s position as a statue,
making a funny face, all the group laughs.)
42. ----------- ¿Entonces qué es lo que yo digo?:
I wan? O I want?
43. Diana: I wa…nt!
44. Edwin: I want a room with jacuzzi, with a
TV very big, with a… girl of the life… fácil
(laughs)
45. Diana: (Laughs) Ok, I have one room, but
only a single one. You don’t have to pay
now.
46. Edwin: Entonces espera, yo te digo: Ok,
what are the rules?
47. Diana: Y yo digo: You don’t have to pay me
now
48. Edwin: ¿Yo no te puedo pagar ahí mismo?
131
EFL COURSE.
49. Diana: No, tu no me tienes que pagar ahora
50. Edwin: ¡Uy bueno mami…! ¡Yo le pago en
especie! (Edwin poses a devilish smile as he
looks at her, teasing her)
51. Diana: (Rolls her eyes up and smiles.
Continues talking to Raúl) Y aquí entra el
botones y dice--- You are… you are… ay
teacher!
52. Edwin: (To the teacher, noticing she needs
the word) Teacher: buttons, ¿botones de,
del, de, del hotel? ¿Buttons?
53. Edwin: (To Raúl, in a commanding voice)
You are my bellboy! Bellboy, thank you
teacher!
54. Edwin: Bell-boy
55. Diana: ¡eso suena re-equis!
56. Edwin: ¡Eso suena re-porno! (laughs)
¡Bellboy cachondo, come to me! (Both,
Diana and Edwin laugh)
132
EFL COURSE.
57. Diana: (laughs) Ven a mi
58. Both students, Edwin and Diana contribute
to create the Bellboy’s lines in the
conversation. Raúl remains silent.
59. Edwin: (To Raúl) You say: Excuse me: I
can take your ba…gs?
60. Diana: ¡No! ¿Can I take your bags? No: “I
can”: Can I take?
61. Edwin: (Following) Can I take you bags? Y
ahí yo le digo: (To Raúl) You have to! Take
my bags and go to my room, IN THIS
MOMENT!
62. Diana: (To Raúl) Tú le dices: pero me da
propina
63. Edwin: ¿Pero de qué…? *Propineishon*
(Diana laughs)
64. Diana: (laughing) *Propineishon*
65. Edwin: Teacher!: One question, please
(Teachers approaches the group) ----Teacher, excuse me, excuse me, one
question: What is the meaning of…no
66. Diana: No! How do you say?
67. Edwin: How do you say? Propina?
133
EFL COURSE.
68. Edwin: Tip?
69. Edwin: ¡Tip! Pues si, pero no le voy a dar
nada, soy un rico tacaño.
70. Diana and Edwin discuss about turn taking
in the dialogue.
71. Diana: Ok, entonces en las reglas, ponemos: T5. Teacher: Tip, tip
¿Have, o Could?.
– I tip
72. Edwin: ¡No! ¡Debería! (In a mocking tone)
¿Cómo le voy a dar propina
T6. Teacher: I tip
obligatoriamente? ¡Es si me da la gana!
you
¡Eso no es una regla! No me parece!
¡Disque a obligarme a darle plata!
73. Diana: (laughs) Entonces luego yo te doy
las reglas con you should, you have to…
74. Edwin: Y entonces yo le digo: Yes, I…
think--- lo pensaré
75. Diana: ¿And the girl…? ¿Cómo se dice:
chica?
76. Edwin: Girl
77. Diana: Si, pues, yo se
134
EFL COURSE.
78. Edwin: Girl of the life happy (To the
teacher) Teacher: one question: How do you
say: chicas de la vida alegre? I say: girls of
the happy life -------- Teacher: How do you
say: Chicas de la vida alegre? ¡Teacher!
Teacher: How do you say: chicas de la vida
alegre? How do you say: Chicas de la vida
alegre? (The question finally reaches the
teacher, he smiles as he thinks, the group of
Edwin, Sarah, Raúl and Diana, laugh
altogether)
80. Edwin: ¡Uy! (To Diana) ¡Escribe eso!
¡Escribe eso! ¡Anótalo! (laughs, to Raúl)
¡Cla…ro! ¡Toca saber!
T7. Teacher:
(Smiling) Oh my
God! I know how to
say that…
135
EFL COURSE.
T8. Teacher: (Laughs
out loud) Ok,
(pauses) whore…
82. Diana: No…!
83. Edwin: Bitches! Ah no! Because the bitches
no cobran! (All the group laughs)
T9. Teacher: (To
Diana) What is the
most common word
for that?
T10. Teacher: Whore
84. Edwin: Oh men! (Laughs) Bitch is more
decent… because ramera is…
(Teacher laughs out
loud)
85. Diana: Is more funny
T11. Teacher: So, in
86. Edwin: Because ramera is very…
English that is a word
like: “Ramera”
(Making reference to
the word: “whore”)
136
EFL COURSE.
T12. Teacher: Is
funnier
87. Diana: Ok (Laughs out loud) ¿Y entonces?
¿Qué más decimos después?
88. Edwin: ¿Yo te digo que si puedo llevar
mujeres de la vida alegre? Ah no, tu eres la
T13. Teacher: No,
but, no but the thing
is---with that
concept--- you don’t
que me dice--- Entonces yo te digo: Oh! Ok! say, you don’t
So you should go to my room!
89. Raúl: ¿Y yo que le digo a ella?
90. Edwin: Usté es el botones (Laughing)
Entonces yo le digo: I…you should… you
should ¿Si? go to my room in this moment.
Y tu: oiga! Que le pasa!? Respéteme!
91. Diana: Laughs
92. Edwin: ¿Y entonces sería: Girls-scort?
express in that way.
It’s a mean word.
137
EFL COURSE.
93. Teacher: Nah, *yu* say: scort girls
(Teacher approaches
94. Edwin: Ah, ok
the group after
having found out the
correct expression)
T14. Teacher: You
say: “scort”
Teacher provides 10
minutes more for the
activity to be
developed, and
students present their
exercise taking turns
successfully. A round
of applause is given
to Ss in this group
and their logical
sequence of the story
is very logical and
understandable in
138
EFL COURSE.
terms of language
production regarding
the topic of the
activity.
139
EFL COURSE.
Annex 3. Video recording Sample Transcription
Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas. M.A. In Applied Linguistics to
TEFL.
The implications of Unconventional Interactional exchanges in an EFL course
Research Instrument: Video recordings transcripts
September 10 / 2014
 What unconventional exchanges emerge across activities in an EFL setting?
And at what moments of the language class?
 What do those unconventional exchanges based on communicative activities in
L2 reveal about interaction in language development, in one basic course at
ILUD?
CONVENTIONS
(-) Determines seconds of pause
(…) Elongation of vowel sound
(*Word*) Spanish pronunciation of letters in a given word
(Stage direction) Short description of events that are happening at the moment of
speaking
(Highlighted word): Indicates a possible disruption that can become an
exemplification of an unconventional exchange
(CAPITALIZED WORDS): Increased tonality of voice, as when speakers make
clarifications, or have to repeat a concept.
140
EFL COURSE.
T: Teacher
Transcription
1. Teacher: English language… (to the course)
what is your opinion about En-English?
2. Yolanda: Is necessary…
3. Teacher: Is nes… English is very necessary
4. Valentina: I love
5. Teacher: You love… the language… Is
difficult, or easy? For you… English…
6. Erika: So, so (laughs, as she uses intonation
used in the same expression in L1) (1)
7. Teacher: So, so, you say. I’m going to teach
you another way… don’t say: “So, so” you
say: “A kind of” (as he writes this expression
on the board and mimics the action with his
hands) you say: “A kind of” yes, something. A
kind of difficult, a kind of easy, a kind of
terrible, I don’t know, whatever you say-. A
kind of ----- Good! Uhm… my friend (to
Monty) what do you opinion… what’s your
opinion about: vegetarians? Vegetarian
people? (Students start talking at the back. To
the course) Guys! We need to listen to our
classmate’s opinion, please. Let’s hear the
opinions. Please.
8. Monty: Em… how do you say: saludable?
9. Teacher: Healthy
10. Monty: (Nodding) Healthy
11. Teacher: Vegetarians are healthy? In your
opinion, because…?
12. Monty-. Emmm… because… vegetales
(laughing)
13. Teacher: Because of vegetables! Vegetable,
they eat too much vegetables- I don’t know, it
depends. So, and to finish… you… my friend:
you (pointing at Axl) you take your outfit
while you’re in the class. Thank you so much,
I really appreciate that (Asking Camilo with
Comments and interpretations
1. Correlating L1 intonation to use
L2 expressions by familiarizing: 6.
2. Using L1 intonation and body
language to express orders to
students: 13
3. Engaging through interpretation
of a situation which may lead to
confrontation: 13 to 22.
4. Using L2 in verbal language
and verbal and colloquial body
language expressions: 13 to 22.
5. Mixing expressions from L1
with L2: 33
6. Assimilation: different to
ignoring, once engaged is
obtained, T continues from this
point, even though comments and
expressions may come from L1
(28 to 34) (33 and 34)
141
EFL COURSE.
his body language to take off the hood from
his hoodie as he speaks) What do you think
about millionaire? A millionaire person?
14. Axl: (laughing and expressing approval as he
nods) Ufffff, yeah! (Class laughs)
15. Teacher: What’s your opinion in general about
the people who have… (expressing money
with his body language, using his fingers as
showing cash money) (5)
16. Axl: But… no is correct. Beca…use… no is
correct (6)
17. Teacher: Is not correct? (7)
18. Axl: Because in the world there are a lot of
people poor (8)
19. Teacher: There are many poor people. U-hu…
(9)
20. Axl: Mmmm… a lot of people… ah no… s…
any people *milionairy* (10)
21. Teacher: Many people? (11)
22. Axl: Many people millionaire (12)
23. Teacher: Ok. Is better to put the adjective first,
and then the noun. Uh, ey! When you were
having the conversation, I listened to some
mistakes I want to correct. It is basically with
the verb: “listen” don’t forget that is
mandatory to use “listen” and the preposition
“to” (as he writes “to” on the board)… in
present, in past, in continuous…in whatevers,
tense you’re making usage of “listen” you say:
“I like listen music” no, no, no, no, no. I like
listening TO music. YESterday, I listened
music… no, no: “Yesterday I listened TO
music” I mean, they go together, all the time.
Teacher provides feedback upon the speaking
exercise they have just done. Right after this, he starts
a listening exercise. He clarifies this exercise is to be
“markable” to state it will have a grade upon
completion.
Students read their exercise before starting, and Will
142
EFL COURSE.
waits to see if there are any doubts regarding this new
exercise. He reads the main instruction and proceeds
to explain the main procedures of the exercise.
He starts the listening exercise, and students’ silence
should suppose anxiety for the pop-up quiz. Will
plays the listening track with his computer three
times, although he says he will just play it twice at the
beginning.
24. Listening track: thank you
25. Viviana: Thank you (Imitating the intonation
of the girl in the last part of the track)
26. Yolanda: Thank-you (In a disappointing tone
of voice)
27. Teacher: Guys: write your names, and give it
to me, please. This very moment. Write your
name. Your full name, please. Thank you.
Thank you. It was very easy, or it was
complicated? A kind of hard for you? Not.
Wasn’t. It was a piece of cake. (To Yolanda)
Yeah, please, your name, I’m telling you.
(Students start talking as Will collects their exercises)
So, what is number 1? When is Kim doing?
Number one. WHEN? (Teacher provides
feedback and students respond to his guiding
questions based on the exercise)
28. Teacher: And, they’re going to be surfing
and…?
29. Some students: Swimming
30. Teacher: (as he writes on the board) but you
need to put “swimming” in this way
31. (Some students) : No!!! Ay no!
32. Carlos: ¿Se puede con doble I?
143
EFL COURSE.
Erika laughs (5)
33. Teacher: Anyway. If you, for example, have
only one M, don’t worry, if you only wrote it
with one m, I collaborate. I collaborate you
34. Edwin: ¡Eso! (As he applauds Will’s kindness
with their spelling mistake) ¡A positive point
for the teacher! (6)
35. Teacher: So, guys. Look at this: You
remember last class was about…
Annex 4. Memos Samples
144
EFL COURSE.
145
EFL COURSE.
Annex 5. Field Notes Sample.
146
EFL COURSE.
147
EFL COURSE.
Annex 6. Consent form. ILUD
148
EFL COURSE.
Annex 7. Consent form. Students.
149
EFL COURSE.
150
EFL COURSE.
Annex 8. Consent Form. Teacher.
151
EFL COURSE.
152

BurbanoJaimeArturo2015

Transcription

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