Spoken Corpora of Non - Native English Teachers to Assist in English Classroom Interactions

This case study evaluates the characteristics of classroom speech found in classes taught by non-native elementary school English language instructors in Japan using corpora compiled by the authors. A corpus of spoken language was compiled from the lessons using XML tagging that marked speaker turns, language use, and classroom interaction modes. We then performed quantitative analyses on both L1 and L2 tokens in the corpus transcripts, which revealed that over 60% of utterances of the teachers measured by tokens were done in L2. We further analyzed teacher-student interactions in our corpus using five interaction modes to categorize the non-native English language instructors’ L2 classroom discourse, four of which were introduced by Walsh (2006), and one by Ellis (1984). Analyzing the corpus in terms of the five interactional modes, we found several distinctive features. First, we note that explicit grammar-teaching by the teachers non-existent. Second, we noted that students speaking in the L2 in chorus while maintaining discourse with teachers. In the future, we plan to expand the corpus of classroom spoken data to make it large enough to justify inferences about elementary school English classes in Japan and to use video in conjunction with the corpus in teacher training. Developing such video classroom spoken corpora would hopefully assist both preservice and in-service elementally school teachers in their professional training programs, and eventually assist them in conducting English lessons, achieving their pedagogic goals more effectively.