Teachers’ Strategies Used to Foster Teacher-Student and Student-Student Interactions in EFL Conversation Classrooms: A Conversation Analysis Approach

Despite the fact that there are a wide range of strategies used to foster interactions in EFL conversation classrooms, many novice teachers are not aware of them. In view of this problem, the current study aimed to identify such strategies commonly used by EFL teachers in conversation classrooms. To this end, fifty sessions of college level conversation classrooms were observed andtheir teacher-student interactions were audio recorded. The class recordings were, then, transcribed by means of transcription symbols proposed by Hutchby and Wooffitt (2008), and were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively based on the taxonomy of foreign language interaction analysis system proposed by Walsh (2006). The findings revealed that teacher echo and asking questions were among the most frequent strategies teachers use to foster teacher-student interactions; however, asking questions and agreement strategies were used to foster student-student interactions.The findings have implications for teaching conversations in EFL classrooms which were discussed in the article.