How much talk should the teacher talk? A study of teacher talk in an English classroom

Abstract

Teacher talk is essential in learning, likewise for language learning classroom. The objective of this study was to investigate the categories of teacher’s talk that occurred in an English classroom of a senior high school in Banda Aceh. The kind of teacher talk was examined by using Foreign Language Interaction Analysis (FLINT) as suggested by Moskowitz (1971) cited in Brown (2001). In this research, the data was gathered through observation, video recording, and interview. To analyze the data, a procedure proposed by Miles and Huberman (1984) was applied to obtain a clear view of the categories of teacher’s talk that happened in the class. The result of this study showed that the most dominant type applied by the teacher was giving information (28.2%), followed by asking question (24.2%), next, using ideas of students (13.1%) and the lowest frequency was dealing with feelings (1.5%). With the regards of the findings, it is suggested that the portion of teacher talk should be balance to achieve the goal of language learning that focuses on students.