Linguistic complexity of lecturers’ class register and its relationship to their personality traits

Abstract

Many research studies indicated a correlation between classroom behaviour and the language of the instructors and learners. The inter-language that the teachers prefer to use in the class differs from the natural, daily life conversations in linguistic terms. It is characterized by more simplistic, repetitive, carefully selected language, or “classroom register”. The paper discusses a „foreign language classroom register” as a specific linguistic subsystem which is operated both by the rules of linguistic simplification and by constraints imposed by the specific social (school) setting. The standard language used in a classroom communication with a high ratio of short basic and coordinate sentences, more universal constructions, such as base case nominal phrases and active present indicative verb phrases, the limited reduction in morphological complexity as a result of a preference for a simple sentence structure. The research study examines a linguistic complexity of the teacher talk with focus on reductions, modifications, and simplifications. It also studies the personal attitudes of lecturers toward school discourse and the relation between teachers´ personality and a language complexity of their language.

Keywords

• school discourse
• interlanguage
• foreign language classroom register
• teachers´ personal traits