Teacher’s speech and students’ oral production

Abstract

This article presents some preliminary results of adoctoral’s research about the relationship between teacher’s speech and students’ smiles in EFL classroom interaction, and its implication tostudents’ oral production. Grounded on Interactional Sociolinguistics (Gumperz, 1982) and Conversation Analysis (Marcuschi, 1991; Goffman, 2002; Armengaud, 2006), this study has shown that the students’ oral production tends to be a refl ection of the teacher’s speech, mainly in pair work and individual activities. In group activities, the students tend to perform better. During group activities, the use of students’ smiles tends to refl ect a better oral performance among them.However, when they interact individually with the teacher, the students’ smiles work so as to block their speech production. In this study, then, the students’ smiles appeared to be a fundamental interactive component in an EFL classroom interaction among students and with teacher, sometimes favoring a more dynamic classroom conversation or not, depending on the specifi c interactional situations of the classroom.Key words: classroom interaction, teacher’s speech, students’ smiles.