Classroom Interaction and Thinking Skills Development Through Teacher-Talks

Abstract

     This research was a micro-analytical study of interaction and thinking skills development through teacher-talks in a Thai class learning English as a foreign language. The research method applied conversation analysis to analyze a corpus of 16 English lessons. The main new knowledge that contributed to the existing work on social interaction in the context of the language classroom was the understanding of the process through which teacher-talks develop classroom interaction and students’ thinking skills. These processes are: (1) structuring successive sequences through questions; (2) structuring turn-taking pattern; and (3) code-switching in teacher questioning.