Students' perceptions about Japanese teacher talk.

Abstract

This study investigated students' perceptions about various aspects of teacher talk in Japanese (as a second) language classes in American colleges and universities. In all, 66 students studying intermediate Japanese were asked to reflect on their views about their teachers' classroom speech, focusing on (a) rate of speech, (b) lexical and syntactic familiarity, (c) visual information, and (d) use of English. The majority of students preferred natural speed, use of appropriate amount of new vocabulary and grammar rules, and minimum but effective/controlled use of English.

1. Introduction

"Teacher talk," the language of instruction that second/foreign language teachers use to speak to their nonnative speaker students in the classroom, has been one of the most hotly debated topics among many language teachers and researchers for the last two-three decades (Brown, 2001; Gass, 2003; Doughty, 2004). Many Japanese (as a second/foreign) language teachers as well have acknowledged the crucial importance of teacher talk in the field of Japanese language education (Kubota, 2006; Matsumoto, 2006).

As more Japanese language teachers engage in in-depth discussions, two specific issues have emerged. The first issue concerns the use of various linguistic adjustments, such as decreased rates of speech, shorter and syntactically less complex sentences, common vocabulary words, more repetition, more rephrasing, and more yes/no questions rather than wh-questions. In Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), the use of authentic language materials in natural spoken and written Japanese is regarded as essential. How and what types of teacher talk do Japanese teachers need to speak to ensure optimal listening comprehension (or comprehensible input), to expose students to natural and authentic language input and, ultimately, to best facilitate their target language acquisition?

The second issue is related to the use of students' first language (that is, English) by Japanese language teachers. Should Japanese teachers speak only Japanese in classes while making the best of gestures, facial expressions, pictures, props, and other visual aids? Or should they use some English, for example, in explaining about new grammar rules? If Japanese teachers decide to use some English, then how much of this language should be spoken to best facilitate their students' target language acquisition? Advocates of the Direct Method claim that classes in which Japanese is used exclusively lead to higher proficiency levels among students. Other teachers argue that there is no valid reason for insisting on monolingual presentations. Thus, this paper intends to explore helpful insights for Japanese teachers by examining certain aspects of teacher talk in Japanese classes.

2. Scholarly Research on Teacher Talk and Their Research Methods

Scholarly studies on teacher talk began approximately in the early-mid 1980s. They evolved inspired by various findings from (1) "caretaker speech" studies in first language development (Snow, 1972) and (2) "foreigner talk" research (Ferguson, 1975). Teacher talk studies began to evolve partly because of Krashen and Terrell (1983), who argued that teacher talk is a vital source of comprehensible input in the second/foreign language classroom.

2.1 Descriptive Studies

Seminal teacher talk studies in the 1980s focused on finding and describing similar linguistics features shared in various second/foreign language classroom teacher talk. The majority of teacher talk studies administered until the late 1980s were descriptive studies. For instance, Wesche & Ready (1985) studied discourse of classroom lectures in a Canadian university. They compared psychology class lectures presented (in English and French) to first language speakers with those to second language speakers. They found significant differences, whether the lectures were given in English or French, between (1) classes composed of first language speaker students and (2) those consisting of second language speaker students in the following five aspects of teacher talk: (a) speech rate, (b) the number and duration of pauses, (c) frequency of tensed verbs and number of S nodes (= clauses) and T units (= a principal clause plus all related dependent clauses), (d) percentage of imperative sentences and self-repetition, and (e) amount of non-verbal information use (such as gestures, facial expressions, pictures, and visual aids).

2.2 Correlational Studies

In the 1980s, teacher talk research as one sub-area of second language acquisition research grew not only in number but also in quality. By the end of the 1980s, several studies started to utilize quantitative research methods based on statistical analyses. One of the quantitative research methods utilized then was the correlational (associational) research method. Tollefson (1988), for example, explored the degree of association between teachers' question types and students' response patterns in ESL (English as a second language) classes. Teachers' question types were divided into (1) display questions, which aim at testing students' target-language knowledge (e.g., "Are you a student?" "What day is today?"), and (2) referential questions, which intend to gain real information from students (e.g., "What would you like for lunch?" Has anyone seen the eraser?"). The results showed that teachers' referential questions have a strong correlation with students' creative responses, which often lead to further teacher-student interactions. On the other hand, teachers' display questions were apt to have a strong association with students' imitative responses, which usually do not lead to or facilitate further teacher-student interactions.

2.3 Experimental Studies on Teacher Talk

Experimental studies, which can examine/establish causal relationships between/among variables, were relatively rare in the early 1980s. However, more articles about experimental teacher talk studies appeared in second language acquisition journals in the late 1980s. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, they became a mainstream research methodology for teacher talk research.

Chaudron & Richards (1986), for example, conducted their experimental study to investigate the effects of discourse markers in teacher talk on students' comprehension. The discourse markers included two different types: (1) "macro-markers," which signal the macro-structure of a lecture and (2) "micro-markers," which indicate links between sentences within the lecture or function as fillers. Discourse markers, such as "What I'm going to talk about today. ..." and "lets' go back to the beginning ...," are categorized as macro-markers while discourse markers, such as "well," "now," "so," and "you see," are micro-markers. Subjects had significantly better comprehension on the macro-marker version of the spoken lecture information than the baseline version. In contrast, the micro-marker version did not produce significantly better comprehension scores than the baseline version. Furthermore, Sueyoshi & Hardison (2005) conducted their experimental study to examine the effects of gestures and facial cues on listening comprehension of a videotaped lecture among ESL students. Results of a multiple-choice comprehension task revealed that the subjects who saw the audiovisual lecture attained significantly better listening comprehension scores than those who listened to the audio only.

2.4 Qualitative Studies on Teacher Talk

In the 2000s, teacher talk researchers began to study qualitatively some affective factors (such as perceptions, feelings, and anxieties) students may experience when they are exposed to different types of teacher talk. For instance, Mackey, Gass, & McDonough (2000) videotaped task-based communicative interactions where a student and a native or near-native interviewer interacted with each other. While utilizing so-called stimulus recall and videotaping, they examined how language learners noticed/perceived error correction feedback conveyed in the interviewer's teacher talk. The analysis of the qualitative data showed that the students were relatively accurate in their perceptions about phonological, lexical, and semantic levels of error correction feedback. However, morphosyntactic level feedback was not noticed as such in general. Similar studies followed in the 2000s (e.g., Carpenter et al., 2006; Katayama, 2007).

3. Purpose of This Study

The majority of experimental studies revealed relatively positive effects on students' comprehension of (1) various linguistic adjustments (such as in rate of speech, vocabulary and syntactic structure, and discourse marking), (2) visual information (including contextual pictures and gestures), and (3) students' L1 (first language) use (especially, in explaining new grammar rules) in teacher talk. Despite such positive effects, there are still some reservations among Japanese teachers about directly applying the insights from experimental studies to their classroom teaching. Therefore, this study aimed at investigating teacher talk in Japanese classes from students' perspectives. More specifically, this qualitative/survey research examined how American college and university students in intermediate Japanese classes may feel about their teachers' classroom speech, especially (a) rate of speech, (b) lexical and syntactic familiarity, (c) use of visual and extralinguistic information, and (d) use of English in the classroom.

4. Method

4.1 Participants and Data Collection

From a subject pool of 74 American college and university students studying Japanese (as a second/foreign) language, 68 students agreed to participate in this study. All subjects were studying intermediate Japanese in 2004 fall term at five different universities and colleges located on the Pacific coast. In October-November of 2004, class instructors explained to students about this study during a class period. After their consent was received, the same instructors gave a survey questionnaire to each student during another class period. The entire survey questionnaire took approximately 20 minutes. In all, 66 students returned their answers: 9 students from "G" University, 5 students from "O" College, 12 students from "P" University, 11 students from "S" Community College, and 29 students from "W" University. Two students were not present in class when the survey was administered.

4.2 Data Analysis

The data analysis was conducted without any particular hypotheses. All the students' hand-written answers were word-processed by the investigator. While utilizing analytic induction techniques (Richards, 2003; Mackey & Gass, 2005), the investigator searched for and jotted down salient recurring phenomena in the students' answers. Then, he gradually came up with several categories of salient characteristics regarding students' perceptions on the above four aspects of teacher talk.

5. Results of Data Analysis

The results of the data analyses were as follows. As for the speech rate, 30% of the students expressed that they would like their Japanese teacher to speak in (a) "fast and natural speed," (b) 18% "somewhat slowed-down speed," and (c) 51% "somewhat slowed-down but still natural speed." The category (c) included the following four categories: (c-l) "slightly decreased, but still natural speed" (21%); (c-2) "at first decreased but later gradually increased speed" (15%); (c-3) "decreased speed for new materials and natural speed for already learned materials," (9%); and (c-4) "a mix of (c2) and (c-3)" (6%). As for the lexical/syntactic familiarity, in all 83% of the students expressed their willingness to be exposed to new lexical and syntactic items through teacher talk, more specifically, with the following conditions: if and when they are used (a) "sometimes, but not always" (42%), (b) "not to the extent students do not understand the meanings" (12%), (c) "with appropriate amount of the teacher explanations about them" (11%), (d) "gradually and not at once" (9%), or (e) "through lexical/syntactic items commonly used in Japan" (9%). Regarding the use of visual and extralinguistic information, in all 89% of the students were in favor of it because of the following reasons: (a) they can "augment comprehension by making the contexts real and tangible" (27%); (b) "strengthen memory/ retention" (21%); (c) "make class interesting" (20%); (d) "create a direct association link" (13%); and (e) "speed up the learning process" (8%).

Finally, regarding the use of English, a total of 96% of the students expressed that they would like their teacher to use Japanese as much as possible while, for example, trying to speak (a) "only Japanese always" (18%), (b) "at least once a week" (2%), using English (c) "only when it is hard for students to understand" (44%), (d) "only when grammar and difficult concepts are taught" (20%), (e) "only when the use of Japanese, visual information, and all other means fail to help students comprehend" (5%), (f) "only when two languages are compared" (2%), (g) "only when the meanings of difficult words are explained" (2%), or (h) "only outside of the classroom" (2%).

6. Discussion

6.1 Rate of Speech in Teacher Talk

First, as for the rate of speech, about 80% of the students (above [a] and [c] categories for speech rate) expressed that their ultimate goal is to get used to and become able to understand native speakers' natural speed. However, it is also true that 69% of the subjects (above [b] plus [c] categories) indicated that being exposed to such fast and natural speech and still able to accurately comprehend can sometimes be difficult. It seems, therefore, that many American college and university students studying intermediate Japanese are relatively open to somewhat slowed-down (not too fast) teacher talk as long as it "sounds natural."

This finding was consistent with the results from the author's previous experimental and survey studies (Matsumoto, 2006). Both prior studies suggested that teacher talk in Japanese (as a second/foreign) language classrooms may not need to be exactly in the same speech rate as exhibited in NS (native speaker)-NS (native speaker) interactions. The "naturalness" in teacher talk seems more important than simply being "fast" from students' perspectives. At this point, the "naturalness" of teacher talk is somehow a vague notion. We need to operationally define and further specify the notion of naturalness of teacher talk by identifying a concrete range of speech rate for such "natural" teacher talk.

6.2 Lexical and Syntactic Familiarity in Teacher Talk

Second, the majority of students (83 %) expressed that they were in favor of lexically and syntactically "relatively challenging" teacher talk that comprises some new words and grammar rules not studied yet, as long as it does not confuse them by too many unfamiliar items. Such enthusiasm and relatively positive attitudes among students were not identified in the previous two studies.

6.3 The Use of Visual and Extralinguistic Information

Most students (89 %) acknowledged that visual information their teachers utilize is helpful. The reasons they indicated for being in favor of visual information were generally consistent with the results of the experimental study, including its effects of strengthening memory, making class interesting (and thus augmenting student motivation), and creating a direct association link.

6.4 The Use of English in Teacher Talk

Almost all the students (96%) wanted their teachers to use Japanese as much as possible in the classroom. At the same time, however, approximately 70% of the students allowed some classroom use of English by teachers, including using English (c) "only when it is hard for students to understand" (44%), (d) "only when grammar and difficult concepts are taught" (20%), (e) "only when the use of Japanese, visual information, and all other means fail to help students comprehend" (5%), (f) "only when two languages are compared" (2%), and (g) "only when the meanings of difficult words are explained" (2%). It seems that the notion of a "minimum, systematic, and carefully-controlled" use of English is the consensus agreed upon among the majority of students. Some kind of good balance between using Japanese as much as possible and minimum, carefully-controlled use of English may be attained as Japanese teachers try to use English for certain classroom language functions. As the present study showed, these language functions may include (1) teaching difficult grammar rules and concepts, (2) teaching difficult vocabulary words, (3) comparing the two languages (Japanese and English), and (4) assisting students to comprehend correctly when the use of Japanese, visual information, and all other means fail.

7. Conclusion

This study examined teacher talk in Japanese (as a second/foreign) language classes from students' perspectives while focusing on the four important aspects of teacher talk: (a) rate of speech, (b) lexical and syntactic familiarity, (c) the use of visual and extralinguistic information, and (d) the use of English in teacher talk. The results showed that the majority of students are in favor of teacher talk that are characterized by (1) natural speed, (2) use of appropriate amount of new lexical and syntactic items, (3) use of visual and extralinguistic information, and (4) minimum, carefully controlled, but effective use of English in teacher talk. Japanese teachers may take the results into consideration as they continue further discussions on the issues of teacher talk.

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Hiroshi Matsumoto, Soka University of America, CA

Hiroshi Matsumoto is Associate Professor of second language acquisition at Soka University of America.