A social psychological approach to language interaction in the Moroccan Englich Language Classroom : Teacher-Learner Interaction

Abstract

This study concerns itself with analysis of teacher-learner language interaction in the Moroccan English language classroom. It is based on two main assumptions. First, the classroom is not merely a place where learners "sit and get" factual knowledge from a teacher whose sole role is to impart this knowledge. The classroom is perceived as providing a situation where participants are engaged in face-to-face interaction with all the complexities this kind of interaction entails. Second, language is the main, albeit not the only, means of communication in the classroom. So, an analysis of classroom language is likely to help one understand an important aspect of classroom life. Part one illustrates the argument that language is a major factor in the classroom, and overviews some of the literature dealing with classroom language and language interaction. Part two provides a theoretical framework for the study of classroom language. Part three presents a description and justification of the observation technique used for data collection (ethnographic observation). Data analysis covers three parts: four, five, and six. Part four provides an analysis of the data in the light of the notion of authority. This analysis has revealed that the teacher makes use of, at least, six strategies to impose his or her authority in the classroom: he or she initiates exchanges, provides feedback, introduces topics, controls knowledge, uses directives, and distributes turns-at-talk. Learners, on the other hand, have been found out to use, at least, two strategies to oppose the teacher’s authority or impose theirs: they may either act as a group instead of acting individually or diverge from the lesson by making noise. The prevalence of authority in the calssroom gives rise to a certain leadership pattern. Part five sets out to relate authority to leadership. There are different leadership styles depending on the nature of the relationship holding between leader and follower. These styles may range from "telling" to "delegating". Unlike the latter, the former is characterised by high control and supervision of followers. A defensive (or authoritarian) leader will use a style that tends towards telling as he or she considers followers to be untrustworthy, lazy, and irresponsible. A participative (or democratic) leader will use a style that tends towards delegating as he or she regards followers as capable of self-direction. It has been concluded that leadership style teachers use in the classroom has more characteristics of telling than of delegating. Seeing that teachers do not hesitate to use different strategies to impose authority in the classroom, and so emerge as authoritarian leaders, the question about who is the centre of classroom activities, teacher or learner, has been addressed. In fact, the often-made claim that classroom, as directed by teachers, is, for the most part, communicatively-oriented and learner-centred is put to the test in part six. The conclusion reached is to the effect that the traditional approaches giving priority to the grammatical structure of language over its functional use still prevail in our classrooms. Though some textbooks (e.g. English in life) have underlined the communicative dimension of their objectives and placed the learner at the centre of the teaching-learning operation, that actually goes on in classrooms now is not essentially different from what went on when the syllabi were heavily oriented towards teaching language as structure. The moves which were typically reserved to the teacher (e.g. follow ups) are still so; the decisions which were taken by the teacher (e.g. introducing topics) remain his or her prerogative; the features which marked classroom talk (e.g. the teacher doing more talk than the learners) still persist; some teaching methods which were popular in the 1950’s (e.g. the Audiongual Method) still find adherents among our teachers. The implication is that the problem is one of outlooks rather than of texbooks. As long as our teachers do not reconsider their traditional conceptions of the learner, the teacher, and the kind of relationship existing between them, the classroom of tomorrow will not be different from the classroom of today.