Target Language Utterances and Word Count Analysis. Given my focus on classroom interactions, I used word count analysis (Flyman-Xxxxxxx, 1999) to gauge the level of participation in interactions by students from the lesson observation transcripts (Xxxxxxxxx, 1993). According to Xxx Xxxx, it is important to identify how the IRF exchange begins, known as conduct initiation (Xxx Xxxx, 1996) – are teacher questions whole-class (general and unspecific) or directed at individuals (personal and specific)? Xxx Xxxx notes at least four teacher questioning choices, becoming more challenging for students in terms of their interaction by the stage of ‘expression’: Repetition (teacher requires student to repeat word chorally/individually); Recitation (students recite pre-learned, memorised material); Cognition (teachers requires students to reflect and verbalise); Expression (teachers require students to clarify or extend answers). The boundaries between these questioning modes are ‘affordances’ (Xxx Xxxx, 2007, p.52) in which students participate, if they are actively engaged in their learning processes. According to Xxx Xxxx, ‘students, must have things to say to each other and to the teacher in class that go beyond the sentences or pronouncements proffered by the textbook that is open on the same page at the same time on every desk’ (2007, p.47). For students to have things to say that stretch the boundaries of the textbook, the teacher choreographer is in the prime position to stretch their own boundaries of the types of IRF sequence initiated in order to open up affordances, which allow for student response functions along the continuum described above. Spaces must be perceived by teachers first for choreography into lessons as student affordances. In my study, I counted the number of utterances by teachers and students in TL or in L1, using this to support a more qualitative approach to examining next the types of utterances these were, for example, whether they were student requests for vocabulary, classroom instructions, choral repetition and so on. The word count approach helped me to get a sense of the whole data set, accessing ‘the whole corpus of data ordinarily lost in intensive, qualitative research’. Xxxxxxxxx (1993) argues that the reader can gain a ‘sense of the flavour of the data as a whole’ p.163). I include an example of my word count analysis in Appendix 9. The combination of word count and analysis of interaction types offered insight into the ‘shape’ of the interaction in terms of the amount of ...
