184 Advances in spoken discourse analysis
some standard of achievement or the degree of approach to some target set
up by the teacher, who then assesses or corrects the performance accordingly.
Typical classroom exchanges illustrating this are:
1* T: What does Fred do at seven o’clock?
S: He gets up.
T: Good.
2* T: What did Ali do on Thursday evening?
S: He went to cinema.
T: Okay. He went to the cinema.
(Constructed examples are denoted by an asterisk. Unless otherwise stated,
all others come from the recordings analysed in Hewings (1985).)
The repeated production of language samples by learners and their assessment
by a teacher is a well-documented feature of a behaviourist approach to
language teaching (see, for example, McDonough 1981:ch. 2), and typified
in activities such as pattern drills and question—answer sequences. The
understanding implicit in giving feedback in this way is that the learner’s
subsequent linguistic behaviour will approach a target: in the short-term
this might be the ability to, for example, respond to a picture prompt with
a particular utterance with acceptable fluency and pronunciation; in the
long-term it might be near native-speaker competence.
Feedback is, of course, a complex phenomenon, to which a number of
physical and psychological factors contribute. It is conveyed not only through
spoken, but also through non-verbal channels. Aspects of paralanguage,
kinesics or proxemics, for instance, may be of significance: an intake of air
between clenched teeth or the raising of eyebrows to draw attention to an
error, or a pat on the head to indicate approval. In aiming towards the
eventual understanding of the interaction of the various parameters of feedback,
it is necessary to isolate each in turn. In this chapter, attention will be
focused on the linguistic realizations and in particular on the part that intonation
plays in providing information about the acceptability and quality of a learner’s
performance in the L2. So it will be asked, for example, whether the pragmatic
function of ‘Good’ in (1) above, in the sense of what it communicates about
the quality of the student’s performance of ‘He gets up’, would be different
if it were spoken with a falling as opposed to a rising tone.
The examples of classroom interaction used as illustrations below are
taken from a corpus of recorded data collected in EFL classrooms in
Malaysian secondary schools during 1983 and 1984. The teachers are all
British, and the students are at a fairly elementary level. In all the examples
cited there is a verbal realization of feedback although non-verbal parameters
may also have been operative. The examples presented are typical of exchanges
in L2 classrooms where learners are at a low level of ability, and English
is the language predominantly used, in that the teacher is more likely to
make students aware of an error by giving an acceptable version him/