Pedagogic and Instructional Perspectives in Language Education: The Context of Higher Education

List of Contributors

The Use of DIU in an ESP Setting in Turkey

Introduction

Conversation analysis is a rapidly developing area of study in applied linguistics (Schegloff, 1999, pp. 405–406; Seedhouse, 2005, p. 165). Social interactions can be better understood with Conversation analysis, which allows for analysis of both the verbal (use of certain expressions, words and intonations) and non-verbal (gestures, mimics and embodiment) productions (Kääntä, 2012, p. 180). These multimodal meaning creation processes can, in turn, help teachers understand classroom interaction and influence teaching (Seedhouse, 2005) and learning.

Teachers can elicit information from learners in different ways. It is argued that teachers use Designedly Incomplete utterances (DIUs) (Koshik (2002) as a pedagogical resource (Sert & Walsh, 2013). DIUs often appear in classroom talk and are dependent on the context of interaction in which they occur. Sert and Walsh (2013) underline the importance of language teachers’ strategies and suggest that effective language use might relies on the employment of interactional resources, such as DIU, which can facilitate language learning through student participation and engagement.

Inevitable aspects of teaching-learning process (Goodwin, 2007), participation and engagement in the classroom are promoted by teachers, critical sources of input (Vickov & Jakupčević, 2017, p. 653) as well as by their classroom practices and their implementation of classroom discourse (Arnold & Fonseca-Mora, 2007, p. 110). Teachers play a significant role in establishing communication patterns (Walsh, 2002) which might facilitate participation. These patterns foster communication through recognition and appreciation of learners (Arnold & Fonseca-Mora, 2007; Waring, 2011) especially when they are nominated to answer, praised and encouraged to engage.

To investigate the nature of participation and engagement, we examined the DIUs in the transcribed conversations between the teacher and the learners.

Designedly Incomplete Utterances

Initially defined as a kind of word search by Lerner (1995, p. 122), incomplete utterances were later termed as DIUs by Koshik (2002). DIUs are often used instructional strategies and sequences (Margutti, 2010) and constitute an important aspect of teacher questions which elicit answers and ascertaining student ←17 | 18→knowledge and learning (Çakır & Cengiz, 2016, p. 61). DIUs might contribute to the questioning process since the teacher elicits student knowledge by urging them to complete an utterance and initiates self-correction of verbal errors.

Netz (2016) describes DIUs as a type of display questions without interrogative form, which still function as questions. DIUs help make answers transparent through prosodic features such as raising intonation towards the end of the sentence and vowel lengthening at the end of the sentence (Koshik, 2002; Margutti, 2010). DIUs make salient the missing information in the utterance (Lerner, 1995) and help learners recall that information, a role that makes the learner a knowing one (Margutti, 2010).

By leaving the utterance incomplete, the teacher encourages students to fill in the empty slot (Margutti, 2010), which might provide motivation for the students to participate without extended pauses and as fluently as possible (Lerner, 1996). DIUs therefore could accelerate the rate of interaction and assigns learners key responsibilities in pedagogical conversations. DIUs have several pedagogical functions, which we present below.

Functions of “DIUs”

As Hints

DIUs are viewed as one type of elicitation technique by Koshik (2002) as a pedagogical resource, also termed as “cued elicitation” (Mercer, 1995, p. 26). Margutti (2010), more specifically, describe DIUs as a means of

However, Margutti also notes that teachers need to allot enough time so that the students can gather their thoughts and participate to prevent failure and discouragement. Teachers hint at learner engagement employing DIUs through pauses and other features of prosody, implying implicit requests for completion and are designed to hint that the utterance is not finished (Margutti, 2010).

As a Repair Strategy

DIUs are also employed in EFL classes as a means of conversational repair for students’ language use. Teachers form DIUs by repeating a part of students’ utterance with a sound stretch in the last syllable, slowing at the end of the utterance, or continuing intonation before the part that needs correction so that ←18 | 19→students can initiate correction (Koshik, 2002) and to target oral errors for student self-correction in language classes (Omaggio Hadley, 1993 cited in Koshik, 2002, p. 306). Keating (2009) states that self-correction invites negotiation due to the repetitions and self-interruptions by its nature, which gives the inclusivity of speaker a different point of view.

One of the central issues in language teaching is the ways teachers repair student outcome. Harmer (2007) suggests that correction is a highly personal business and is standing out among other classroom interactions. Knowing when to implement DIU is important because when the language error is not the focus of the lesson, trying to deal with it can interrupt the flow of the activity and make the students stray away from the topic. DIUs, however, do not interrupt the ongoing activity because they are designed as part of it (Lerner, 1996, p. 248).

When repairing, DIUs function more differently than when they are used for elicitation in the shape of sentence completion. Repair with DIUs can be in the shape of repetition or echoing (Harmer, 2007) of the student outcome, coupled with intonation and expression hinting that something is not right and needs correcting. The students should know that, at minimum, they are being prompted to display knowledge on the issue (Koshik, 2002; Margutti, 2010).

Impact of DIUs on Student Participation

Classrooms are institutional settings where learning and teaching practices manifest themselves in interactions between students and teachers (Sert & Walsh, 2013). A central finding is that participation is key to the process of learning in interaction (Sert & Walsh, 2013; Seedhouse and Walsh, 2010, cited in Sert & Walsh, 2013; Nunan, 2003; Sert, 2017) state the importance of learner participation by pointing out the fact that in conversation-analytic approach to learning in language classrooms, learning is seen as emerging from participation. They state that learning is not seen as a cognitive state, rather can be defined as a change in a socially displayed cognitive state achieved on turn-by-turn basis. By facilitating student agency, learners are given the opportunity to take on different identities in which they can exploit the language according to their benefit and thus be given more of a learning opportunity than a student would be in a classroom strictly following certain rules about teacher and student roles. As opportunities of learning increase in a classroom, depth of learning also increases from which students can benefit (Van Lier, 1996, p. 184).

As a pedagogical source, DIUs also appear to be helpful in student participation in an observable way. Student engagement is key to successful learning and teaching experiences in language classrooms (Sert & Walsh, 2013; Walsh, 2006; ←19 | 20→Waring, 2008; Waring & Hruska, 2011). In order for a DIU to be successful in pedagogic settings, a high level of collaboration between teacher and students is demanded (Margutti, 2010). DIUs provide students with ample opportunities to realize a need for a turn constructional unit (TCU) or utterance repair (Koshik, 2002). Sert and Walsh (2013) also suggest that Designedly Incomplete Utterances (DIUs) can inspire interaction and lead to further participation in class. In their study, they indicated that a student who claimed insufficient knowledge, keeps participating after the teacher’s initiation of a DIU and is engaged in ongoing interaction. The DIU appears to be fruitful in that they do contribute to the progress of talk and foster student participation (Sert & Walsh, 2013).

Margutti (2010) suggests that classroom questions, DIUs being a form of incomplete questions, achieve, maintain, and sustain students’ participation in the activity underway. By signaling that some missing information is asked of the students creates an encouraging atmosphere for students and shows to the students that the teacher believes that they can in fact complete the turn, which encourages students to participate.

Netz (2016) states that DIU that is used for hinting can function more than just as clues for elicitation. They urge and push the students for completion. Although, it cannot be claimed that DIU practices lead to language acquisition or learning, they do increase student participation (Sert & Walsh, 2013). Due to the fact that successful classroom interaction depends on learners’ engagement and participation, (Sert & Walsh, 2013; Margutti, 2010), it is very important that teacher creates opportunities for learners to become the knowing recipient (Waring, 2011).

Methodology

Research Design

In order to conduct this study, one speaking class was examined and analyzed in an ESP setting. The focus of the analysis emerged from the data as in exploratory research practices. So the emerging research focus was DIU as a specific teacher strategy that teachers use in their classroom interaction with students to elicit student responses and check learning. Conversational Analysis (CA) was used as the method in the analysis of the classroom interactions in this research since it provides an understanding of how people interact with one another using the language (Sert, et. al., 2015, p. 5). It also documents micro moments of interaction and clarifies how interaction is managed between individuals (Sert & Walsh, 2013). In addition, it provides a number of methodological advantages for a qualitative research (see Sert, 2017). CA, for example,

Data and Context

The participants are the students of civil aviation cabin services program at the vocational school of Turkish Aeronautical University in Selçuk/İzmir. There are 16 students in the classroom and their ages vary between 18 and 23. They have lessons such as business English (beginning in the second term of the first year and continuing throughout the second year), grammar, reading (only in the first year), writing (in the second year) and speaking lessons (both years). The participants are in their final year. The students have four-hour speaking lessons a week, each lesson being 40 minutes long. Lesson materials that were used for speaking lessons were books, worksheets and lessons audios of the books. The teacher in the extracts- a graduate of the department of English Language Teaching- is also the researcher of this study. During the recording of the extracts, she is working her 4th year as a lecturer. The participants were chosen according to their convenience. There were two cabin classes; however, the one recorded for this research consisted of students who consented to participating in the study. Speaking lessons were designed according to principles of ESP, involving language content and skills that they need in their future career. That is why specially designed materials were used in these lessons; that is, the context of the lessons subsumes cabin services and civil aviation. In the first term of the first year, the speaking lessons were designed to help students reach a basic level of L2 speaking. In the second term of the first year, the content of the lessons changed into ESP format including aviation.

The data were collected through video-recordings of the speaking lessons. The participants’ names have been anonymized. The teacher took the consent of the students before starting the recordings. Also, the teacher’s petition to record the lessons was approved by the school principal. The lessons were recorded once in two weeks. A camera was used in order to record the lessons. The camera was located on top of the white board thanks to which the students are facing the camera, but the teacher’s face is rarely visible due to the fact that she is addressing to the class almost throughout the entire extract. Six-hour data were recorded. This six-hour data were collected within a three-month period of time.

Before this extract, the teacher distributed worksheets to the students where they match pictures with their definitions. The extract presents the last stages of the elicitation phase of the lesson. One of the students can’t match, so the teacher ←22 | 23→initiates correction by repeating what the student answers, thus hinting. Then, the lesson moves on with the teacher’s initiation of DIU.