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This paper focuses on one of the most prevalent interactional features of classroom discourse which is teacher question. A bulk of research has attributed the preponderance of display questions to the pedagogic goals of constructing, eliciting, and evaluating learners' knowledge and/or to the learners' limited language capacity. This study, therefore, aimed to examine if experience can make a difference in the types and functions of teachers' questions during the knowledge construction phase (KCP), whose major pedagogic goal revolves around learners' display of knowledge, in classes with low language proficiency learners. To this aim, two experienced and two novice teachers' EFL classes with elementary learners were recorded for four 2-h sessions. Transcription and discourse analysis of the data using Long and Sato's (1983) taxonomy showed that experienced teachers managed to offer not only the intended but also the emergent affordances for learners and learning through deploying a variety of questions serving different functions in KCPs. The findings of this study can substantiate Walsh and Mann's (ELT Journal, 69(4), [351][352][353][354][355][356][357][358][359][360][361][362] 2015) proposal for a data-led dialogic reflective practice and help teachers foster their classroom interactional competence.

Effective teacher talk has been reported to be dependent upon the teacher having post-liminal (higher levels of) understanding and has been operationalized as aligning one’s talk with the pedagogic purpose. In EAP classes, however, there are some instances where enacting effective teacher talk can be challenging. This article reports on one such instance by drawing on fifty-one hours of classroom video-recordings and seventeen hours of reflective meetings. It explores EAP teachers’ responses to learner initiatives, tapping into the teachers’ subject knowledge deficit. It also examines the potential of data-led dialogic reflective practice to enable teachers to skilfully manage the interacting influences of face, authority, ethics, input, and learner participation in EAP classes.

The present study examines the effects of pre-task explicit instruction on second language (L2) oral self-repair behaviour while controlling for the effects of working memory. The participants were 121 Iranian learners of English at incipient levels of language proficiency. Their working memory was measured using an operation span task and then they were randomly assigned to a control and an experimental group. Both groups performed a picture story-retelling task that was preceded by five minutes of planning time. During the planning time, the experimental group also received a grammar handout that explained English relative clauses. The instances of self-repairs were identified through stimulated recall interviews that immediately followed performance on the oral task. They were then classified into categories of global form repairs (FG-repairs), local form repairs (FL-repairs), and content repairs (C-repairs). A series of one-way ANCOVAs were run, the results of which indicated pre-task explicit instruction had significant and beneficial effects on FL-repairs and adverse effects on C-repairs. The covariate was only associated with repairing the target structure. The findings are discussed in light of the Extended Trade-off Hypothesis and confirm the view that pre-task explicit instruction tends to foster a focus on form at the expense of meaning.