Functions of Teachers’ Narratives in EFL Classroom Contexts

Abstract

Although narratives have been widely used and investigated in the second/foreign language literature, studying narratives in authentic classroom contexts and their functions has received comparatively little attention. To fill this gap, the present study examines the narratives produced naturally by teachers within English-as-a-foreign-language classroom contexts to find out what functions these narratives serve. The participants were five Iranian teachers teaching general English courses in a private language institute. Following the principles of qualitative research in data analysis, 30 hours of naturally occurring data were first transcribed, then their narratives were identified. After analyzing the 23 determined narratives in the dataset, three functions of narratives emerged, namely, moral, pedagogical, and intercultural.

Urdu fillers used by English teachers in ESL classrooms

“…Clark and Fox (2002) proposed several other functions of fillers which include searching for a word, keeping the floor or receding the floor. Castro (2009) The study challenges the conventional notion that disfluency uniformly indicates linguistic disabilities in second-language speakers. The findings revealed the filler "uh" emerged as a significant marker of disfluency among Saudi English speakers, particularly when accompanied by longer pauses.…”

“…The functions proposed by Stenström (1994); Castro (2009), Clark and Fox (2002) and other researchers were the primary basis for the researchers' discovery and reflection on various functions of both lexicalized filled pauses and non-lexicalized filled pauses in the interactions of three female English language teachers. The lexicalized filled pauses serve as a marker for the beginning of the frame, an editing tool or device, an empathizer, a re sponse marker, a positive reaction, and a time-creating device.…”

“…The teacher tried to give positive remarks and motivated the students to prepare well for the final presentation (Castro, 2009).…”

“…Reaction marker The teacher used it to express sudden happiness over what had been performed by the students (Castro, 2009).…”

“…Few researchers have specifically examined Urdu fillers in the context of L2 classes in Pakistan despite the fact that the number of researchers studying fillers is increasing (Azi, 2018;Castro, 2009;Clark & Fox, 2002;Firiady & Mahendra, 2019;Pamolango, 2016;Rajabi & Salami, 2016;Rose, 1998;Siswoyo, 2022). Therefore, this quantitative study's first emphasis was on the kinds and purposes of Urdu fillers used by three Pakistani English teachers who were teaching ESL programmes at the tertiary level in Pakistan keeping this research gap in mind.…”