From a conversation analytic perspective, this paper undertakes the sequential analysis of students' oral reading initiated by teachers during teacher-student interaction. Extracted from 14 Korean elementary school EFL lessons collected on video, the sequences that contain teachers' initiation and students' reading and the surrounding talk were closely examined. The major finding is that students' oral reading serves a range of instructional purposes: practicing through repetition, marking closure, preparing for what is about to unfold, collaborating in knowledge presentation, rendering key linguistic information, and presenting and checking students' written work. Based on this observation, this paper argues that students' oral reading predominantly occurs as part of or in conjunction with a larger instructional activity, rather than with an exclusive instructional focus.

This study aims to investigate the interaction patterns between the teacher and students or among students themselves in a Korean elementary English classroom by analysing classroom talk and by focusing on the types of the teacher’s questions and feedback as well as the use of L1 and L2. This analysis is used to determine the influence of such interaction on the students’ communicative skills in English. A female teacher in Gyeonggi province and a 6th-grade class participated in the data collection. This study included data from video or audio recordings, interviews, field notes, self-assessments, and portfolios. The transcribed data were analysed using Tsui’s (1994) framework and Verplaetse’s (1995, 2000) coding system. The results of this analysis indicated that the interaction patterns varied between participants into three groups: teacher-initiated talk (e.g., T-S talk) vs students-initiated talk (e.g., S-T talk & S-S talk). At the beginning stage of lesson, the teacher-initiated talk made up the majority of talk in English, and facilitated the students’ involvement in classroom learning including their language use. In the S-S talk, the students were involved in interaction which occurred naturally without the teacher’s control.

With a recognition of a profound effect that teacher identity has in students’ language learning, the present study explores how teacher identity, especially that of native speaking (NS) and nonnative speaking (NNS) teacher in EFL context, shapes the teacher-student interaction and influences students’ learning differently. Data was gathered through classroom observations and video recordings of teacher-student interaction of a total of six hours of class sessions. The data comes from the interactions of three nonnative Korean teachers, one native speaker, and six university students in Korean EFL co-teaching classroom. To analyze the data, the method of discourse analysis was used. The findings show that the native teacher acted as an interaction provoker who stimulated classroom discussion and also an expert of both target language and culture. On the other hand, nonnative teachers acted as an activity guider by helping student understand the classroom activities. As sharing L1 and the same culture, nonnative teachers were flexible with the language choice of the students and understood the difficulties they had in the class. The study further draws attention to the pedagogical implications regarding the co-teaching of native and nonnative teacher in EFL classroom.

This study aims to investigate differences between task-based learning and teaching (TBLT) and storytelling-based learning and teaching (SBLT), focusing on teaching interaction in Korean elementary schools. The present study is motivated by the realization of the effects of teaching English by telling stories in comparison with TBLT, which has been effectively implemented in language classrooms. This study investigates eight task-based classrooms and eight storytelling-based classrooms in conjunction with teacher interviews. The findings indicate that frequencies of teacher talk and L1 interaction are significantly higher in TBLT than those in SBLT, and frequencies of other utterance types are significantly different between the two. These distinctions result in the two main interaction patterns for TBLT and SBLT, respectively. In addition, the interviews with teachers indicate that the atmosphere of TBLT classroom interaction has a tendency to be competent, and that of SBLT has a tendency to be enjoyable.

This paper investigated the tearn-teaching at three primary schools in Korea. The data consisted of classroom audio-recordings, in-class observations and post-observation interviews. This study first examined the degree to which Teaching English through English (TEE) was practiced by Native English Teachers (NETs) and Korean English Teachers (KETs) and the extent to which each case fit five conditions for optimal language learning environments: interaction with an authentic audience; opportunity for the negotiation of meaning; exposure to creative and varied L2; production of creative and varied L2; and engagement in authentic tasks (Egbert & Hanson-Smith, 1999). The main findings were that in five different observation sites, as expected, L I was rarely used in NET classes, but was used in 28% of utterances in KET classes, often to perform functions for which L2 English could have easily been used. In addition, it was found that very few instances of NET or KET classes met any of the five conditions for optimal language learning environments. This research proposes that L2 English be maximized in class, and that teachers pay more attention to creating a learning environment that satisfies the conditions for optimal language learning.

This paper investigated interaction patterns of L2 learners and their native speaker counterparts in EFL classrooms and proximal social settings. To this end, data were collected from an English cafe at a university (i.e., pseudo-natural setting) and from an English conversation class at a university (i.e., classroom setting). Data analysis focused on teachers" question types, feedback patterns, and learners" responses towards feedback. The analysis based on utterance frequency revealed that students displayed higher participation rate in the pseudo-natural settings. With regards to teacher questions, teachers used more referential questions than display questions in both settings. However, there were twice as many teachers" feedback in the pseudo-natural setting compared to the classroom setting, but the frequent feedback did not slow down the conversation and did not always lead to self-repair. In addition, students in two settings differed in terms of their preferences to feedback in different linguistic categories.

Although interactionists’ input, interaction, and output hypotheses offer a clear picture of what goes on in one's language learning product as well as in one's process, they fail to explain why interaction is not possible or even desirable for certain groups of learners. To explore negative factors which hamper selected Korean learners' oral interaction processes (N=14) in-and-out of class, a one-year ethnographic study was conducted with different methods (interviews, observations, and social network analysis) and multiple sources of data. Participants strongly voiced the importance of interpersonal relationships among students, between the students and the instructor, and their effect on second language learning. The results of this study indicate that both institutional and social contexts impact learning far more greatly than the choice of teaching method, material, or techniques. This result contradicts the popular belief that learners are ready to learn once the educational environment is optimalized. This study is significant in that it raises the importance of understanding the students' group dynamics that originate in their own culture. Based upon the findings of this study, coping strategies for interactional barriers are provided for the future Intensive English Programs (IEP) for students and teachers.

The purpose of this study is to analyze teachers' questioning patterns in EFL classes, and propose a new set of classification based on the interaction flow that a question initiates and the teachers' intention of questions in language classroom. Data were collected from five advanced EFL classes. Six categories of teacher questions were observed and two types of interactions following the initial questions were found. The interactions were usually opened by the teacher, which confirmed the general conception, and the types of interactions were mostly chosen by the teacher's preference and the activity the class was doing.