UNDERSTANDING TEACHER TALK AT ISLAMIC SECONDARY SCHOOL: A PILOT STUDY

This study explores the teacher talk in Islamic Secondary School during the English language classroom. This study follows a research paradigm associated with a naturalistic qualitative inquiry where the main focus is to understand the teacher talk's complexity. The study mainly employed audio recording for data analysis. There were two audio recording sessions in form four classes. The researcher selected two teachers for the audio recording. The findings shows teacher talk time had dominated most of the class time in which Teacher A had talked for 74% of the class time and Teacher B had talked for 68% of the class time.

EFL Instructors’ Performance Evaluation at University Level: Prescriptive and Collaborative Approaches

The present paper aims to investigate EFL instructors’ performance at university level according to prescriptive and collaborative approaches in supervision. In order to achieve this target, the researcher addressed three questions. The first investigates instructors’ level of performance. The second and third questions aimed to identify instructors' points of strength and action points. In this regard, the researcher developed an observation checklist (Appendix A) for supervisors to use when observing teachers'. He also developed observation guidelines for supervisors to make sure they are following the collaborative approach of supervision (Appendix B). The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, including means, standard deviation and percentages to answer the first question. To answer the second and third questions, the researcher used content analysis to synthesize the supervisors' feedback given to instructors regarding their points of strengths and action points. The results showed that the instructors' performance was either satisfactory or outstanding based on the supervisors' observation, which could be due to the professional development program conducted to develop their teaching competencies. In addition, the instructors showed themselves competent in other areas related to motivating students and providing them with constructive feedback. However, some instructors still need to develop their competencies in areas such as classroom management and teacher talk time. These have been summarized according to their frequency of occurrence in tables 2 and 3. Based on the results, the researcher drew a number of conclusions and recommendations.

TEACHER TALK AND INSTRUCTIONAL LANGUAGE CHOICE: TWO PROBLEMS ENCOUNTERED IN EFL CLASSROOM

When we agree with the internalization of a foreign language acquisition centered in the classroom, teacher talk plays the most important role to achieve the success of teaching and learning. However, a high intensity of teacher talk and the hesitation of instructional language choice become two common problems are usually faced. Therefore, it seems important to present a variety of literature reviews to be considered by teachers which may be used as the reference to solve the problem. This study presented the concept of teacher talk at classroom interaction, monolingual and bilingual approach in EFL classroom and some previous research findings “the rationales for supporting bilingual approach” which were gained from some articles. This study suggests that teachers have to control the quantity and quality of their talk to gain an effective teaching and learning process in the EFL classroom. It is more advantageous to reduce Teacher Talk Time and increase Student Talk Time based on the students’ need because too much teacher talk will have an impact on decreased student learning motivation. When teaching EFL students, it will be helpful for overcoming cognitive difficulties if teachers insert mother tongue for the certain condition such as to translate difficult words from reading the text and to explain grammar. However, the teachers have to keep a principled and judicious use of mother tongue because a very high proportion of it also limits the students’ achievement. If the students are exposed more to the second language, they will become more successful

Behavioral and Environmental Analysis of Self-Reported Dysphonic and Nondysphonic High School Music Teachers

Dysphonia is considered to be a common hazard associated with occupational voice users. Teachers represent the highest percentage of clinical voice disorder patients. Voice injuries in teachers could result in lost wages due to missed work, additional costs for medications, therapy, and surgeries, and teacher attrition. The purpose of this study was to observe specific vocal habits among and between three self-reported dysphonic and three self-reported nondysphonic music teachers. I observed each participant for 3 consecutive days and conducted semistructured interviews following the observation period. The observed behaviors were analyzed to determine if teacher talk time, amount of time spent talking over specific classroom noises, and amount of teacher talk within a “very loud” classroom (>80 dBA) could be contributing factors for vocal attrition. Results revealed more hazardous talk episodes among dysphonic participants. Interview themes included stress and vocal awareness.