earticle

영어

The study aims to investigate how communicative and meaningful the English classes taught by a native English-speaking teacher are. The data were collected from three different levels of English classrooms (advanced/intermediate/beginning) in a middle school. The classes met once a week and each class was observed and tape-recorded twice (total 270 minutes). Communicative Orientation of Language Teaching (COLT) observation scheme was employed to analyze the classroom interaction and the characteristics of the classes. The results showed that even though the primary goal of the classes was to help the students develop their communication skills, the classes were not communicative enough to bring about meaningful and authentic interaction. In addition, the students were mostly situated in a passive mode where they had rare opportunities to decide the content of the class and to express their own opinions. Most interaction between the teacher and the students were initiated by the teacher’s pseudo questions and a large number of utterances produced by the students consisted of only one or two words. The study, on the basis of the results, discusses several pedagogical suggestions.