Classroom Interaction and Classroom Talk

The present paper attempts to empirically investigate the Iranian EFL teachers’ discourse types in an EFL classroom context in terms of what types of questions the classroom discourse members create through different types of interaction. Accordingly, two research questions were constructed, the first focusing on the question types, and the second concerning the responses the students provide. Three classes run by two English language instructors were selected. All the class interactions were audio recorded. The class students were 13 to 19 years old. These classes were also mixed, and were not randomized in any form due to the purpose and method of research. The classes each lasted for about 45 minutes. Following the analysis, the findings revealed that the teachers employed different types of questions, including open-ended questions, display questions, convergent questions, and the Wait-Time techniques, and the students prompted to provide responses to the questions. Results also indicated that students were not able to answer the questions concerning the lexical and semantic relationships as well as most segmental and suprasegmental features. Rather, they could give responses to most questions regarding the syntactic elements.