Browsing by Subject "kehu"

In classroom conversation, teacher and students have different possibilities to take turns. Together they conduct the institutional task of school in the roles of teacher and student. Compliments and positive feedback can easily be seen to support students learning. That is one of the main reasons why compliments and positive feedback should be noticeable part of classroom interaction. However previous research shows that teachers don’t give as many compliments as they should according to how important compliments and positive feedback is seen on most of the studies published so far. The aim of this study was to find out how teachers compliment students during classroom lessons. This study consists of eight classroom lessons in native language (Finnish) and literature. The lessons were filmed in 2012 and the duration of each lesson is about 45 minutes. The lessons in this study were from different schools around Helsinki area and the students were 6th graders (approx. 11 to 12 years old). I used conversation analysis as my main research method to analyze the data of this study. This study showed that teachers use different linguistic expression such as copula clauses and positive adjectives to compliment students during lessons. Positive adjectives were often accompanied by intensifiers and references to assessable. In this study adjectives carried the positive load in teachers’ compliments. The most frequent compliment teachers used was good which doesn’t always act as a compliment in classroom conversation. Some of the good phrases had a sequence closing and topic transitional aspect. Prosodic features and conversational context made it possible to categorize good as a compliment. Teachers used personal and demonstrative pronouns to refer to the assessable or the recipient of the compliment. However most of the compliments given to students had no explicit reference. As other studies before, in this study was found that many of the teachers’ compliments were general.