This study locates in a Chinese primary school context where English is one of the three key subjects together with Chinese and Maths (Chinese Ministry of Education, 2011). In the English language classrooms of Chinese context, review lessons are set at the end of a unit study and/or before an examination, aiming at helping students recap, reinforce and practice knowledge learnt in previous lessons. In English language classrooms in Shenzhen, like many other cities in China, the shared local language is Mandarin which is often used with the target language English as the instructional mediums in the classroom teaching. However, there is little specific guidelines for teachers to use local language and target language strategically and systemically. Previous literature rarely examines the use of these languages in review lessons in Chinese context.
To gain an in-depth look at what classroom discourse of review lesson is valued in such a context, an online video recording of an award-winning English language review lesson (among the 30 award-winning English lessons out of 189 demo lessons) has been chosen from a Year One English language class in Shenzhen, China. This 45 minutes lesson is awarded as one of the highest quality lessons by Shenzhen Education Bureau in 2017, and published in an open access website named Shenzhen Online Class (https://wlkt.sz.edu.cn/videocase/). This website is an official and authoritative digital resource sponsored by the local education bureau. According to the officer Zewu Huang who is responsible for this competition, each year, the team of English language teachers in each school in Shenzhen will choose one or two representative teachers to record their lessons, and then upload the video recordings to the website. These lessons uploaded by different schools will then be evaluated by the teaching and researching staff in Shenzhen Education Bureau and the list of the award-winning lessons will then be published online.
The criteria used to evaluate the award-winning lessons are focused on both teacher’s performance and students’ outcomes in the class (see Appendix B). Specifically, there are five main aspects in the criteria (100 points maximum), including 15 percent of teacher quality (e.g. teachers’ language proficiency and classroom management); 35 percent of teaching design (e.g. teaching objectives which suit their students’ needs, and teaching rationale and strategies that encourages exploratory, independent and corporative learning); 20 percent of teaching process (e.g. teacher guiding and student-center learning, and appropriate amounts of teacher talk and students talk); 20 percent of teaching effect (e.g. classroom tasks being completed successfully, adequate interactions among teacher and students); and 10 percent of the use of innovation technology (e.g. multimodal use of resources such as pictures, audio and video) (see more details in Appendix B).
Video recordings have been considered as the most neutral tool for classroom observation as they ‘have the potential of capturing the essence of the classroom, and can be listened to or viewed over and over, allowing the participants to agree on an interpretation of an event or behavior’ (Day, 1990, p. 46). Different from a written data source, video recordings provide more comprehensive details of the ongoing pedagogic practices. Both verbal and non-verbal exchanges can be captured such as languages used, teacher and learners’ behaviors and the classroom atmosphere. This is essential for the current analysis focusing on teacher and learner’s interactions, although video recordings of the lesson may also have some limitations which include that teacher and learners may behave in different ways from normal classroom settings. When participants are being recorded, they are ‘in extraordinary situations’ where they may ‘produce extraordinary language’, which may not be natural (Stubbs, 1983, p. 225). However, due to the goal of this current lesson, this impact seems to be trivial comparing to the advantages of using this video recording for an analysis of classroom discourse.
Another reason for this choice is out of personal convenience purpose. As the researcher has previously worked as an English language teacher for four years in a Shenzhen public school, she herself has participated in similar processes of designing a lesson involving recording and publishing on the website. She has an interest in exploring the pedagogic activities and
relationship between teacher and learners in such demo lessons and learning to apply the Sydney school SFL knowledge and genre pedagogic framework into classroom teaching.
3.2.2 Participant information
Participants involved in this study are the teacher in the award-winning review lesson and her students. The teacher has more than five years of English language teaching experience in primary schools. She has a bachelor’s degree in English language teaching and a national teaching qualification (Primary School) in China. Such educational background and
qualifications are normally set as the basic criteria for teacher candidates to ensure their teaching expertise and teaching quality. These criteria can be found in many teacher job advertisements in China nowadays published in teacher-recruiting websites (e.g. www.gaoxiaojob.com and
www.jiaoshizhaopin.net). This teacher uses both English and Mandarin in the class.
This class consists of 40 students. They are in their Year One and aged from 8 to 9 years old, with the same amount of female and male students. They attend primary schools based on where their family live instead of their academic background. Their family come from different parts of China and share Mandarin as their local language with their teachers in schools. They are at their beginning levels of English language learning and have acquired some basic
vocabulary and simple exchanges. English is considered as their foreign language and the most occasions they use English is in their English language classrooms, same for pupils in most of other public primary schools in China (except those international/foreign language schools where English is sometimes required to be used in other subject teaching/learning).
3.2.3 Data collected
Data collected for this study include the video recording of the award-winning review lesson, the teaching rational written by the teacher and published online with the video
(https://wlkt.sz.edu.cn/videocase/), the criteria used to evaluate the lessons and the New English Curriculum for primary school in China (2014).
First, the current review lesson data have been transcribed into spoken discourse transcription symbols suggested in Eggins and Slades’ (1997) work of systemic functional linguistics' conversational analysis. The transcriptions have been further divided into different moves for analysis following Rose’s (2014) conventions of analyzing pedagogic discourse in terms of the small meaning chunks. In addition, the spatial arrangement of the turn-taking and other non-verbal information related to the utterances is also taken into consideration guided by Edwards’ (1993) work on the notation conventions. Additional semiotic resources such as the
gestures and other body movement are included in the curly brackets ‘{}’. Table 3.1 shows one example of the transcription.
spkr exchange gloss
T [TELL ME WHAT IT IS]
T {Pointing to S1} [YOU PLEASE]
S1 {no answer}
Table 3.1 Example of data transcription 1
In table 3.1, ‘spkr’ column shows the speakers of the horizontal discourse in the
‘exchange’ column. Their local language, Mandarin which is presented in the exchange column, has been translated and presented in the gloss column in capital letters within square brackets. The non-verbal activities are described in curly brackets. The teacher’s pointing and students’ no response are both noted. T stands for Teacher and S1 (2, 3, etc.) stands for each individual student that is identified by their voice. For example, S15 refers to the fifteenth student’s response to the teacher. Table 3.2 is another example showing the annotations of S15’s voice which may indicate whether the student was confident in answering the questions.
spkr exchange gloss
T
{T checks the picture on the board but seems
not to understand him} [SAY THAT AGAIN.]
S15
Duck {He lowers his
volume a lot and can be barely
heard this time.} [DUCK IS YELLOW.]
T
duck
, [OH, YOU SAID DUCK IS YELLOW, RIGHT?]
T OK it’s yellow
T ? YEAH?
Table 3.2 Example of data transcription 2
Additional data have been collected from the website to gain background knowledge of the lesson and perspectives of the teacher in interpreting pedagogic activities. These additional data include the teaching materials presented in PowerPoint slides and electronic copies of handouts for the students, teaching rationales submitted by the teacher herself in which she
introduces the teaching objectives, the content being taught in prior lessons, and updated English curriculum documents published by the China Education Department (2011). As Christie (2002) recommends, ‘extract selection needs to be understood for its status in the much longer stretch of classroom activity’ (p. 23). It is important to relate the prior activities to the development of current lessons, which enables to identify how shared previous knowledge is negotiated in current lesson data. This is particularly essential for analyzing the interactions that shape the pedagogic activities in which the main purpose is to help students recall their prior learning.