Interaction Process and Chinese EFL Learners’ Proficiency Development by Shanshan Gu

Author:Shanshan Gu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Singapore, Singapore

4.4.2 The Instructors as Competent Interlocutors

The instructors as the learners’ competent interlocutors in the present study included the researcher of the study and four experienced teachers of English with master’s degree. The researcher then was a Ph.D. candidate in applied linguistics in the School of Foreign Languages in a key university in the southeast of China. She also had years of English teaching experience. The four professional teachers came from two universities where all of them were working as lecturers in the English department. Two of them were at the same university with the EFL learners. The other two were at a key university in the north of Jiangsu Province. They had never taught the participants before the study.

The instructors were informed of the purpose and the procedures of the present study. Moreover, they were trained how to complete the pair work with the EFL learners, that is, how to carry out the pretest and the posttests, how to do the treatment tasks in each treatment condition, and how to provide NF as required. On the other hand, they were also trained not to provide feedback to every question in nontarget language form in order to avoid learner irritation because of excessive feedback (McDonough 2005). During the pair-work interaction there were no fixed scripts for the instructors to repeat the conversation with each EFL learner. Instead they had to have cooperative communication with those learners. Additionally, the instructors were assigned at random to each group and were exchanged among groups so that the EFL learners would have opportunities to have interaction with different instructors during treatment sessions. All these conditions ensured that the instructors were qualified to manage the test and treatment sessions.

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