Abstract
Teachers use language in ways that are not at all likely in everyday life. Instructing someone to turn around or stop talking, or praising an interlocutor for their correct response to a question you have posed would not be acceptable in situations of general language use. These are common, even expected, tasks that the teacher carries out in the classroom, and despite high levels of proficiency in the target language, there is no guarantee that an NNSLT has ever had to perform these functions. This chapter provides a topology of tasks that are specific to the classroom, and in particular the language classroom. I have categorised these in terms of
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regulatory tasks,
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informative tasks, and
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eliciting responses and providing feedback.
The significance of the specificity of teachers’ classroom language use is outlined and the implications for teacher training are discussed.
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Notes
- 1.
More information can be found at http://www.atlas-alltagssprache.de/runde-5/f09/, where a map of the usage of the various options according to region can be viewed.
- 2.
A discussion of the translation of ‘hands up’ into German can be found on the forums of the online dictionary Leo: http://dict.leo.org/forum/viewGeneraldiscussion.php?idThread=1168099&idForum=4&lp=ende&lang=de
- 3.
The students are approximately 14 years old and have been learning German for one-and-a-half school years. The teacher is a native speaker of German.
- 4.
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Riordan, E. (2018). Target Task Analysis. In: Language for Teaching Purposes. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71005-1_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71005-1_7
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