Chuka
Fred Ononye
Alvan
Ikoku University of Education at Owerri, Nigeria
Abstract
Effective linguistic choices and delivery methods are the basic
ingredients to success in classroom teaching/learning, yet the language and
style of classroom interaction have enjoyed little scholarly attention. The
paper, therefore, investigated the styles and lexical
choices in teacher-student classroom interactions to establish the role of language as vehicle of the content and style in
teaching/learning. The data consist of 10 teacher-student classroom
interactions randomly recorded,
transposed to writing and subjected to stylistic and quantitative methods of
analysis, with insights from relational semantics, text-linguistic and
socio-linguistic stylistics. Two
styles were observed in the discourse: evaluative style (used by the teachers)
and informative style (used by both the students and teachers). Informative
style is indexed by such lexical choices as register, synonymy, antonymy,
hyponymy, and colloquialism that enter into paradigmatic relations. Evaluative
style is characterised by collocation which keys into syntagmatic relation. While
collocation (330: 32.1%) is the most prevalent lexical feature in the data,
hyponymy (17: 1.7%) is the least. These stylistic features have proved to be
the functional indices for underpinning the styles and lexical choices used in
classroom interaction. Thus, they are important for effective assessment of
teachers’ competence, students’ learning progress, and designing of school
curricula.
Keywords:
Stylistics, Teacher-student
interaction, Classroom discourse, Lexical choices
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