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Language Classrooms - Multicultural classrooms (Why is she so quiet in the classroom?) - Student-teacher interaction

6 important questions on Language Classrooms - Multicultural classrooms (Why is she so quiet in the classroom?) - Student-teacher interaction

What is the consensus regarding student-teacher interaction?

There are some cross-cultural variations regarding how students as learners of English perceive the relationship between themselves and their teachers, which in turn impact on their ways of communication.

What did studies comparing native and non-native English speakers' email requests find?

Both groups of students use the same general request strategies and are aware of the need to adjust their request strategies according to the reader, but L2 learners tend to realise the same strategies qualitatively differently. They tend to use a more restricted range of modifiers or under-use linguistic modifiers.

Do these differences impact on how teachers perceive email requests from students?

Although people tend to have negative perceptions of the senders of emails with language mistakes such as spelling and grammatical errors, these negative perceptions are significantly reduced when they know that the sender is a non-native speaker of the language. The knowledge of whether the sender is a non-native speaker of English does not make a difference in cases when there is a breach of etiquette.

What does research on email requests show?

Difference in the range of linguistic means and degree of flexibility employed by native speakers and non-native speaker to make a request, the challenge facing students to discover unwritten rules regarding what can be expected from staff and what may be over and above their duties.

What did Boxer (2002) find?

Compared with native speakers or local students, students who are non-native speakers or from a different culture very often miss some contextualisation cues which would help them to achieve their goals in these interactions, due to lack of shared schema.

What are contextualisation cues?

Verbal or non-verbal signals or indicators that allow participants to evoke relevant background knowledge and social-cultural or institutional expectations that are necessary to interpret interaction.