| Summary: | This paper deals with classroom interaction, including the views of teachers and students
about language and verbal communication in EFL classes in Brazil. Nine teachers of
English, four native speakers (NS) and five non-native speakers (NNS) and the students
from one class taught by each teacher participated in the study. The students were mostly
young adults, and their level of proficiency in English varied from lower intermediate to
advanced. Three lessons from each class were observed and recorded on audio tape; the
transcripts were analyzed for characteristics of the language and verbal interaction. The
type of student verbal participation varied from mostly listening to the teacher to
attempting to participate verbally in opening sessions. Some students were very talkative
during the classes, while others spoke only in order to seek clarification for their linguistic
doubts or in reply to teacher elicitations. Both teachers and students believe in the
importance of teacher talk for classroom language development and, although most of the
teachers and students surveyed advocate teaching in English most of the time, the majority
agree on the use of the student L1 whenever this is absolutely necessary. Learners tend to
prefer NS teachers because they expect both to be exposed to better English and to be
motivated to speak more English in such a situation than in a NNS teacher-taught class,
although neither of these expectations seems to have been supported by the classroom
data. The predominance of English as the lingua franca in all classes corroborates teacher
and student views about the contributions of communicating in the target language for
language acquisition in FL contexts.
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