원어민 영어교사와 초등학생 간의 의사소통단절 유형과 보완 전략 연구

Types of communication breakdowns and repairing strategies between a native English teacher and elementary school students

The purpose of this study is to investigate communication breakdowns between a native English teacher and Korean elementary school students and thus to explore effective strategies that they can use to minimize or repair communication breakdowns. The participants of the study were five elementary school students and their native English teacher at a small English camp. The data consists of class observation, interviews, and learning journals of the students. The analysis of the data revealed the followings. First, major sources of communication breakdowns were the teacher’s use of difficult words or sentence structures, his lack of knowledge about Korean culture, and the students’s lack of knowledge about English words, grammar and pronunciation. Second, repairing strategies used by the teacher were, in order of frequency, circumlocution, approximation, repetition, message abandonment, non-linguistic cues, encouragement of student’s utterance, and clarification request. On the other hand, the ones used by the students were message abandonment, non-linguistic cues, repetition of one’s own or other’s utterance, signaling of their lack of understanding, requesting repetition, approximation, etc. Third, while the quantity and types of communication breakdowns did not change much over the course of the classes, repairing strategies of the students showed some significant changes. Their use of message abandonment was decreased and signaling of their lack of understanding, requesting repetition, non-linguistic cues were increased. Based on the findings several suggestions were made regarding ways of making interactions between a teacher and students in English classes successful.