An Investigation of Pre-service EFL Teacher’s Use of ‘Okay’ in Their Mock-teaching

This is a qualitative analysis of Korean EFL pre-service teachers’ use of ‘okay’ in their mock-teaching data. ‘Okay’ has been commonly characterized as a type of reactive expressions or tokens that has multiple natures and patterns. Use of reactive expression mainly displays listenership in talk-in-interaction. Interestingly, the pre-teachers’ use of ‘okay’ in the data was frequently found than many other reactive expressions. Then several questions were raised in mind: In what context does ‘okay’ appear in terms of sequence organization?; is there any patterns in common?; and what are the function of the teachers’ ‘okay’ utterance? Three sets of secondary school EFL mock-teaching session were randomly chosen in a course work of a teacher-training college in Korea. The mock-teaching data was video recorded in class and transcribed adopting CA conventions. The teacher talk data included 620 utterances in total and 121 use of okay in frequency appeared. ‘Okay’ in the teacher talk performed both structural and interpersonal functions as follows: First, signaling speaker designation in turn initial position in brief vocalization with falling pitch; second, checking student(s)’s comprehension and encouraging of class participation in Q-A sequence or in turn final displaying prolonged rising tonal contour; functioning as a negative feedback in other-initiated repair sequences with rising tonal contour; and closing the current action or class activity and opening the next action or teaching points.