Some Uses of Oral Reading in EFL Classroom Interaction

From a conversation analytic perspective, this paper undertakes the sequential analysis of students oral reading initiated by teachers during teacher-student interaction. Extracted from 14 Korean elementary school EFL lessons collected on video, the sequences that contain teachers initiation and students reading and the surrounding talk were closely examined. The major finding is that students oral reading serves a range of instructional purposes: practicing through repetition, marking closure, preparing for what is about to unfold, collaborating in knowledge presentation, rendering key linguistic information, and presenting and checking students written work. Based on this observation, this paper argues that students oral reading predominantly occurs as part of or in conjunction with a larger instructional activity, rather than with an exclusive instructional focus.