An Analysis of the Discourse Interaction in the Online Classroom of Chinese for Specific Purposes - A Case Study of the Online Teaching of Chinese for Hotel in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Burapha University

Abstract

In order to better understand the problems of classroom interaction in the online teaching of Chinese for specific purposes, this paper analyzes the online teaching video of the course “Chinese for Hotel” as an example. This course is for the Chinese major of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Burapha University. Based on the discourse interaction theory, ELAN software was adopted to annotate and quantitatively analyze this video from the following three dimensions: teacher talk, student talk and student invalid answers. It was found that the teacher subconsciously gave attention to classroom interaction by, for example, setting display and referential questions, adopting a variety of repair strategies, and giving positive feedback. However, there were also some problems as follows. Firstly, according to the teaching purpose and the level of students, there should be more referential questions. Secondly, in terms of the total number of discourse acts, the total duration of discourse and discourse control, the teacher’s discourse overwhelmingly exceeded the students’. Finally, the organization of classroom activities was mainly based on the interaction between teacher and students, and the form of interaction was not diverse but single. On this basis, this paper gives corresponding teaching suggestions on how to design information gap activities to implement task teaching and to improve students’ output in class.