ADVANCED DISCOURSE STUDIES

Dra. Helena I. R. Agustien, M.A., Ph.D

Sri Wuli Fitriati, Ph.D.

CRITICAL REVIEW
“Making Sense of not making sense: Novice
English Language Teacher Talk”
(Phiona Stanley, Marie Stevenson)

Prepared by

Ririn Ambarini NIM. 0201617019

Yayu Sri Rahayu NIM 0201619022
Eko Suwignyo NIM 0201619008

Review: Stanley, Phiona., Stevenson, Marie. Making sense of not making sense: Novice
English Language Teacher Talk. Linguistics and Education Journal. Volume 38 (2017).
Page 1-10. Published by Elsevier.

Stanley and Stevenson’s article “Making sense of not making sense: Novice English
Language Teacher Talk” is persuasive and successful at bringing both awareness and
understanding to its readers because of the smooth illustration, examples, tone and word
choice, a non-bias approach, and well-written qualitative analysis of the supporting evidence.

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In their study, based on the qualitative data on the analysis teacher discourse and spoken
classroom discourse, Stanley and Stevenson were able to present the results of their study
about the intelligibility of the teacher talk of novice native speaker English language teachers.
The first result shows that the teacher talk shifts between three registers: a regulatory
register, a commentative register, and an instructional register. The three registers
contains ideational, interpersonal, and textual meanings. Even though the teacher talk
that is examined in their study have already contained ideational, interpersonal, and
textual meanings, but it is found that that the vignette of teacher talk provides no
discourse markers or non-verbal signals and a lack of cohesiveness in the reference
chain of the media used. Thus, it leads to less understanding of the students to the
materials that are being discussed.

Another major concert of the authors related to the discussion of their finding is related
to the important role of context of situation and context of culture give great influence
on the successful of teacher’s talk so that what is conveyed by the teacher can be easily
understood by the students. If teacher does not consider context of situation in his or her
talk to students in which they are familiar with the things being learn, students’ understanding
of teacher’s talk can not be reached successfully. As addition, lack of consideration of context
of culture also lead to the students’ lack of success in starting a discussion in English
language classroom.

Stanley and Stevenson’s article is an interesting one, especially at the points how she presents
the underlying theories or philosophy of their study that lead them to the presentation of the
results of their study by using a qualitative study that uses data from two sources to examine
the difficulties that novice English language teachers have with grading their teacher talk to
make it understandable to their mixed language background learners. Their study examines
focus group discussion with learners about difficulties in understanding video-recorded
teacher talk. In their study, they focus on an intelligibility perspective in which they view
language grading by teachers in the language classroom as a form of speech accommodation.

There are some weaknesses that can be found in Stanley and Stevenson’s article that
presents the gap between literature review and the results of the study. In literature review,
Stanley and Stevenson only mention two kinds of registers in classroom teaching. Those two
registers are (1) regulative register covering setting goals, giving instructions, sequencing
tasks; and (2) an instructional register that is content being taught. But in their results, they
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mention three kinds of registers. Those are a regulatory register, a commentative register, and
an instructional register.

The next shortcoming written by Stanley and Stevenson is about the missing information in
the current study session in which they mention about macro skills and macro-skills lessons
without further explanation about what are they about and what are the differences between
macro skills and macro-skills lessons. This kind of missing information will lead to readers’
confusion especially novice teachers who may be lack of experience and lack of
understanding about linguistic competence and knowledge.

The last shortcoming of the article written by Stanley and Stevenson is about the lack of
examples as the follow up of the main points being discussed in their paper. They stated that
teachers grade their language to take into account the language proficiency of their learners
by making adjustments in the modifications of phonology, lexis, and syntax. But the only
example of adjustment mention in their paper is only how to make adjustments in terms of
phonology.

In summary, the article written by Stanley and Stevenson is quite interesting in which they
wrote the steps, the procedure of their research in details and also in successive ways but it
does give much novelty in their research and that will give broaden knowledge to the readers
to something new related to teacher talk in the language classroom. Moreover, their article
will give more benefits to policy makers, teacher educators, and teachers on how to capture
the complex and multi-layered effects of teacher talk in the language classroom
implementation as an integrated framework based on key concepts from Systemic Functional
Linguistics (SFL).

References

Halliday, M. A. K. (1985). An introduction to functional grammar. UK: Edward Arnold.

Halliday, M. A. K., & Hasan, R. (1985). Language, context, and text: Aspects of
languagein a social-semiotic perspective. Melbourne: Deakin University Press.
Holliday, A. (2006). Key concepts in ELT: Native speakerism. ELT Journal, 60(4),385–
387.
Holliday, A. (2010). Complexity in cultural identity. Language and Intercultural Com-
munication, 10(2), 165–177.