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DOI: 10.1177/0033688217730138
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Teachers Fronted Reading journals.sagepub.com/home/rel

Comprehension Lessons
for Vocabulary Learning
Opportunities

Justina Ong
National University of Singapore, Singapore

Abstract
This study examined classroom routine and interactional patterns of Grade 5 English Language
reading comprehension lessons through delineating the speech act functions of instructional
discourse that was based on Malcolms sociolinguistic model (Malcolm, 1979a; Malcolm, 1979b;
Malcolm, 1982; Malcolm, 1986). It also evaluated the classroom interaction patterns with reference
to four proposed levels of vocabulary learning opportunities that could be afforded through the
discourse. Using a qualitative single case study methodology, four video-recorded and transcribed
lessons, together with a semi-structured interview with the teacher, classroom observations,
and lesson plans formed the data for the present study. The classroom routine showed teachers
informing, teachers elicitation, childrens bidding, teachers nomination, childrens replying, teachers
acknowledgement, teachers informing and teachers directing and a predominant Initiation-
Response-Follow-up pattern. The teachers discourse had focussed the learners attention on target
vocabulary and was effective in eliciting the meanings of those words from the learners. However,
most of the successful elicitations took few and short turns. A closer examination further revealed
that the most prevalent teachers elicitation acts were checking elicitation and multiple elicitation;
and that the most prevalent teachers acknowledgement acts were unqualified accepting or relaying,
and evaluating. The types of teachers elicitations and acknowledgements resulted in an interaction
that was devoid of dynamic negotiation of the meanings between the learners, teacher, and text.

Keywords
Classroom interaction, speech act functions, classroom routine, teachers elicitations and
acknowledgements, sociolinguistics model, vocabulary learning opportunities, case study

Corresponding author:
Justina Ong, English Language and Literature Department, National University of Singapore, 10 Kent Ridge
Crescent, 119260, Singapore.
Email: elljo@nus.edu.sg
2 RELC Journal 00(0)

Introduction
Educators and researchers have a long-standing interest in classroom discourses and how
they might influence learners and their learning processes. Classroom discourse is one of
the most important instructional tools that educators use to facilitate learning. Different
types of speech events (e.g. teacher-fronted lesson, group discussion) serve varied pur-
poses; and they exhibit unique sequential characteristics and social behaviour which
might provide insights into how and what learners learn. As classroom discourse per-
tains to particular educational, social and cultural contexts, and is not static but in a state
of change, current classroom discourse research is continuously needed. In this study, we
examine the speech act functions, classroom routine, and interactional patterns of Grade
5 English Language reading comprehension lessons based on Malcolms sociolinguistic
model (Malcolm, 1979a; Malcolm, 1979b; Malcolm, 1982; Malcolm,1986) and explore
whether the current instructional discourse provides learners with vocabulary learning
opportunities.
There are several theoretical rationales for examining classroom discourse with
Malcolms sociolinguistic model (Malcolm, 1979a; Malcolm,1979b; Malcolm, 1982).
First, the model is extremely valuable in terms of its comprehensive categories, com-
pleteness as a model, validity in coding, and sensitivity to both the form and function of
speech act utterances (Malcolm, 1986). Second, a review of the current literature in
classroom discourse shows a paucity of studies that are based on Malcolms sociolin-
guistic model. In fact, classroom discourse research studies have mostly adopted an ad-
hoc analysis instead of a system-based analysis (Walsh, 2006), whereby there is no
preconceived set of descriptive categories. Some ad-hoc analysis relies on simplistic
coding schemes which fail to distinguish utterances well (Mercer, 2010). Such an ad-hoc
analysis has also less order, faces the challenge in generalizability of findings, and
researchers conclusions are largely derived from the categories identified and at times,
driven by what they want to see. By contrast, Malcolms sociolinguistic model is a
well-known and well-validated system-based framework, that allows comparisons to be
made across classroom research studies which employ this framework. Third, the speech
act functions of the teacher and students show the purposes of the interlocutors inten-
tions and their responses to each others intentions, thus, a close and detailed examina-
tion of the functions would reveal the intricacies of classroom interactions (Hutchby and
Wooffitt, 1998; Mori, 2004; Schegloff, 1987; Schegloff, 1988).
Recent research has found that teachers speech act functions, such as elicitations and
acknowledgments, influence the quality and length of students replies and that these acts
are almost completely at the teachers disposal (see Chin, 2006; Mehan, 1979; Molinari
etal., 2013; Shintani, 2013; Shintani and Ellis, 2014; Smith and Higgins, 2006; Wolf
etal., 2005). Most of these studies (e.g. Chin, 2006; Molinari etal., 2013; Vaish, 2008;
Wolf etal., 2005) offer rich and detailed descriptions of observed events and are based
on an implicit assumption that classroom discourse affects learning. However, only few
research studies attempted to study classroom discourse for language learning behaviour
(e.g. Shintani, 2013; Shintani and Ellis, 2014).
According to Long (1981; Long, 1996) and Lyster (1998), classroom discourse plays a
critical role in second language learning. The instructional exchanges between teacher
Ong 3

and students provide opportunities for the learners to practice the target language, test out
hypotheses about the target language, and obtain useful feedback. The general consensus
among second language acquisition researchers on how classroom talk might facilitate
second language learning is that the teachers talk directs and heightens learners attention
to linguistic meanings and forms. Learners conscious attention to such meanings and
forms (i.e. noticing) is necessary for language learning (Schmidt, 1990). The situations
typically occur when the teacher and learners negotiate the meanings of the target words
or when the learners notice the gap between what they want to say and what they can
produce during classroom interaction (Long, 1981). According to Lightbown, Meara, and
Halter (1998), the teachers input is equally important for learners to learn the target
words. The learners need to encounter the target words 12 to 20 times in order to learn
them (Coady and Huckin, 1997). Laufer and Hulstijn (2001) further suggest that learners
learn by searching for and locating information on the meanings or forms of the words.
Instructional scaffolding that lead learners to make associations of the target words with
other lexical items, grammatical forms, syntactical structures, and contextual meanings
improve learners depth of processing of the target words. As Hulstijin (2001) aptly sug-
gested, it is the frequency and quality of processing of the meanings of the target words
that help learners to remember them. Ellis and Beaton (1993) also found that learners
rehearsal of the target words facilitated the retrieval of those words.
The above studies lead us to propose four levels of vocabulary learning opportunities
that can be afforded through classroom discourse. With reference made to these four
levels, we evaluate the instructional discourse of English language reading comprehen-
sion lessons to find out whether the current classroom interaction provides the learners
with second language vocabulary learning opportunities. The four levels are as follows.

Level 1: The teachers discourse focusses learners attention on the target words.
Level 2: The students discourse reveals that they notice the target words.
Level 3: Classroom interaction shows that the learners search, locate, and retrieve the
meanings of the target words.
Level 4: The teachers discourse provides interactional opportunities for learners to
process the target words, particularly through meaningful negotiation of the word
meanings.

Theoretical Framework
As Malcolms studies have provided a basis for the present study, we will delineate the
details of his studies. Malcolm (1979a; Malcolm, 1979b; Malcolm, 1982; Malcolm, 1986)
focussed on the sociolinguistic aspects of the classroom interaction between the Aboriginal
students and non-Aboriginal teachers in primary schools in Western Australia which was at
the time greatly hampered by cross-cultural communication difficulties. Adopting an ethno-
graphic approach, he observed and analysed 100 different teachers teaching in 100 different
classrooms. In his study, he identified about 100 different kinds of speech acts and reported
that 40% were performed by the students whilst 60% were performed by the teacher.
4 RELC Journal 00(0)

The speech acts were categorized into seven basic functions: eliciting, bidding, nom-
inating, replying, acknowledging, informing, and directing. Each of the functions had
its sub-categories. Malcolm (1979a; Malcolm, 1979b) found that interactions in his
observed classroom discourses entailed the following dominant speech act functions:
proxy eliciting, empty bidding, deferred replying, declined replying, shadowed reply-
ing, and unsolicited replying.
Malcolm (1982) further conceptualized theoretical constructs such as speech acts, rou-
tines, and speech events in his study of classroom discourse. The speech acts are the small-
est functional unit in an interaction. There are seven basic interactional functions. Routines
are patterns of organizing the speech acts. An example of a basic teaching routine of a
speech event of imparting content that occurred in Malcolms analysis (1982) is known as
the tripartite speech-act structure (see sequence in Mehan, 1979) which consisted of initia-
tion, response, and feedback (IRF) (see Initiation, Response, and Evaluation, IRE, in
Mehan, 1979; McCarthy, 2002). The routine characterizing Malcolms classroom dis-
course was teachers elicitation, childs bidding, teachers nomination, childs reply, teach-
ers acknowledging, and teachers informing. Finally, the speech event displays an activity
that is characterized by rule-governed patterns of speech acts. Examples of speech events
include but are not limited to imparting content, classroom discussion, and picture talk.

Review of Classroom Discourse Research Studies

In what follows, recent studies on classroom discourse that share a converging focus
with our study on how teachers elicitations and acknowledgements moves influence
students replies in the classroom are reviewed. Wolf, Crosson, and Resnick (2005), for
example, assessed quality of reading comprehension lessons of Grade 1 to 8 classes
using an Instructional Quality Assessment tool. Their investigation focussed on account-
able talk and academic rigour. Using an ad-hoc interaction analysis, they described
accountable talk as comprising seven dimensions: 1) participation rate, 2) teachers link-
ing ideas, 3) students linking ideas, 4) teachers asking for knowledge, 5) students pro-
viding knowledge, 6) teachers asking for rigorous thinking, and 7) students providing
rigorous thinking. Accordingly, academic rigour consisted of 1) rigour of the text, 2)
active use of knowledge: analysing and interpreting the text during the class discussion,
and 3) active use of knowledge during class discussion. The researchers found more
teachers talk than students talk; and the dominant teachers moves consisted of elicita-
tions of the students knowledge and prompting of their thinking. The students replies
were brief, particularly when the teacher used closed-ended questions or elicited one-
word answers. The interaction among students was limited. It has been further reported
that a positive and strong relationship was established between good accountable talk
moves and the level of rigour in the observed lessons.
Vaish (2008) examined a total of 273 English language lessons in Primary 5 and
Secondary 3 classrooms from 51 Singaporean schools. The main findings were that cur-
riculum-related teachers talk constituted the largest percentage of total teachers talk
time for both grade levels; and teacher-fronted lessons were dominant. From Vaishs
(2008) qualitative transcripts analysis, the teachers questions were typically closed-
ended and the feedback moves were largely evaluative.
Ong 5

Similarly, Liu and Hong (2009) examined teachers elicitations, but their focus was
on the types and functions of teacher directives. They looked into regulative discourse of
32 lessons conducted by eight teachers in Grade 5 English language classrooms. They
found that there was a predominant use of imperatives (62.7%) compared to declaratives
(26.1%) and interrogatives (11.3%) in the teachers directives. There was also a higher
percentage of procedural (62.6%) rather than disciplinary directives (37.4%). The use of
teachers directives was found to be forceful and explicit; and they concluded that there
was an asymmetrical power relation between the teachers and the students, with the
teachers possessing a more powerful social position than the students.
More recently, Shintani (2013) and Shintani and Ellis (2014) examined teachers inputs
and students outputs of the target language items in classroom discourse, with an overarch-
ing aim of ascertaining language learning behaviour. What is of relevance to the current
study is that Shintani (2013) found that teachers elicitations (either requested or optional)
influenced the types of students replies (borrowed or self-initiated). Shintani (2013), for
example, examined the effects of two instructional approaches (the FonF instruction versus
FonFs instruction) on the acquisition of nouns and adjectives of 45 young Japanese EFL
children. The FonFs group received explicit vocabulary instruction through the Present-
Practice-Produce teaching method. The FonF group received implicit vocabulary instruc-
tion through the task-based teaching method. The control group received regular vocabulary
lessons. Apart from analysing the results of the production vocabulary tests to find out
whether the learners acquired the target items, Shintani quantified the instances of the items
produced as inputs and outputs in the discourses of the experimental and control groups.
She found that the FonFs group produced more of the target items than the FonF group,
despite the fact that both groups were exposed to similar amount of inputs. More impor-
tantly, she found that when the learners replies were elicited by the teacher, the FonFs
group greatly surpassed the FonF group in the production of the target items. However,
when the learners replies were not elicited, the FonFs group mostly borrowed the target
items from the earlier utterances but the FonF group mostly self-initiated the use of the
target items. Shintani (2013) empirically verified the effects of instruction on vocabulary
learning, and illustrated how target items were negotiated in classroom interaction.

The Study
This study was guided by two main research questions:
1. What are the classroom routine and interaction patterns of Grade 5 English
Language reading comprehension lessons?
2. Does the classroom discourse of reading comprehension lessons provide the
learners with vocabulary learning opportunities?

Methodology
Participants and Context of Study. This study drew on data collected from four teacher-
fronted English language reading comprehension lessons conducted by a teacher for 40
Grade 5 students in an elementary school in Singapore. Apart from the classroom tran-
scripts, our data analyses were supplemented with a semi-structured interview with the
6 RELC Journal 00(0)

teacher, the classroom observation notes, and lesson handouts. Each of the transcribed
lessons was of 45-minutes duration. The type of lessons, teacher, and students were
selected based on a broad criterion, that is, their typicality or representativeness of the
wider population from which they were drawn a criteria Duff (2012) recommended
for the selection of lessons or participants for a case study. We focussed on teacher-
fronted lessons because Vaish (2008), who examined a total of 273 English language
lessons in Primary 5 and Secondary 3 classrooms from 51 Singapore schools, found that
teacher-fronted lessons formed the bulk of English language lessons conducted by
teachers in Singapore. Based on the interview with the teacher, the reading comprehen-
sion lessons, with one of the aims of building the students vocabulary through explicit
vocabulary instruction, were also typical of lessons conducted by other teachers in the
school. The common instructional procedure was that the teacher would instruct the
learners to read an article and search for the meanings of the target words before the
lessons. The data from the four reading comprehension lessons, although limited in
terms of the quantity of lessons, permitted us to delineate each speech act utterance and
do an in-depth analysis of classroom interactional patterns.

Procedures of Data Analysis

The classroom transcripts were coded by two independent raters who had been trained to
code samples of transcripts using Malcolms sociolinguistic model (Malcolm, 1979a;
Malcolm, 1979b; Malcolm, 1982). First, each speech act utterance in the transcript was
coded according to (i) the speakers (the teacher or students), (ii) the types of acts (e.g.
eliciting), and (iii) the sub-categories of the acts (e.g. checking elicitation) which we will
elaborate next. The initial inter-rater reliability was .95. The disagreements in coding
were resolved through discussion.
In Malcolms sociolinguistic model (Malcolm, 1979a, Malcolm, 1979b; Malcolm,
1982), each of the seven speech act categories entails several fine sub-categories.
Teachers elicitations consist of the following sub-categories: general eliciting, check-
ing eliciting, suggestive eliciting, conjoined eliciting, linked eliciting, relayed elicit-
ing, multiple eliciting, vocabulary eliciting, formula regulating, looping, greeting,
terminating, reading eliciting, querying, and eliciting referring. Table 1 shows exam-
ples of the teachers elicitation acts. Teachers acknowledgments consist of the follow-
ing sub-categories: acknowledging, unqualified accepting, qualified accepting,
refusing, relaying, modified relaying, evaluating, response referring, and incorporat-
ing. Table 2 shows examples of the teachers acknowledgement acts. The students
replying acts consist of the following sub-categories: general replying, whispered
replying, deferred replying, shadowed replying, declined replying, unsolicited reply-
ing, supportive replying, interrogative replying, directed echoing, reading aloud, recit-
ing, directed singing, reacting, borrowed replying, disclaiming, reply turn holding and
multiple replying. Each of the sub-categories has its definition and an example to
illustrate its function (see Malcolm, 1979a). Before we proceeded with our analysis,
we drew upon Malcolms definitions and examples of the main types of speech act
functions (Malcolm, 1979a; Malcolm, 1979b) which appeared frequently in our class-
room transcripts.
Ong 7

Table 1. Example of the Teachers Elicitation Acts (Malcolm, 1979a).

Teachers Speech Act Description Example

Checking Eliciting An act of the Teacher-Sender
intended to elicit a predetermined
response. The aim is to check on
the Child-Receivers knowledge
rather than to supply the teacher-
Sender with new information.
Multiple Eliciting A succession of differently-coded
elicitations directed by the Teacher-
Sender to the same child without
any response being received to one
elicitation before the next is given.
This act is often associated with
CR3 Deferred Replying.
Mrs. B: How many sounds did
that make?
Mrs. H: All right, now why did
he want to collect as many
shells as he could, Karen? Why
do you think he wanted to
collect as many as he could?
To try and get what? What did
they want to get?

Table 2. Example of the Teachers Acknowledgement Acts (Malcolm, 1979a).

Teachers Description Example

Speech Act
Unqualified An acknowledging act in which the
accepting Teacher-Sender accepts a childs response
to his/her elicitation without going on to
modify or extend it. This act commonly
co-occurs with a relaying act.
Relaying An acknowledging act in which the
Teacher-Sender repeats verbatim the
response or elicitation which he/she has
received. The act often co-occurs with
Unqualified Accepting and the same item
may fulfill both functions. The distinctive
function of Relaying is to make explicit the
teachers perception of what has been said
and to convey it to the class.
Evaluating An acknowledging act in which the
Teacher-Sender conveys a judgment
evaluating a prior replying act and/or its
Sender.
Mr. C: What do they do in actual
riding, theyve got a special job
most of the horses, havent they?
Noel: Mustering?
Mr. C: Mustering, yes.
Mrs. H: Where are the socks
Marlene?
Marlene: On the little boys foot.
Mrs. H: On the little boys foot
yes.
Mrs. W: (following CR10 Reading
Aloud) Right. Good boy Hedley
thats getting much better.

Following Shintani (2013) who counted the number of times the teacher orally men-
tioned the target words (also known as inputs) and the number of times the students
orally mentioned the target words (also known as outputs), we quantified the frequency
of the target words appearing in the types of speech acts of both the teacher and students
and the frequency of the teachers successful and unsuccessful attempts at eliciting the
meanings of the target words across the number of turns taken.
8 RELC Journal 00(0)

Findings and Discussion

The Classroom Routine and IRF Pattern
This study focussed on the instructional phase of the lessons where there was an exchange
of academic information (see Mehan, 1979). There were 48 episodes in the four reading
comprehension lessons. We observed a common recurrent pattern of teachers initiation
or elicitation, students reply, and teachers feedback or acknowledgement with the seven
basic functions illustrated as follows:

1. Eliciting (What is the meaning of diagnosis?)

2. Bidding (Mr. Lim!)
3. Nominating (Alex)
4. Replying (A forecast of the course of a disease)
5. Acknowledging (A forecast of the course of a disease. ok, very good)
6. Informing (A doctor tells the patient at which stage of cancer he is in)
7. Directing (Copy the definition)

The specific classroom routine that characterizes our classroom speech event is sum-
marized as follows: teachers informing, teachers elicitation, childrens bidding, teach-
ers nomination, childrens replying, teachers acknowledgement, and teachers
informing. The main classroom routine shows that the teacher read aloud the text to the
class (teachers informing: reading aloud), stopped at the paragraph level where a
vocabulary word was located. He elicited the meaning of the word (teachers elicitation:
checking eliciting) by nominating a student (teachers nomination: nomination) to pro-
vide for the definition of the word. Other students offered bids at occasional instances
(childs bidding: unsolicited bidding). The student whom the teacher nominated replied
to the elicitation (childs replying: replying). Those unsolicited bids from the floor
would be given opportunities to reply to the teachers subsequent elicitations. The
teacher acknowledged the students response (teachers acknowledgement: unqualified
accepting or replaying) by repeating and conveying the students response verbatim to
the whole class, with no modifications made to it. The teacher then briefly extended his
preceding utterance by incorporating more information (teachers informing: extend-
ing); at other times, the teacher demonstrated by writing the meaning of the word on the
board (teachers informing: demonstrating). The classroom routine observed in this
study converges with the routine identified in Malcolms study (1982) despite the diver-
sities between the two classroom contexts in terms of the ethnicity and the linguistic
proficiency of the participants, and the differences in education, culture, and time. The
only difference is that our teacher typically begins with an informing act. A likely rea-
son is that the classroom routines are closely bounded with the types of speech events;
in this case, both studies were imparting of content events.
The classroom routine further reveals a predominant IRF pattern. Out of the seven
moves, five are from the teacher and the remaining two are from the students. Out of the
two students moves, one is non-verbal, e.g. the students raise their hands to bid for elici-
tations. In other words, teachers initiation, students reply, and teachers feedback (IRF)
structure characterized our classroom instructional sequences. Our result aligns with the
Ong 9

Table 3. Frequency and Percentage of Target Words in the Speech Acts of the Teacher
(Inputs) and Students (Outputs).

Teachers Inputs Students Outputs

Types of Speech Acts Frequency Percentage Types of Frequency Percentage

Speech Acts
Eliciting acts 54 37.2 Directing 0 0
Nominating acts 0 0 Informing 0 0
Replying acts 0 0 Eliciting 0 0
Acknowledging acts 62 42.7 Bidding 0 0
Informing acts 29 20% Acknowledging 0 0%
Directing acts 0 0% Replying 18 100%
Total 145 100% 18 100%

recent studies conducted by Molinari, Mameli, and Gnisci (2013) and Wolf, Crosson,
and Resnick (2005). Such IRF sequences have been found to predominate classroom
discourse (Nassaji and Wells, 2000) and it accounted for up to 70% of classroom interac-
tion (van Lier, 1996; Wells, 1999).

Frequency of Teachers Inputs and Students Outputs and Teachers

Successful versus Unsuccessful Attempts at Eliciting
We quantified the frequency of the target words appearing in the types of speech acts of
the teacher and students in the four reading comprehension lessons. For example, in
Episode 1, the target vocabulary is cracked. This target word appeared three times in the
teachers inputs and one time in the students output. Table 3 shows the frequency of the
target words appearing in the speech acts of the teacher (inputs) and students (outputs).
The total number of teachers inputs greatly surpassed the total number of students out-
puts. The ratio is 18: 1. The teachers inputs appeared mostly in his acknowledging and
eliciting acts, but the students outputs appeared only in their replying acts.
With reference made to the four proposed levels of vocabulary learning opportunities
that can be afforded through classroom discourse, the teacher has successfully achieved the
first three levels. The high frequency of teachers inputs shows that the teacher had effec-
tively focussed the learners attention on the target words. Although the students outputs
were low, they seemed to notice the target words. This is reflected in the students success-
ful production of the meanings of the target words which would be elaborated next. If the
students had not noticed the target words, it is unlikely that they would be able to produce
the meanings of the words. Two plausible reasons for the low frequency of students out-
puts are: first, their noticing of target words might have been covert, instead of overt; sec-
ond, it was not necessary for them to mention the target words in their replies.
Table 4 shows the frequency and percentage of the teachers successful and unsuc-
cessful attempts at eliciting the meanings of the target words from the learners across the
number of turns taken. A turn is defined as a conveyed idea that typically follows a turn-
shift. The teacher has successfully elicited the meanings of the target words from the
10 RELC Journal 00(0)

Table 4. Frequency and Percentage of the Teachers Successful and Unsuccessful Attempts at
Eliciting the Meanings of the Target Words across the Number of Turns Taken.

Successful Attempts Unsuccessful Attempts

Frequency Percentage of Frequency Percentage

of Turns Turns of Turns of Turns
1 - 4 turns 36 80 0 0
5 - 8 turns 8 17.8 1 33.3
8 and above turns 1 2.2 2 66.7
Total 45 100% 3 100%

learners. The percentage of successful attempts was high, at 94%. Exactly half of the
successful elicitations took between one and four turns. The percentage of unsuccessful
attempts was low, at 6%. When they occurred, they took more than eight turns.

Characteristics of the Teachers Discourse

In order to find out whether the classroom interaction has provided the learners with
vocabulary learning opportunities, we did a microscopic analysis of the teachers elicit-
ing and acknowledging acts.

The Types of Teachers Elicitation Acts

The two common features of the teachers elicitations were checking elicitations and
multiple elicitations. For instance, in Episode 1, line 3, the teacher elicited, what is the
meaning of cracked? The checking elicitations were typically sequenced right after
the teacher had performed a directive act through marking boundary in line 1 and an
informing act through reading aloud from the reading comprehension text in line 2. Table
5 shows an episode that illustrates the teachers checking elicitation.
The teachers checking elicitations was predominantly low-level and close-ended
types of questions which tended to elicit only short and fragmented student responses.
Most elicitations are product ones which require the students to provide factual responses
(Mehan, 1979). Second, the teachers multiple elicitations were quite prominent. In
Episode 2, the teacher used multiple elicitations. The multiple elicitations were ambigu-
ous and difficult to answer. They co-occurred with limited waiting time for the students
responses. In response to the teachers multiple elicitations, students replied with a reply
turn holding act and an explicit declined reply.
Episode 2 shows that the teacher failed to activate the students background knowledge
on their experience with caring for a cancer-suffering patient and he eventually abandoned
the multiple elicitations after three repeated attempts. In Episode 2, line 3, the teacher
elicited from the students, Who has a relative who has cancer? and Who has died of
cancer? Following the multiple elicitation, some students mumbled in line 4. The teacher
gave limited waiting time for the students to reply, and initiated another multiple elicita-
tion in line 6, It is very painful, right? Do you want to describe your experience?
Ong 11

Table 5. Episode 1 Illustrates the Teachers Checking Elicitation.

Line Speaker Non-verbal Verbal Types

1 T Lets carry on. Directing act:
Marking boundary
2 The tests show that the cancer is in Informing act:
the third stage, the doctor said flatly Reading aloud
after he entered the waiting room.
Lees voice cracked as she asked
about her mothers prognosis. She
has six to 12 months left, the doctor
replied. Lee broke down in tears -
her mother, Goh Kim Kat, was the
foundation of their, family.
3 What is the meaning of cracked? Eliciting act:
Checking eliciting
4 Ss A few raise Bidding act: Solicited
hands bidding
5 T I believe it is on the number 14 of Informing act:
your vocabulary list, cracked. Commenting
6 Writes on S1? Nominating act:
the board Nominating
7 S1 A sudden change in vocal pitch. Replying act: Relying

The teachers multiple elicitation was ambiguous; it was unclear to the students if your
experience refers to the experience of the caregiver or the patient. It may be equally
plausible that the students find this elicitation difficult to answer because of their limited
social experience with caring for a cancer-suffering patient. Unfamiliarity with a topic of
discussion that was distanced from students everyday lives is a factor which has resulted
in less dialogic interaction among second language learners of English in Hong Kong (Luk
and Lin, 2007). Even if the students possess the experience of caring for a cancer-suffering
patient, it may not be easy for them to express their emotion on this sad topic. As a result,
a student responded with a confusing marker Huh in line 7. This confusing marker denotes
two possible meanings; first, the student was signaling for further teachers clarification or
second, the student rejected the elicitation implicitly as this question was difficult to answer.
According to Malcolm (1979b), the function of this above speech act is known as reply
turn holding; and it is used when the student is unable to give a reply to the elicitation. The
teacher initiated another multiple elicitation in line 8, Your feeling about this. Your friends
suffering, your relative suffering. This multiple elicitation changed from interrogatives to
declaratives, despite having the same function. One student, S3, declined and called-out the
reply this time with, I dont know in line 9. Instead of either rephrasing the elicitation or
providing an example of what type of response the teacher had expected from the students,
the teacher continued his multiple elicitations in line 11, You have any close friends who
have cancer? How was it like? The teacher again did not wait for the students to respond.
The teacher then instantaneously abandoned his elicitations when he realized that his third
attempt in getting the students to respond to his elicitations had failed. He quickly directed
Table 6. Episode 2 Illustrates the Teachers Multiple Elicitations.
12

Line Speaker Non-verbal Verbal Types

1 T Lets carry on from there. Directing act: Marking
boundary
2 As well, visitors can post questions, which are answered by experts in Informing act: Reading
Singapore and overseas. CancerStory.com quickly became a hit. It has aloud
received about 33,000 visits from around the world, and has over 350
registered users from as far as France and South Africa. Cancer Story also
has over 100 volunteers who help with fundraising. Lee has won praise
from people struggling to come to terms with cancer. This is a fantastic
website, Singapore resident Nora Ng wrote in the sites guestbook. It
will definitely help many people to cope. Im a cancer survivor and can
understand the pain every cancer patient has to go through.
3 Who has a relative who has cancer? Who has died of cancer? Eliciting act: Multiple
eliciting
4 Ss (Inaudible mumbling) Replying act: either
Declined replying or
Whispered replying
5 T (1s)
6 It is very painful, right? Do you want to describe your experience? Eliciting act: Multiple
eliciting
7 S2 Huh? Replying act: Reply turn
holding
8 T Your feelings about this Eliciting act: Multiple
Your friend, suffering, whatever, your relative suffering. eliciting
9 S3 I dont know. Reply act:
Declined replying
10 T (1s)
11 You have any close friends who have cancer? How was it like? Eliciting act: Multiple
eliciting
RELC Journal 00(0)
 Ong

Table 6.(Continued)
Line Speaker Non-verbal Verbal Types
12 (1s)
13 They have to undergo chemotherapy. That means you have to use some Informing act: Extending
laser beam to kill the cancer cells. And people really have to suffer. You
have to kill the cancer. By killing the cancer cells, our body is made up of
cells, you know. A lot of cells. So all these cells huh that are not multiplying
normally, they are called cancer cells. Some of them, they have, this thing.
They called the benign tumour. You know what is malignant tumour? All
these people who have cancer. They have two types. One is the benign.
The other is malignant.
14 Writes on Ok. I dont think you have to know all these terms, but basically, benign Informing act:
the board tumour, my mother has it a few years ago in her stomach, in her intestines, Demonstrating
is a growth, you know. When you have cancer, the cells starts growing, so
if you dont remove the cells or tissue, that the tumour.
15 S1, are you with me? Eliciting act:
Checking reception
16 S2? Eliciting act:
Checking reception
17 Ya. Later on. ok. You can do it later. Directing act:
Directing
18 I just tell you the meaning. Benign means sleeping, not so dangerous. Informing act:
So you will remove the organ of the tissue. You will be saved. It is called Extending
benign tumour, ok. But this mother, I think this mother of this daughter
have malignant tumour. This is the tumour cell that spreads all over the
body in the bloodstream. You cannot normally cure them, even with
chemotherapy. It will invade to other organs, you know and the person
most likely will die. But for benign tumour, it is very safe.
13
14 RELC Journal 00(0)

Table 7. Episode 3 Illustrates the Teachers Unqualified Accepting or Relaying which is

Followed by an Evaluating Act.

Line Speaker Non-verbal Verbal Types

1 T How about Eliciting act: Checking
inspirational? eliciting
2 Ss A few raise hands Bidding act: Solicited bidding
3 T S4 Nominating act: Nominating
4 S4 Prompted thought Replying act: Replying
5 T Prompted thought Acknowledging act:
Unqualified accepting or
Relaying
6 Very good Acknowledging act:
Evaluating
7 Like you have an Informing act: Extending
inspirational hymn. You
listen to some songs. They
will inspire you.

the students attention to another issue on the types of and treatment for cancer (from line
13 onwards) by using two informing acts. Table 6 shows an episode that illustrates the
teachers multiple elicitations.

The Types of Teachers Acknowledgement Acts

The two common speech act functions which characterize the teachers acknowledgements
(or feedback moves) were unqualified accepting or relaying and evaluating. This is shown in
Episode 3, line 4, when S4 replied to the teachers elicitation of the meaning of inspirational,
Prompted thought. The teachers acknowledgements consisted of an exact repetition of the
students response, Prompted thought in line 5, followed immediately by the teachers posi-
tive evaluation act, Very good in line 6. Repeating the exact verbatim of the students utter-
ance is known as unqualified accepting or relaying (Malcolm, 1979a, Malcolm, 1979b). Both
unqualified accepting and relaying act entail no modification or extension from the teacher,
with the latter possessing an added function of making the students response explicit through
conveying it to the whole class what the teacher has just heard. Finally, the teacher terminated
the discussion of the word with an informing act which entailed an extension of the teachers
preceding utterance in line 7, Like you have an inspirational hymn. You listen to some
songs. They will inspire you. Table 7 shows an episode that illustrates the teachers unquali-
fied accepting or relaying which is followed by an evaluating act.
In Episode 3, the teacher failed to guide students to elaborate on their preceding utter-
ances with the use of unqualified accepting or relaying as acknowledgements. In addi-
tion, the positive evaluating act, together with an informing act, signaled a termination of
the discussion of the word. Taken together, the turn-taking allocations, although system-
atic and well-managed, were rather rigid. The students were typically nominated to speak
only after they had bid for their turns. They were expected to reply only after the teacher
had questioned, without exceptions to these implicit rules.
Ong 15

In summary, there was hardly any negotiation of meaning of words in the reading
comprehension lessons. The interactional patterns between the teacher and the students
were static and conventional, with the teacher dominating the classroom discourse with
his elicitation, acknowledgement, and informing acts. The students performed only the
replying acts and their turns consisted of only a few words. In addition, there was no
interaction among the students. Our results corroborate the more recent classroom dis-
course studies of Wolf, Crosson, and Resnick (2005), Molinari, Mameli, and Gnisci
(2013), and Vaish (2008). Such a non-interactive environment was clearly not in line
with the constructivist perspective of learning, adopted by Ruddell and Unrau (1994:
1042), where the teacher creates an instructional environment in which the students are
involved in active comprehension processes as they approach the text. Ruddell and
Unraus emphasis on meaningful dialogues and negotiated meanings is largely absent in
the current reading comprehension practice. This lack of interactional opportunities for
learners was attributed to the types of teachers elicitations and acknowledgements.

Conclusion
The aims of this study were to examine the classroom routine, and interactional patterns
of Grade 5 English Language reading comprehension lessons through delineating the
speech act functions of the classroom discourse based on Malcolms sociolinguistic
model (Malcolm, 1979a; Malcolm, 1979b; Malcolm, 1982; Malcolm, 1986) and to
investigate whether the current classroom discourse has met the four levels of vocabu-
lary learning opportunities.
The classroom routine that characterizes our teacher-fronted reading comprehension
lessons is as follows: teachers informing, teachers elicitation, childrens bidding, teach-
ers nomination, childrens replying, teachers acknowledgement, and teachers inform-
ing. The classroom routine concurrently shows that the initiation, response, and feedback
(IRF) was the predominant sequence in the observed lessons. The present study found
that the teacher has achieved the first three levels of vocabulary learning opportunities
that can be afforded through classroom discourse. The high frequency of the teachers
inputs reflects that the teacher has effectively focussed the learners attention on the tar-
get words. The teachers inputs appeared in his eliciting, acknowledging, and informing
acts. The low frequency of the students outputs suggests that their noticing of the target
words might have been covert, instead of overt. The reason is because the learners were
able to produce the meanings of those target words. In other words, the teacher was suc-
cessful in eliciting the meaning of the target words from the students; and most success-
ful elicitations took very few turns, i.e. between one and four turns. The unsuccessful
attempts were limited; and when they occurred, they took elaborated turns, i.e. more than
eight turns. Through a close examination of the types and characteristics of teachers
discourse, we found that the teacher had failed to achieve the fourth level of vocabulary
learning opportunities, that is, to provide interactional opportunities for the learners to
process the target words. Our analysis shows there was hardly any negotiation of mean-
ings which Long (1981; Long, 1996) proposed as critical for second language learning.
In this study, the teacher elicited the instructional sequences with mostly checking elici-
tations and multiple elicitations. The elicitations which required the learners to produce
16 RELC Journal 00(0)

factual responses were low-level and closed-ended questions. The multiple elicitations
used were ambiguous and difficult to answer. Such multiple elicitations were followed
by a lack of sufficient wait time for the students to reply.
We acknowledge some limitations of this small-scale and exploratory study. First, this
study has adopted a qualitative single case study methodology. The analysis was based
on a very small quantity of the classroom transcripts of the teachers fronted English
language reading comprehension lessons. One of the inherent limitations of a single case
study research lies in the challenge of generalizing the findings of a single case to the
general population. Consequently, the results of this study might not represent Grade 5
English language reading comprehension lessons in Singapore. Instead of generalization
of the sample to the wider population, our aim was to provide a descriptive account with
an evaluative perspective of the current classroom interactional patterns (see Duff, 2012;
Firestone, 1993). Second, this study has reported only observable behaviour (e.g. the
teachers inputs, the students outputs and their retrieval of the meanings of the target
words, and the interactional opportunities), but not the mental processes of vocabulary
learning (e.g. silent rehearsal of words or meanings).
Notwithstanding the above limitations, the present study has contributed to the exist-
ing body of knowledge in classroom discourse analysis. The study has illustrated explicit
vocabulary instructional discourse of a classroom teacher for English Language reading
comprehension lessons in an elementary school in Singapore. Through delineating the
speech act functions of the teacher and students based on Malcolms sociolinguistic
framework (Malcolm, 1979a; Malcolm, 1979b; Malcolm, 1982; Malcolm,1986), this
study has revealed the predominant classroom routine and interactional patterns of the
lessons. It has further identified the common types of the teachers eliciting and acknowl-
edging acts. Without due attention to the nature and functions of talk, one cannot under-
stand the complexities of classroom discourse (Mercer, 2010). It has further shed light on
whether the instructional discourse has provided the learners with opportunities in
vocabulary learning. We stress that the results of this study point to evidence of vocabu-
lary learning opportunities afforded through the discourse, and might not necessarily be
vocabulary learning. Even so, this is a useful focus, given that researchers and educators
are seeking evidence of classroom discourse in facilitating learning and such evidence,
that would better inform classroom practices and policies, is presently scarce.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of
this article.

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