1. Introduction

With globalization and the role of English as an international language, the need for English competence has been widely acknowledged.Enthusiasm for English learning has intensified.With the implementation of the government’s policy of teaching English early,participation in English learning has been rising inmany pre-schools.For example, in Yarsi pre-school, ‘English Time’, ‘Family Day’, ‘Market Day’ are activities in its curriculum designed as extra curricular activitiesand in some pre-schools English has been used as a medium of instruction.In Indonesia, pre-schools have accommodated 15.000.000 learners[5] and it can be assumed that with the acknowledged importance of English more and more pre-schools, especially those in the cities, will be offering English to young learners.

The teaching of early-childhood English in pre-schools has impacted the field of English teaching in English Education Departments.The curriculum has been adjusted to meet the needs for English teachersfor young learners. More and more research is now directed to investigating how English is taught inpre-school. Many students have been assigned to have their teaching practicum in pre-school and then many of these pre-service teachers work as English teachers inpre-schools.

The interest for introducing early English to pre-schoolers has been based on the assumption that young learners can acquire a new language easily. This statement is often heard from people or scholars who have pursued further study in English speaking countries where they had the opportunity to send their children to school. Many of them testified that their young children could communicate in English quickly. Research along this line has been published and the results indicate positive development of young children second language acquisition.While this finding may be generalizable across first and second language contexts, it needs to be questioned whether English for young children in Indonesia, especially that taught inpre-schools would be acquired similarly well by pre-schoolers considering that the learning contexts are variably different.This is a challenge to the teaching of English as a foreign language in pre-schools.

In teaching English inpre-school, the role of the English teacher is very dominant. The question whether the Englishteacher should use Indonesian as the medium of instruction in teaching English has been a source of some debate. Arguments cantered on the context of English as a first or second language tend to be ideological and research-based and opt for exclusive use of the target language in the classroom.Much exposure to the target language is believedto speed up acquisition. On the other hand, EFL-based arguments tend to be linguistically oriented which is more instrumentally motivated, utilizing much Indonesian especially when complex explanation is needed or when classroom management issues arise during learning.In our school context, the English teacher is the only source of English input which should be made comprehensible to the learners. Therefore, as the argument goes, the teacher should as much as possible minimize code-switching practice since it deprives learners of the opportunity to get exposed to English and its real, authentic use. Much code-switching would result in lost opportunity to obtain useful intake and authentic communication.Research conducted in primary and secondary schools investigating the role of Indonesian in teaching English has revealed important findings about teacher talk and its pedagogical purposes and motivations of L1 use.The current study has a similar orientation with a focus on the teacher’s interactional moves and feedback types in teachingEnglishin one pre-school in Salatiga, a small town in Indonesia.

2. Teacher-Learner Interaction in English Classes

Learner language performance, to a large extent, is determined by the type of interaction that occurs between the teacher and the learner.Studies on child first language development in L1 contexts abound and child language performance can develop if the child and adult are engaged in elaborative conversations.Collaborative talks usually require higher cognitive and linguistic demands and these demands are believed to be able to push children’s language acquisition forward.However, in the case of foreign (English) language acquisition, such as that in pre-school contexts, elaborative talks between the English teacher and the learners rarely happen,if not non-existent, because it is difficult for young learners due to their limited English skills.

It is common practice that talks in English classes in pre-school are teacher-controlled and learners tend to respond in single-word utterances or short phrases, or formulaic chunks. The research conducted in Taiwan [10],reveals that student-teacher talks in English classes produce some interactional types when they have more open discussions on some topics familiar to the learners. They can produce more talk, provide answers to the teacher’s questions, and they talk with peers.One reason for this is because the teacher’s instruction requires the learners to display their linguistic skills. In other words, the learners are not encouraged to express their opinions. These two studies show that interactions in English classes depend on the teacher’s instructional demands which may be constrained by the learners’ limited linguistic knowledge and the status of English as a foreign language with a very limited exposure in the classroom.

The literature on first language acquisition[3] shows that the type of interaction that is made between adults and children determines how quickly children can acquire English. This, I would argue, is also true to Indonesian children learning Indonesian as first or second language.In our school or family contexts, young children are always surrounded by adults - teachers or parents, or other family members. These adults create opportunities to talk to children collaboratively in which the topics in their talks are jointly negotiated and this joint negotiation plays an important role in developing children’s acquisition of Indonesian. A negotiated conversation is important because it encourages language use that is collaborative. Such talk provides children to build their language skills, share meanings and produce more quantity of talk.Besides talk between adults and children, opportunities for child-child talk also has a significant role on children language learning. This is a crucial factor that seems to be lacking in most English classes in our educational system including those in pre-school language learning environments.

Studies investigating teacher’s strategies in teaching English to young learners have been conducted at some schools in Salatiga[6,7]. These studies reveal that the English teachers used a variety of strategies such as questioning, praising, instructing and so forth with a dominant use of Indonesian throughout the lessons and the classes were very teacher-cantered. One interesting differencebetween these two studies is the use of collaborative technique.In one of the two studies, the teacher asked the learners to work in groups to solve a learning problem. This technique did not occur in the other study since the learnerswerepre-schoolers. It appears that, based on these two studies, the choice of a particular technique is affected by the age of the learners. More mature learners can be assigned more complex tasks which demand higher cognitive and linguistic ability. It should be noted that in both studies the use of Indonesian was dominant and English was used less than optimal in quantity and quality.

It is interesting to know from other research in English speaking countries that the use of learner’s language (English) in teaching a foreign language such as French also reveals relatively similar pattern; that is the use of target language (L2) was very low[2]. In another study[4], one reason for the low use of L2 was the presenceof English (L1) as a means of communication for both the teacher and the students. In other words, because everyonespeaks English (L1) it is very convenient if it is used for immediate classroom interactions. Similarly, the low use of English in English classes in Indonesian schools may be due to the same reason – since Indonesian is spoken by everyone in the class, it is pragmatically appropriate if immediate interactional needs use Indonesian. Other factors that may contribute to the minimal use of English in our schools may derive from teacher’s limited fluency in English which, then, makes it difficult to repair communication breakdowns in classes. As a result, the teacher may resort to much code-switching that results in learner’s relying on Indonesian.

The view that emerges from the discussion above is that teachers need to be made aware of their language use. The main concern, in my view, is that the classroom environment should provide sufficiently rich English input to enable learners to acquire English being taught at one particular time.It is within this interest that this paper presents a study of teacher’s interactional patterns of English classes in one pre-school.

3. The Context of Learning

This study was conducted in SatyaParahitapre-school, in Salatiga,Indonesia.It is a non formal education system and it does not have formalities such as those implemented in most pre-schools. Thispre-school does not have fixed schedule and the lesson starts when the children have arrived. If many children come late, then the lesson will start a bit later. Attendance is not very regular. There are often new students coming to class, therefore, class size changes everyday. The students’ ages range from toddlers to six or eight years old. The English lesson does not have a syllabus, instead, the teacher picks up topics familiar to children such as parts of the body, occupations, or means of transport. The teaching techniques are carefully adjusted to simulate children games and everyday activities in order to avoid boredom. The teaching atmosphere is made very relaxing and flexible to accommodate children’s interests. In this pre-school, there is no formal assessment, therefore, there is no record of students’ progress in English. Learning progress is usually discussed together by the teacher and parents who are allowed to sit in the class. Very often the parents take the role as the teacher’s ‘assistant’ in dealing with classroom management and discipline. The educational objective is to prepare the children for the next level of education; that is to prepare them for primary school education. Therefore, learning experience in this pre-school, including English learning experience, has a significant role in children education at the primary level in which English is often offered as a local content curriculum.With this learning context in mind, this study aimed to figure out the interactional patterns or teaching moves and feedback types provided by the teacher during English classes.

4. Method

This study used a descriptive method[9] to identify the patterns of talk by the teacher in teaching English to young learners at the school. The data were collected from six classroom observations and an interview with theteacher which were audio-recorded. The recordings were, then, transcribed and coded for the types of interaction patterns identified in the transcripts. The coding of the data was based on the framework proposed by Kim &Elder[4] with some modification, in which they describe teacher’s moves into the following categories:

1) Extend; the teacher builds upon previous student’s language.

2) Check; the teacher asks closed questions such as OK? Finished? Ready? Etc.

3) Display; the teacher requires students to display their linguistic knowledge.

4) Elicit; the teacher gives commands, questions, or phrases functioning as a call for students’ answers or responses.

5) Nominate; the teacher names students in the class and requires answers or responses.

6) Evaluate; the teacher repeats student’s answers and provides feedback indicating that it is appropriate

7) Model; the teacher helps the student with either grammatical structure or pronunciation, and provides the correct model.

8) Discipline; the teacher’s call to students functioning to change non-acceptable behaviour in order to maintain attention

5. Finding and Discussion

This section addresses the question how the teacher interacts with the learners in terms of teaching moves. Therefore, the analysis is presented in terms of teacher’s interactional patterns and the types of feedback in their talk. Table 1 below presents the teacher’s moves or interactional exchanges in teaching. It shows that there are seven patterns of teacher’s interactional moves which have been put in order of frequency from high to low.Below are examples of interactional exchanges between the teacher and the learners.

Table 1. Types of Interactional Exchange

As can be seen in Table 1, the highest frequency of teacher’s move was Elicit-Response-Evaluation; as much as 68% of the total teaching moves, indicating that in teaching English to the learners the teacher provided a lot of evaluation or praises to the learners elicited responses. Then, Elicit-Response-Modelling was second (17,1%) in which the teacher provided the correct model or correction to the learners’ wrong response of English vocabulary or pronunciation. The third and fourth moves were teacher’s evaluation to the learners’ nominated responses in which the teacher provided evaluation or praises or responses to individual students.

Table 2. Evaluation techniques used in teaching

Further analysis of teacher’s Elicit-Response-Evaluation moves indicated that the teacher used different techniques of evaluating the learners’ language as presented in the following table.

As Table 2 shows, the teacher’s techniques to evaluate learner’s language varied from repeating the learner’s response to praising in Indonesian (hebat, pinter), giving further instruction, or use of gesture (thumb up) showing acceptance.

The second highest interactional moves was Elicit- Response-Modelling. It was made when the learners made mistakes either in vocabulary or pronunciation. Analysis of this move showed that the teacher used three different ways of modelling the correct language to the learners; providing the correct response with or without instruction or checking learner’s understanding as can be seen in Table 3 below.

Table 3. Modelling techniques used in teaching

6. Teacher Feedback

The teacher’s feedback is presented in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1. Teacher’s feedback in teaching

The analysis of classroom transcript shows that there were two pedagogical roles of teacher’s follow-up move or teacher’s feedback[1]; evaluative and modelling roles. The evaluative role was identifiable in the third move of the teacher’s interactional pattern and its function was to provide feedback to the learner’s response elicited by the teacher in her first move. This evaluative move functioned to confirm that the response was acceptable.Most teacher feedback was in Indonesian such as ‘pinter’ (good) or ‘hebat’ (excellent) accompanied with or without a hand gesture (thumb up).

The frequency of occurrence of evaluative feedback was 83.9%, much higher than the other feedback type; modelling, which was 16,1% as indicated in Figure 1.The high proportion of evaluative feedback may indicate that praising is an essential pedagogical tool in pre-school education. It appears that praising learner’s performance as a teaching technique is used to accommodate the different characteristics of the learners to encourage participation and enhance learning. On the other hand, the low occurrence of modelling as feedback to the learner’s mistakes may indicate that its role in teaching English to pre-school learners is not that significant. The learners may not be able to notice the purpose of teacher’s modelling thecorrect features of English since most teacher-learner English interaction takes place during play activities when the learners’ attention is usually on the games or other fun physical activities. The types of activities planned for English classes seem to be determined by the learners’ characteristics; being active, social, and unique with their individuality.

Based on the types of interactional patterns and the types of feedback moves discussed above, it can be concluded that the teaching of English inpre-school is aimed to introduce lexical items which are characterized by the here-and-now condition; those vocabulary items which are observable in the learner’s immediate environment.Further examination of the interactional patterns above reveals thatthe teacher- learner talk and English learning activities are delimited to developing the learner’s recognition and recall of vocabulary through E-R-Eval or E-R-Mod moves. Such interactions can not be expected to help learnersdevelop their English language capacity to appropriately express themselves since the teaching is largely teacher-cantered.The classroom observations in this study show that the teacher provides all of the initiation moves as traditionally practised in many schools. This elicitation-response-follow up exchange has been criticised in the Communicative language teaching methodology since it fails to provide learnerswith the opportunity to develop their language capacity.

Given the context of pre-school education in this study, the teaching of English could be pushed one step ahead, that is to help learners to develop their language acquisition capacity through teacher’s discoursal role of the follow-up move (Cullen, 2002). Discoursal role of the F-move is qualitatively different from the evaluative role of the F-move in that it aims to pick up learner’s response (language) and incorporate it to create a (short) dialogue of two or three exchanges as simplified below.

T: (shows a picture of an ear and asks)

What is it?

L: Ear

T: Good. How many ears do you have?

L: Two.

Such a simple teacher-child exchange would not be cognitively demanding and the activity can be designed to match the characteristics of young learners. Thus, the emphasis of such an exchange is not only the form (plural) but also the content (message). A discoursal follow-up move could also occur with questions which have a referential function commonly used in children real-worldcommunication.

7. Conclusions

In this paper, I have attempted to identify the patterns of teacher-learner interactions in pre-school English classes by examining the recordings of English classes. The interactional exchanges clearly show that the teaching is very traditional and teacher-cantered without any attempt to elaborate on the learner’s responses. This shortcoming may be due to the learning context of pre-school where the purpose of teaching English has not been well established as revealed in my interview with the teacher. It may beimportant to suggest that, in spite of the present condition of teaching English inpre-school, the interaction between the teacher and the learners need to make use of the significant role of discoursal feedback move in order to develop learners’ language capacity in English appropriate at this level. The findings of this study may have important implications for teacher training and development especially to teaching English to young learners in pre-schools.