Foreigner Talk In Vietnam’s Teaching And Learning Context

Abstract

Foreigner Talk (FT) is a phenomenon where native speakers modify their speech to accommodate less proficient foreign speakers (Ferguson, 1971). However, whether proficient non-native speakers make similar modifications is not widely explored, especially in the settings of Vietnam, in which the number of second language English learners is increasing. Therefore, this study is motivated to investigate the issue of FT in Teacher Talk (TT) because it would contribute to the research of FT. The goals of this study are (1) to find whether non-native English teachers use FT in their TT and (2) to determine the extent to which they use it. The classroom interactions were recorded from different classes of the same proficiency level instructed by different teachers. Comparisons were then made between their level of modifications in classrooms and the interviews between them and another proficient speaker of English to draw conclusions about Vietnamese teachers’ usage of FT. Through analyzing the speech type-token ratio, lexical frequency, and mean length, results suggested that participants did not make significant modifications in type-token ratio and lexical frequency, but made significant length modifications when addressing non-proficient interlocutors. These findings would bring in-depth implications and help improve the efficiency of English teaching and learning in Vietnamese classrooms.