Teacher talk time in ESL classrooms in Bangladesh

Abstract

This research examines the influence of Teacher Talk Time (TTT) in foundation courses of ESL classrooms at the tertiary level. A questionnaire was designed with a combination of 15 questions on likert scale and four open ended questions for collecting data from 65 students of two private universities of Chittagong. All these students were from different majoring subjects who took this foundation course to improve their proficiency before beginning their main course of study. The researcher observed the teachers of the same classes on the basis of Douglas Brown's (1984)'Teachers observation form' criteria of teacher observation to find out how they utilize the teacher talk time. Findings show that the students the teacher talk time to be more in the classroom and they want their errors to be corrected immediately. Most of the teachers, on the other hand, ask different display questions such as " this is correct" "very good" etc. to give a positive feedback to the students. This research will serve other practitioners and learners of ESL courses to modify their TTT in classroom.