Abstract:
With the observation of teaching and learning of French for communication in the Thai classroom, some interesting points about the pedagogical interaction between participants in co-presence can be observed ; notably that this interaction is quite clearly characterized by a silent atmosphere, showing that Thai students don’t take the initiative for action. They don’t speak a foreign language without having it elicited by their teacher, and, in particular, they barely participate in class. For this reason, this work aims to study what factors prevent Thai student from constructing discourse in classroom. The analysis is essentially based on the corpus constituted by the verbal and non-verbal exchanges collected in French language classroom in Thailand. The observation of the corpus aims, first, to remain mindful of describing classroom development, interpersonal relationships, teaching and learning techniques, and particularly the linguistic, sociocultural, pragmatic and interactional characteristics of pedagogical communication between engaged participants, in order to reveal the ways the participants make their own sentences in foreign language. In spite of their “reserved” attitude and their passive learning habits, Thai students whom we observed had to engage in pedagogical interaction and therefore make sentences, not only to answer teachers’ question, but also to maintain progression of dialogue. Regarding this point, we notice that the speech construction of Thai students is inelegant, staccato and discontinuous, which obviously reflects their insufficient level of language competence and especially their level of cultural education, which is considered a hidden dimension in teaching and learning of French for communication. Consequently, linguistic factors and cultural education of Thai students constitute an important component for pedagogical analysis of interaction in the classroom in Thailand. This factor needs to be taken into consideration so as to achieve the greatest possible contribution to the study of speech construction by Thai students.