Teachers' strategies in overcoming the challenges in the immersion classroom of English for young learners

Abstract

This study investigated the realization of teachers' directives in the immersion pre school classrooms. The research design used was descriptive. There were eight events which were transcribed from two classes. The units of analysis were the teachers' directives and students' comprehension during the teaching and learning process. The results indicated that the teachers as facilitators were able to manage the classroom as well as to give a good description on character building. The forms of imperative were frequently constructed by the teachers because it was relatively explicit. It is clear enough to be understood by the students. Moreover, it was also the realization of scaffolding talk when the teachers used the explicit utterances. The teacher encouraged them to speak their ideas, act the actions, and responsible for it. On the other hand, the students were quite capable to interpret the teachers' directives. Most of them had the abilities to interpret the sentence and situation and the linguistic etiquette rules of the classroom when the teachers' directives were produced. Even though, they tended to give a non-verbal response than a verbal response. In addition, they were not good enough to understand a complex contextual demand. The students' appropriate responses to the teachers' directives can be described when the usages of the teachers' directives were analyzed. The teachers' directives can be presented by the realization of directness strategies particularly imperative, hint, locution derivable and availability. The students' responses matched the teachers' directives, and they created an adjacency pair as well as had the grammatical and semantic value.