Relationship between Teachers’ Experience and Their Talk Richness: A Case Study of Iranian EFL Teachers

Abstract

The purpose of the present study is to address the relationship between teachers' experience and the richness of their talk in an EFL classroom context. The participants were four male EFL teachers who were divided into two groups, namely inexperienced and experienced. To collect the required data for this study, the researcher observed the classrooms as a non-participant and made audio-recordings from one lesson of each teacher. Using the above-mentioned method, seven hours of naturally occurring data was obtained from the four teachers participating in this study. The measure of lexical variation which is a type-token ratio was used to assess the lexical richness of teachers talk. The findings showed that experienced teachers used less number of types and tokens in their talk in comparison to their inexperienced counterparts which is attributed to reasons such as different approaches of experienced and inexperienced teachers toward communicative approach, the teachers' own language learning experiences and background knowledge, the various teaching history of teachers, and different type of relationship between teachers and students.