Abstract:

The study described the spoken discourse performance of the student teachers in three levels of language namely: phonology, morphology and syntax during their on-campus teaching. It primarily described phonology through the student teachers’ intonation patterns of their utterances. The production of inflected morphemes “ed” was also investigated for description of their performance on morphology. Lastly, the student teachers’ sentence structures of their utterances were analyzed to describe their spoken discourse performance in terms of syntax.

The qualitative research method was used to analyze the data and describe the spoken discourse performance of the student teachers. Preliminarily, an interview guide was used to gather data on the language profile of the student teachers. The on-campus teaching classes of the participants were then videotaped, transcribed, and analyzed to describe their actual spoken discourse performance.

With reference to the language profile, data confirm that the student teachers’ mother tongue (Filipino) was commonly used in most of their verbal exchanges activities. However, all the student teachers under study declared that they used English language frequently in their classes.
For the actual spoken discourse, it is worthy to note that the utterances of the student teachers displayed evidence of intonation patterns variation on wh-questions and yes/no questions during on-campus teaching. Student Teachers exhibited pronunciation characteristics that result from imperfectly learning the pronunciation of English. Findings also show that common to the student teachers were inconsistencies in the production of the allomorphs of the inflected morpheme “ed”. Thus, student teachers’ production of inflected morpheme “ed” is similar to some research findings that Philippine English spelling pronunciations are prevailing in spoken discourse. Non- native production of English, as what the student teachers did, resulted from the common linguistic phenomenon in which they tended to carry the intonation and pronunciation rules from their mother tongue (Filipino) into their English spoken discourse.

Syntax, on the other hand, was described based on the error scheme on misformation, addition, omission, and misordering. Data showed that misformation errors were the most common slip-ups in the sets of video transcripts of on-campus teaching. Student teachers under study were mainly confused with the subject- verb- agreement (SVA) and tenses. Another ungrammatical element observed in the study was the errors of omission on verbs after the third person singular in the simple present tense. There were also errors of addition in which student teachers demonstrated the use of unnecessary tense markers. Errors of ordering were also made when the participants’ utterances were wrongly sequenced.
This qualitative research study implies that there is an interference of first language (Filipino) in the production of the student teachers’ intonation patterns, inflected morpheme and sentence structures which finally describes the spoken discourse performance of the student teachers during on-campus teaching.

Future studies may acquire more valuable insights by gathering geographically diverse samples that would include student teachers across disciplines.

Keywords:

Spoken Discourse, Industrial Education, Student Teachers.