Abstract:

The paper analyzes the speech of teachers and students during their school classes. It presents the analysis of school speech from various points of view – it describes the differences between the speech of teachers and students in general or depending on the individual school subjects.

The analysis of school speech produced by teachers is important for many reasons. Students are influenced by their teachers in many ways, including language culture. The teachers act as significant speech models – the way how they communicate their ideas influences the speech of students. In this way, the speech of teachers produced during their classes should be cultivated, reflecting the specific communicative situation formed by the school environment and its community.

In the analysis, we use the SCHOLA2010 corpus containing transcripts of recordings of classes at Czech elementary and secondary schools. They cover spoken communication in various types of school lessons, e.g. mathematics, physics, biology, history, geography, chemistry, informatics, or the Czech language and literature.

Altogether, we examine 61,285 speeches by 2,410 speakers (teachers and students), which covers 8,605 minutes of recordings (1,046,600 tokens and 64,329 words). The recordings are unabridged and thus provide authentic language material for the examination of school speech in Czech.

In the paper, we describe the similarities and differences of spoken communication produced by teachers and students and we focus on speech deficiencies. Specifically, we examine the so-called filling words on the level of discourse structure. In more detail, we analyze the speech produced by teachers of language and literature.

In the analysis, we take into account the following aspects: i) the role of the author in the communication discourse (teacher vs. student), and ii) the type of communicative situation concerning the individual school subjects (language and literature vs. mathematics, history, etc.). The paper presents both quantitative and qualitative analysis on the level of discourse structure.

In the final part of the paper, we express how the results help to better describe the specifics of text construction of school speech, provide feedback to teachers concerning their speech cultivation and discuss how the results may be beneficial in the teaching process focused on communication and language culture.

Keywords:

Language learning, spoken language, discourse, school speech, language culture, filling words.