This research is conducted: (1) to find out the types of teacher talk and students talk in classroom interaction; (2) to find out the characteristic of classroom interaction; (3) to find out the problems faced by the students during the classroom interaction
This research is a descriptive study. The research was carried out to the class XI-MIPA 6 of SMAN 11 Semarang in the academic year of 2018/2019. The subjects of the research were the students, which consist of 11 males and 25 males and the English teacher. The techniques used to collect the data are observation, interview, and document analysis. The data collected were analyzed by using the interactive model of analysis proposed by Miles and Hubberman.
The finding of this research shows that both the teacher and the students performed all types of talk during the classroom interaction. The classroom talk was still dominated by the teacher as the proportion of teacher talk was higher than the proportion of the students talk. The teacher spent most of her classroom talk for lecturing, while the students spent most of her classroom talk for giving responses. The students were quite active in giving responses but were passive in initiating their talk. There were only a few students who actively initiated their talk.
This research shows that the most dominant characteristic in the classroom interaction was content cross. It indicated the teacher dependence on the questions and lectures. She spent more her teaching activities to ask questions and give lectures to the students. The teacher often used display questions for her questioning, while she lectured the students by giving information, offering ideas, giving examples, and explaining the material, which was typically in a long explanation.
There were some problems that the students encountered in terms of classroom interaction: (1) The students had been mentally tired and sleepy to receive the lesson in the last hours; (2) The students had lack of confidence to speak individually; (3) The students sometimes found it difficult to understand the teacher explanation without any notes left on the whiteboard; (4) The students found it difficult to arrange the words in English, so they opted to use Indonesian language.
Keywords: classroom interaction, teacher talk, students talk, descriptive study