A Pragmatic Investigation of Prompts in Classroom Interaction: A Study of Six Public Primary Schools in Plateau State, Nigeria

Abstract

Abstract

The classroom is a learning environment facilitated through discursive interaction between teachers and students. Prompt is among the many interactional strategies employed by teachers to facilitate interactive learning in the classroom by stimulating participation, cognitive engagement and meaning negotiation and proficient language development. Despite the pedagogical and pragmatic significance of prompts in classroom interaction, prompts have received limited attention within Nigerian primary school classrooms, particularly in Plateau State. The study adopts a qualitative research design anchored on the pragmatic theories of Speech Acts, Cooperative Principles and the Sociocultural Theory to investigate the significance of prompts in classroom interaction. In order to generate authentic and naturally occurring data suitable for the study, the data for were generated through classroom audio-recorded teacher–students interactions, in-class observation, and semi-structured interviews involving teachers and students across the selected schools. The recorded interactions were transcribed to produce the discourse data that enabled the examination of the various forms of prompts and the pragmatic functions that they perform in classroom interaction. Prompts were seen to perform instructional functions, to contribute to learner participation, and influence the flow of classroom interaction. The study found prompts function beyond their known linguistic form and function and perform deeper pragmatic function of scaffolding learning, decrease the likelihood of communication breakdowns, encourage collaborative meaning-making, and sustain effective classroom interaction. This study offers significant contributing to classroom discourse studies, discourse pragmatics, educational pragmatics, and language pedagogy by providing empirical evidence on how prompts facilitate teaching and learning English Language Teaching classrooms in Nigerian public primary schools.