A corpus-based analysis of pauses in teachers’ speech: first results

The paper describes the results of annotating a school teachers' speech corpus. We have developed a multilevel classification for pauses, enabling us to distinguish both unique characteristics within teachers' speech and those that might be common for the effective teachers’ speech in general. We also explored the degree to which the teachers' speech aligns with prepared discourse rather than spontaneous speech. We analyzed monologues delivered by two effective Russian speaking teachers during four history lessons in 6–8 grades. Using PRAAT software, we described 1) the physical nature of each pause, 2) its physical manifestation, 3) its position within the grammatical and semantic structure of the utterance, and 4) its function. The results demonstrated a challenge in putting teachers’ speech into either spontaneous or prepared speech category, as compelling arguments in favor of both sides appeared. The shared characteristics in the speech of both teachers included the prevalence of physically unfilled pauses, their syntactic position, and their function as a hesitation marker. The overall duration of pauses, the quantity of filled pauses and the type of their fillers, as well as the functional distribution of pauses turned out to be speaker specific. Hesitation and rhythmic pauses were clearly associated with a syntactic position, while emphatic and situational ones displayed variability in their location within an utterance. The initial corpus-based analysis has enabled us to discover various characteristics of pauses within teachers' speech. The parameters we distinguished appear to be promising for further research concerning the organization of effective educational discourse.