The Future of Education

The aim of this paper is to illustrate how the application of Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis theory to teacher-student interactions in the foreign language classroom can provide useful insight for teachers. This paper will provide examples from the monolingual language classroom at university level in Italy within a non-compulsory educational setting. It is argued that an increased awareness of how teacher discourse affects student engagement in the learning process can, in turn, lead to more effective teaching. The analysis will examine a string of typical teacher-learner interactions that occur over a specific period of time using Berne’s PAC (Parent-Adult-Child) transactional model. In addition, by illustrating the complexity and potency of classroom interactions, the examples aim to provide a greater understanding of the implications of classroom dynamics in terms of learner development in general through the ongoing activation of learner autonomy, critical thinking and pro-active behaviour. The outcomes of the analysis will be discussed also in relation to the theoretical fields of Language Awareness and Learner Advising in Foreign Language Education. In addition, the paper will provide a discussion of how these fields overlap with the broader field of Learner Counselling in education. While this paper is based on dynamics of the foreign language classroom, the analysis can be viewed as being relevant to teacher-student interactions in a variety of educational contexts as well.

Keywords: language teaching, leaner counselling, learner advising, language awareness, learner autonomy;