This study examines the organization of teacher-student interaction in TEFL (teaching English as a Foreign Language) classrooms in China, one urban and one rural, in order to examine how recent educational reforms have impacted English teaching in different parts of the country. The study presents an analysis and comparison of two 10th grade classrooms and found that the urban and rural schools are distinct from each other in various ways related to turn-allocation procedures and interactional sequences. Comparatively, the teacher in the rural school favored invitation to chorus to allocate turns, but the teacher in the urban school has gradually moved the focus away from chorusing and closer to strategies such as nomination that encouraged individual students to speak. The analysis also suggests that the ways in which students participate in interaction in both schools differ from English-speaking environments, where students are seldom found to participate in chorusing. In addition, the differences between the urban and rural schools indicate that the new English Educational Reform has had an influence in secondary schools in China, especially in the urban areas. The urban school in this study, for example, is moving toward what the new policy has called for: communicative teaching with updated teaching materials, better teacher training, and an English learning environment with more speaking opportunities. To find out more about how the new Educational Reform has affected the foreign language classrooms, extended studies on more classrooms in different parts of the country are recommended.
