Issues in Applied Linguistics

This longitudinal study of teacher talk examines the use of effective particles in the language of the university-level elementary Japanese as a foreign language classroom. The classroom is viewed as a crucial language socializing space in which students are not only acquiring grammatical competence, but are also being socialized into particular norms of interaction in Japanese. The frequency and variety of affective particles are carefully calculated and compared with particle use in ordinary conversation. The results show that affective particles are used far less frequently in the classroom language analyzed than in ordinary conversation. Significant differences between teachers were also found. Qualitative analysis of classroom assessments reveals that teacher stance impacts the frequency of affective particle use, with teachers revealing their communicative orientation towards interaction with students through their affective particle use—the frequency of affective particle use increases when the teacher's focus is on the communicative content of the interaction rather than on grammatical form.