| In communicative English classroom, teacher talk has been the focus of a great deal of research in recent years. The number and quality of teacher talk contribute to generating genuine and successful interaction. In language classroom, it is common to find out that teacher talk dominates the overall talk and leaves learners with no room for initiation. Teacher have also widely adopted IRE pattern with which if perpetually used can inhibit numbers of learners’ participation. In terms of types of questions, occurrences of display questions often outnumber greatly the use of referential questions. Although display questions elicit immediate responses, however, it may not empower learners to talk through their opinions, and so it diminishes the chance for genuine interaction to break out. In the teachers’ attempt to get across their message, teachers sometimes need to modify their initial questions. The most common modifications are in the form of repetition and rephrasing. Neuro-Linguistic Programming is an approach to language teaching which is claimed to help achieve excellence in students’ performance. With its tenet that there is no failure in learners, NLP techniques deal with teachers’ verbal intervention. The goal of adopting NLP techniques is to provide teachers more techniques in teaching, engage students in class activities, and together create successful interaction. The present study aims at presenting a case study of two language classrooms, raising teachers’ awareness of the problems occurring in the classrooms, understanding these problems, and providing ways to overcome them. In collecting the data, the researcher recorded the teaching and learning activities of two reading classes in a private high school in Jakarta. All utterances in the classes are transcribed and made as verbatim as possible. These utterances are then analyzed by using three tools: (a) Ami’s expanded observational system, (b) Initiation-Response-Evaluation pattern, and (c) Neuro-Linguistic Programming techniques. The results of the study are as followed: (i) there are four episodes in the two reading classes that are presumably interactive because they are long in terms of time duration, (ii) the teacher dominates the major talk of the class with only a few occurrences of learners initiate, (iii) IRE pattern was used throughout the lessons, (iv) display questions outnumber referential questions, (v) NLP provides techniques to help teachers to encourage more students’ participation. |