“I know you got it right” : How novice EFL teachers secure learners’ participation during fronted whole-class activities
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| Year of publication | 2020 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Within the sociolinguistic and interactional approaches to L2 learning, learner participation is considered a necessary prerequisite for language learning (e.g. Van Lier, 2000). However, recent studies on the topic (e.g. Walsh & Li, 2013) have demonstrated that simply letting learners talk is not enough, and that for learning opportunities to arise a solid amount of interactional steering work must first be employed by the teacher. This conversation-analytic study explores what resources novice EFL teachers (i.e. students enrolled in a part-time teacher education programme) use to manage the participation of their learners during teacher-fronted whole-class activities, and how the learners respond to them. It builds on video-recordings of what equals to nine 45-minute-long lessons taught by six novice teachers as a part of their internal teaching practice. The study shows that there is a large range of resources which novice teachers mobilise to secure the participation of their learners: these include Yes/No questions in first and third-turn position, increased wait time or acknowledging learners’ turns in advance through positive assessments. Furthermore, the deployment of these resources is often tied to the pedagogical goal of an activity. As for equal opportunities to speak, the data show that selecting a learner is not always a sole privilege of the teacher, but rather a joint achievement of both parties. These findings bear some implications for future teacher education, particularly in relation to the development of their Classroom Interactional Competence (Walsh, 2006). |
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