The Participatory Role of Cooperating Teachers during Practicum Teaching in Pre- school L2 Classrooms


Bozbıyık M., Balaman U.

ICOP-L2, Vasteras, İsveç, 29 - 31 Mayıs 2019

  • Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Yayınlanmadı
  • Basıldığı Şehir: Vasteras
  • Basıldığı Ülke: İsveç
  • Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

Despite the growing interest in classroom interactional studies focusing on pre-service teachers’ (PSTs) interactional management of practicum classes (cf. Somuncu & Sert, 2018; Bozbıyık, 2017), the participatory role of co-present cooperating teachers remains unexplored to date. In this study, we explore an interactional site of common intervention by cooperating teachers, namely pre-school L2 classrooms. Based on a pre-service English language teacher education project, the data comes from video-recordings (36 hours) of 131 PSTs’ very first practicum teaching ever in a pre-school L2 classroom. Each PST teaches a topic for 20 minutes and the actual teacher of each classroom in the dataset is present in the room. Using multimodal conversation analysis, we show that cooperating teachers mostly draw on non-assigned self-selective turns in order to ensure student participation, maintain classroom order, repeat, clarify, expand, and complete PST instructions, give instructions to students, respond to PST turns on behalf of students, and hint at preferred responses. We also observe that the cooperating teachers deploy a diverse array of interactional resources addressed to students such as address terms (i.e. as a verbal alert to a particular student), hushing, physical contact with the students, question formats, and negative assessment of student behavior while they largely avoid explicitly addressing PSTs. All in all, the findings present an overall picture of the interactional organization of the moments that are observably treated as trouble by the cooperating teacher and subsequently resolved in diverse ways, which is of utmost importance for an understanding of how the first practicum experience of PSTs are attended to by the cooperating teachers in situ. Therefore, the study will bring new insights into L2 classroom discourse research based on the detailed descriptions of a previously unexplored interactional domain and provide implications for L2 teacher education especially for eliciting successful outcomes from practicum activities.