The work of categorisation in achieving moral order in feedback talk during the school-based professional experience
Issue: Vol 10 No. 2 (2013)
Journal: Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice
Subject Areas: Writing and Composition Linguistics
DOI: 10.1558/japl.18760
Abstract:
As part of the school practicum experience, supervising and pre-service teachers have regular professional conversations. Supervising teachers are expected to model, assess and evaluate their pre-service teachers’ classroom skills, and a key component of this is feedback about pre service teachers’ teaching techniques. This paper uses conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis to unpack the initial three turns of such feedback to show how they have procedural consequence for the speakers’ professional relationships and for the talk that follows. Analysis of seven audio-recordings reveals some of the conversational ways the participants constitute their institutional roles and relationships within a particular moral relational order: the speakers talking as supervising, or pre-service teachers with and for each other about teaching practices. Pre-service teachers are seen for the most part to align with their supervising teachers’ versions of events. These speakers collaboratively co-construct asymmetrical institutional relationships, interactively normalising their shared understandings of attributes associated with ‘good’ teachers and effective teaching. We suggest that the development of such asymmetric relationships and understandings may well inhibit pre-service teacher learning, limiting possibilities for extended understandings of alternative classroom practices.
Author: Jayne Keogh, Jessica Harris, Paula Jervis-Tracey
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