Literature Review: What Makes a Teacher: Identity and Classroom Talk

Literature Review: What Makes a Teacher: Identity and Classroom Talk

The aim of this paper is to understand the teacher’s identity through the discourse analysis. First of all, it is relevant to mention that historically people’s behavior, values and attitudes are linked with society, context and culture; it means that teachers’ experience influences their teaching practices, and self-perception is reliable for inquiring in teachers’ identity. Moreover, identity is built upon interaction, since it exposes people's’ personality, the way they talk and what they mean, which could be analysed through an approach. For this paper, the researcher selected conversation analytic, an approach that aims to study the social interaction, and claims that identity appears in social interaction. For example, language classroom behaviour is influenced by pedagogical goals that are interactional tasks which are lexical choices, and linguistic functions that were study through conversation analysis. 

The methodology implemented during this research was conversation analysis, used for the interpretation of naturally-occuring interaction inside the classroom, and to describe talk modes, body language, gestures and facial expressions. Three transcribed video recording English lessons were analysed throughout the Initiation-Response-Feedback/Evaluation cycle. Regarding the population, there were 19 female and 1 male, whose ages varied between 20 and 50. It was an English as a foreign language class, in which the teacher’s methodology and performance, promotes a pleasant learning environment. As it was mentioned before, the analysis of data was made considering the IRf/E cycle initially stated by Bellack, A. A., Kliebard, H. M., Hyman, R. T. (1966) as an structure with three exchange patterns: solicit, respond and react. 

The first extract presents three aspects regarding teacher’s figure. First of all, the teacher is recognized as person who has the right of asking questions. Secondly, the teacher is seen as a reference to gather information; and lastly, the teacher is in charge of monitoring, reconfirming or prompting for information. The second piece of conversation, reveals that turn-taking emerges during the primary stages of conversation analysis, which are basically the transitions that speakers follow during a conversation. It occurs due to the fact that most of the times, the teacher initiates the conversation and then decide who will talk, and the content to be used. The last extract, makes reference to repair, which actually deals with communication problems. There are four trajectories stood by  Seedhouse (2004) to fulfill repair. The first one is when students realize their mistakes, and then they correct themselves; the second one is when one of the speakers identify a language mistake, start to repair and the other speaker complete it; during the third one, one of the speakers notices the mistake, initiates to repair and another participant finishes; the last trajectory is when a participant identifies others’ mistakes and correct it. In summary, one of the teacher’s role is repairing and it includes error correction, confirmation check and clarification.

To sum up, this paper provides findings regarding the role of the teacher and the role of the learners in the language classroom. The first finding is that interaction shapes teacher’s professional background. Commonly, teacher's position is dominant over students position, since the teacher has a pedagogical control that is accomplished through questions, allocation of  turns and by keeping the floor of the conversation. It was observed that it happens because there is a model where the teacher has a fifty percent of communication turns, and most of the times learners do not assume a productive role. Moreover, to repair is considered a teacher’s goal in which repair is used as an error correction method, and less currently used for clarification request and confirmation. 

It is paramount to highlight from this research that many linguistic utterances are used most of the time subconsciously as a strategy to support learners’ linguistic development; nonetheless, it is important to look for strategies that encourage learners to take risks, and open the room for non-artificial conversions inside the language classroom. For example, nursery teachers tend to repeat the IRF/E cycle, since it is assumed that learners with a lack of linguistic knowledge is a boundary for interacting fluently with others; however, young learners are risk takers who take advantages of different methods for express themselves, such as body language, facial expressions or even create new words for accomplish the task. Certainly the teachers strategies are important especially during this early stages considering that teachers are guiding their learning process; in spite of, preschoolers are emergent bilinguals that enjoy learning and acquiring new information by playing, while using the language and interacting with people with whom they spend most of their time. The strategies that teachers can use to promote this type of learning environments are role play activities, nursery rhymes, storytelling based on their draws, and asking questions regarding topics that are current for them, among others. Finally, it is necessary to reflect upon the strategies, activities and discourse in order to promote a confident setting, where learners feel confident and motivated to participate and to have an active role in class.