Tracing Teachers’ Ordering Decisions in Classroom Interaction

초록

While discourse studies have uncovered regular structural patterns in classroom interactions, these patterns are often the result of interpretive decisions teachers make in performing various pedagogical actions. Notably, however, teachers’ instructional decisions often stretch beyond topical boundaries and are thus not limited to the current topics of their instruction. To capture teachers’ instructional decisions, it is necessary to trace the trajectories of interactional sequences in their entirety. This manuscript offers descriptions of these instructional decisions based on three data sets collected from an ESL composition course and two EFL content courses. The findings elucidate the processes in which classroom teachers make ordering decisions regarding when and how to discuss particular content knowledge. Teachers often enact these ordering decisions through topic shifts, which changes the direction of interactional trajectories. Tracing these sequences offer descriptions of the pedagogical practices teachers deploy that are illuminating for practitioners who have eyes for such practical details. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

키워드