WHAT MAKES A TEACHER: IDENTITY AND CLASSROOM TALK

WHAT MAKES A TEACHER:

IDENTITY AND CLASSROOM TALK

By Yenny Bautista Pinzón

This a study carried out by José Alberto Fajardo Castañeda. The main goal of this study is to get a closer view of teachers’ professional identities from the perspective of interaction in the language classroom. The discourse setting was taking from a group of 20 adult learners, 19 females and 1 male studying English in a monolingual Spanish context. The teacher appears as an experience professional who displays a friendly environment where students laugh and there is communicative encouragement. Three extracts of classroom observation where analyzed the issues were emerging with the turns took by the participants.

During the analysis of this data, many concerns emerged in terms of identity, talk interaction, turn taking, power relationships, and institutional interaction among others. According to the researcher, a language classroom is an essential setting where social actions take place during interaction, when teachers and students interact in terms of roles, power language choice, organization of talk, display what really makes a language teacher. This study also pretends to explore the role of classroom interaction in forming, shaping and adapting identities.

It is mentioned in the text that classroom talk can be used for different purposes; it can help teachers to arise their awareness towards the assessment of the pedagogical practices, it also can give teachers an overview of what is happening in the classroom and how can be things improved or reinforced.

It is stablished on the text the closer relationship between identity and discourse, some scholar see identity as reflected in discourse but some others say that it is dynamically constituted in it. Discourse is a tool use to achieve social interaction, which reveals how we are, how we talk, what we say or what we mean.

 Identity has been a field of research that has call the attention of conversation analysts; most of these studies have focus on institutional talk, rather than ordinary or informal talks. There clear differences when addressing this two sorts of talk. The first one is related to institutions in particular like hospitals, schools, courts among others. In addition, talk is enclosed in pre stablished tasks. On the other hand, ordinary talk is not enclosed in any specific context. The connection between these two talks gives an overview of the way identity is constructed or negotiated in interaction.

When we talk about language in the classroom it is labeled where institutional talk where the teacher is constantly in charge of asking questions, pre allocating turns or maintaining or limiting the flow, there is not too much space for free driving exchange, ordinary conversations are regularly controlled and structured in the classroom setting.

These are some conclusions drew by the researcher.

·         Classroom talk reveals relevant images of the way teachers professional identities are co- constructed and shaped. By observing and analyzing teacher talk, people can stablish somehow what kind of teacher is the person, how he think, act. Etc.

·         By analyzing the data it was observed a figure of asymmetric interaction that empowers the role of the teacher as dominant over students the teacher was the one who controlled the class asking questions pre allocating turns and holds the floor

·         By exploring the data, it was found that repair assumes the role of error correction, most of the time it is the teacher the one in share of repairing there is no sign of student-student repair.

·         It was observed that the model of interaction was based on teacher student- structure with no chance to student- student interaction, teacher asks questions and students respond, they seldom really adopt a more proactive role.

Reading this research paper made me to reflect about what is my role as a language teacher in the classroom. It make me think that sometimes we are paying too much attention to the language use than interaction, we sometimes  found ourselves in a hurry to control everything in the class that forget about some other issues that can allow students to take a more proactive  role in their learning process.  It also called my attention how much can reveal discourse about the identity of people, the way they think, act, react and conceive in this case teaching and learning. Therefore, conversational analysis can be a powerful tool to improve our pedagogical practices addressing important issues like repairing, IRF/E cycle, turn taking organization, among others. Recording ourselves is not such a common activity in our classrooms, we rarely take time to reflect about our practices or if we are doing well or wrong, any way what is important is that we are manipulating the theory, having the basis to start and change what we have to or improve what is well developed.