BEING THE TEACHER’: IDENTITY AND CLASSROOM CONVERSATION

BEING THE TEACHER’: IDENTITY AND

CLASSROOM CONVERSATION

By Yenny Bautista Pinzón

Conversational analysis has played an important role in the educational field, although some scholar do not pay too much attention to this methodology as a tool to address different issues in the classroom. Some others claim that by exploring the interaction opportunities set in a classroom, people understand and enhance in this case; language learning processes.

It is mentioned in the paper that conversation and interaction is something that is possible in a classroom, social actions are occurring all the time in this institutional setting were the participants, teacher and students are playing an specific role, it can be said that identities are constructed while social interaction.

The author arises a discussion about the presence of the patters found in the IRF cycle in the different classroom settings. According to some studies developed, they revealed that 70 and sometimes 50 percent of the interaction in the classroom is based on this  structure of a traditional system where teacher controls the class transmitting information and students almost know what they have to do. However, few studies evidenced that not all the classroom interaction is led this way, so the important thing here is how teachers turn their classes into communicative ones, taking advantage of their pedagogical knowledge.

Student are not any more passive members in the classroom, they need to be exposed to more interactive opportunities to talk, and although it has been shown, how IRF cycle appears in the majority of the classroom  as a not really efficient pattern, the positive effects can be good help at the moment of interaction.

The structure of the cycle needs some improvement; teacher decision making is crucial at the moment of going into interaction, the kind of questions addressed by the teacher need to be changed into genuine questions, negotiatory questions instead of display ones.  Students’ contributions in the ongoing talk have to be present in the classroom, the follow ups must allow students to do their own decisions and feedback should be a discourse one more than evaluative, this way the IRF could support teacher practices at the moment of addressing real interaction.

According to Seedhouse (1966) conversations in the classrooms must be as natural as possible,  teachers have to forget about the role of regulator and should be seen by students at the same position as them, if a teacher starts a conversation with the pedagogical purpose of addressing a language construct, then real conversation stops. Moreover, teachers cannot be the ones that direct the discourse in the classroom; it is their job to set the proper scenery to promote genuine interaction.

When interaction is seen in different contexts it can be easily identified some patterns about people´s identity. Each participant takes a role in a conversation and revels in some way how must be understood during the construction of interaction. Hence, Zimmerman suggests three aspects of identity that are significant to the study of interaction: Discourse identity; it is related to the moment-by-moment organization of the conversation.  Situated identity; it refers to the support of participants involving in the activities and respecting pacts and Transportable identity; refers to the visible identities related to physical and cultural categorization.

Under the light of this theory it can be said that interaction can be a possible action in the classroom, what is really important is the way teacher displays everything, trying to set a really natural space where teachers and students find themselves in the same status, teacher cannot be the owner of the discourse, otherwise e is breaking conversation. We as teachers do not pay too much attention to what is happening while interacting and how are being things constructed, for instance how is identity being constructed and evident in a simple talk.

Besides, it is a great challenge for teachers rethink about our pedagogical practices, what is it what they are doing in the classroom in order to set a good environment where interaction takes place and the communicative goal of the language teaching can be achieve. After reading this paper, I reflect a little bit about my role in my language classes, and how I allow students to interact, then I realized that most of the time I am facing students to display questions instead of genuine ones, so it is not the accurate environment for them to talk in a natural way. Therefore, what is next is starting changing and looking for the best strategies to succeed.