Seminar: ​​​​​​​Prof Olcay Sert: The design and implementation of a course on interactional competence for teachers: Teacher-learning through video-based guided discovery tasks

Seminar: The design and implementation of a course on interactional competence for teachers: Teacher-learning through video-based guided discovery tasks

Abstract

The field of teacher education has enjoyed an “interactional turn” in the last decade, which led to the emergence and development of constructs like Classroom Interactional Competence (Walsh, 2011). Although the theoretical routes and roots of interactional competence in teacher education may not be identical to the L2 IC situated in the ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis (CA) tradition, CA and classroom-based conversation analytic research have nevertheless shaped a practice-oriented applied research tradition within teacher education. This tradition is evidenced by studies that track teachers’ development of interactional practices and competencies in classrooms over time (e.g., Bozbıyık et al., 2021; Carpenter, 2023; Sert, 2015; Sert et al., 2024). Yet, we know less about the design and development of university courses that take interactional competence for teachers as their central concern and train novice practitioners (i.e., pre-service teachers) drawing on research findings from conversation analytic studies. In this talk I will try to close this gap by describing the design principles and exploring the implementation of a university course for student-teachers in Sweden. This 10-week course includes hands-on transcription and video-based discovery tasks, field studies in schools, micro-teaching, and video enhanced reflection on interactional practices. After describing the design and the structure of the course, I will demonstrate the benefits and outcomes of the course with a focus on a central element in the course, namely transcription and video-based guided discovery tasks, using evidence from the analysis of transcribed university classroom interactions. I will do this by tracking the learning of Designedly Incomplete Utterances as an interactional and pedagogical phenomenon. Implications for designing and developing professional development courses and programs in other contexts will be given. 

Bio

Olcay Sert is Professor of English Language Education at Mälardalen University and the editor of Classroom Discourse, an international, peer reviewed journal published by Routledge. He leads the Mälardalen Interaction and Didactics (MIND) Research Group and the SOLD Research environment at Mälardalen University. His research deals with classroom discourse, L2 interaction, and language teacher education.