Mandana Zolghadri; Homa Jafarpour Mamaghani
Abstract
The variability of the professional knowledge and skills required for diverse pedagogical contexts makes second language teaching effectiveness a complicated issue and teaching ineffectiveness a common concern among EFL practitioners. Notwithstanding the scholarly consensus on this matter, the roots ...
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The variability of the professional knowledge and skills required for diverse pedagogical contexts makes second language teaching effectiveness a complicated issue and teaching ineffectiveness a common concern among EFL practitioners. Notwithstanding the scholarly consensus on this matter, the roots of teaching ineffectiveness have remained contentious. Hence, we conducted a case study deploying collaborative critical reflection (CCR) to diagnose the possible roots of the participants’ teaching ineffectiveness using Saphier, Haley-Speca, and Gower’s (2018) skillful teacher framework. To this end, two EFL teachers were selected as the participants of the study and were guided to utilize their selves, and colleagues as professional development (PD) resources. Video-recorded classroom observations guided the subsequent reflections and a focus group collaborative discussion. Then using a retrospective lesson- objective interview and a retrospective lesson plan, we elicited the teachers’ thinking types while planning. The analysis of multiple sources of data through multiple methods and by multiple investigators revealed teachers’ erroneous and over self-evaluation, teachers’ non-reflective practice, faulty thinking for lesson planning, and the discrepancy between their intentions and actions as the possible roots of the observed teaching infectiveness. The findings of this pathology, shedding light on the professional development path, might benefit EFL theoreticians, teacher educators, and teaching practitioners.
Mandana Zolghadri; Mahmood Reza Atai; Esmat Babaii
Abstract
The study investigated a second language teacher educator and teacher learners’ awareness of classroom interactional competence (CIC) to communicate pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) on a teacher education course in Iran. Therefore, the teacher educator’s classroom discourse was scrutinized ...
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The study investigated a second language teacher educator and teacher learners’ awareness of classroom interactional competence (CIC) to communicate pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) on a teacher education course in Iran. Therefore, the teacher educator’s classroom discourse was scrutinized using classroom observation triangulated with an interview data with the educator to characterize the interactional features of his talk-in-interaction with respective discourse modes. The resulting 43 interactures represented four interacture types which mediated Effective Eliciting, Shaping Learner Contribution, Facilitating Interactional Space Focused on the Learner, and Facilitating Interactional Space Focused on the Teacher. The corresponding mode analysis revealed frequent mode integrity incorporating classroom context mode with a pivotal role in all except Facilitating Interactional Space Focused on the Teacher interactures. Later, the taxonomy was incorporated into CIC TLA questionnaires. 32 teaching candidates, and the educator completed respective ethnographically-developed questionnaire versions indicating their awareness of the teacher educator’s choice of CIC interactures. Besides, the interview data concerning the TLA deliberation was triangulated with a Spearman rho correlation results of the perceived CIC strategy frequencies. Consequently, the confirmatory evidence for the significant degree of correspondence (rho = 0.67, n = 33, < 0.01) between the educator and teacher learners’ awareness revealed the student teachers’ heightened declarative TLA. The findings urge language teacher educators to tune interactures in type, mode, and intensity to the professional content and the TLA they negotiate with teacher learners thereby.
