Effective teacher talk has been reported to be dependent upon the teacher having post-liminal (higher levels of) understanding and has been operationalized as aligning one’s talk with the pedagogic purpose. In EAP classes, however, there are some instances where enacting effective teacher talk can be challenging. This article reports on one such instance by drawing on fifty-one hours of classroom video-recordings and seventeen hours of reflective meetings. It explores EAP teachers’ responses to learner initiatives, tapping into the teachers’ subject knowledge deficit. It also examines the potential of data-led dialogic reflective practice to enable teachers to skilfully manage the interacting influences of face, authority, ethics, input, and learner participation in EAP classes.

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The present study examines the effects of pre-task explicit instruction on second language (L2) oral self-repair behaviour while controlling for the effects of working memory. The participants were 121 Iranian learners of English at incipient levels of language proficiency. Their working memory was measured using an operation span task and then they were randomly assigned to a control and an experimental group. Both groups performed a picture story-retelling task that was preceded by five minutes of planning time. During the planning time, the experimental group also received a grammar handout that explained English relative clauses. The instances of self-repairs were identified through stimulated recall interviews that immediately followed performance on the oral task. They were then classified into categories of global form repairs (FG-repairs), local form repairs (FL-repairs), and content repairs (C-repairs). A series of one-way ANCOVAs were run, the results of which indicated pre-task explicit instruction had significant and beneficial effects on FL-repairs and adverse effects on C-repairs. The covariate was only associated with repairing the target structure. The findings are discussed in light of the Extended Trade-off Hypothesis and confirm the view that pre-task explicit instruction tends to foster a focus on form at the expense of meaning.