Teachers' Demonstrations of Epistemic Access in Teacher-Student Interactions in a Digital Setting

Abstract

This paper is concerned with a Conversation Analytic (CA) study of teachers' demonstrations of epistemic access to a student's domain or territory of information in teacher-student interactions in a digital setting. It describes interactional practices analyzed in 12 excerpts with an explicit reference to information about students' progress provided by the digital system. It will be shown that teachers initiate interactions about already fulfilled assignments that are shown to be problematic. In the opening of the interaction, teachers more or less explicitly refer to the digital programme as an information source and/or to the hitches in student's progress. In the continuation of the interaction, teacher and student are concerned with a redoing of assignments. In this phase of the interaction, the teacher demonstrates epistemic access to possible causes for students' mistakes. In all cases, students do not show resistance to teachers' demonstrations of epistemic access to knowledge and experiences falling into their epistemic domain. The findings confirm teachers' and students' orientation to the educational context as being a specialized context where students' problems are not treated as 'theirs to know and describe'. The findings in this paper shed light on interactional practices in relation to epistemics, as well as on interactional practices in a digital setting.

Between teacher candidates’ reflection and teacher educators’ evaluation: Fluctuations in epistemic (a)symmetry in feedback conversations

“…Instead, M takes on the interactional work of accounting for T's behavior between lines 6 and 9, which lays the ground for her to express the potential consequences of T's behavior (9−12). This confirms the mentor's epistemic authority over the trainee as she treats the problem as not the trainee's “to know and describe” (Gosen, 2018; Koole, 2012). Moving on from assuming T's reasoning behind the behavior, she extends the assumption to T's potential students (9−12).…”

“…In his monograph Educating Second Language Teachers, Freeman (2016) raised fundamental questions on reflection: Is it "a clearly defined concept, or has it become a catch-all? And how does it connect thinking and knowing in teaching?"…”

The Role of Self‐Talk in Downgrading a Teacher’s Certainty About Grammar Matters

“…A large portion of CA research on L2 classrooms has examined the actions and practices by which students display their epistemic stance relative to the subject matter and how these displays are managed by the teacher and their peers (Gosen, 2018; Koole, 2010; Rusk, Pörn, & Sahlström, 2016; Sert, 2013; Sert & Jacknick, 2015; Sert & Walsh, 2013). For example, Sert and Walsh (2013) show how L2 learners display their lack of knowledge via claims of insufficient knowledge (e.g., I don’t know ).…”