“What is the date today?”: A dialogist perspective on expert EFL teachers’ classroom interaction

Abstract

This article presents a micro-analysis of an EFL classroom episode in which the teacher and the pupils worked on the concepts "date" and "day" (and relatedly saying the date in English), which the learners had not fully internalized yet. Conversation analysis (CA) and concepts from sociocultural theory (SCT) are used in the analysis to reveal how the mutual understanding proceeded. It is argued that the presented dialogist perspective can cast light on the intricacies of the teaching and learning processes.Keywords classroom interaction, dialogism, conversation analysis, English as a foreign language, learning, teaching IntroductionThe shared activity and mutual influencing among learners and teachers constitutes a fundamental part of the teaching and learning processes. In this paper I offer a dialogist perspective on one episode from a corpus of video-recordings of expert EFL teachers' classes. The selected episode exemplifies, among other things, the process of reaching mutual understanding between the teacher and the pupils, and within this process, the role of display questions, pauses and non-verbal signals is discussed. This paper is structured as follows. First, I will briefly characterize dialogism as an epistemological and theoretical framework and conversation analysis (henceforth CA) as one of the possible approaches to researching classroom interaction in a dialogist manner. Then I outline the research on teacher questions in classroom interaction. In the following part I present a microanalysis of an episode from an expert English language teaching.