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In this passage, Liying first verbalized her observations so she could gain dialogical “control”
over the events in this lesson part to then assess them (Frawley & Lantolf, 1985, p. 22). She also recognized that my purpose in initiating focus on this part may have been to consider something problematic, her “explaining.” Next, she showed communicative teaching intent in stating, “I don’t like to talk too much…” Afterwards, Liying expressed an opinion or position that could be assessed, questioned, challenged, confirmed, or disconfirmed (Bereiter, 1994; Wells, 2000). It gave me an opportunity to advance our dialogue by inquiring more deeply into her belief that explaining was necessary.
In this two-minute nine-second stretch of dialogue we were now both clearly focused on a potentially problematic part of her lesson for discussion: her explaining of vocabulary. We then moved to the Stage 4 work of trying to agree on whether her explanation was necessary. Our work for agreement constituted a debate.
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followed teacher leadership,18 finding agreement involved identifying how student teacher moves had resulted in limited class communication.
Analysis revealed differences in dialogue for this agreement. Jun and I achieved easy agreement by collaboratively building on each other’s thoughts and lesson assessments. Liying and I engaged in a struggle for ideological hegemony to find agreement on her vocabulary teaching. But Stage 4 work is best illustrated by a comparison on the differences between Chaoxing and Dilin in reconstructing problematic parts of their lessons.
Differences between Chaoxing and Dilin in Reconstructing Lesson Parts
As mentioned Dilin and I could not focus or agree on the most important part of his first lesson. In an illuminating contrast, Chaoxing had the same problem with unclear instructions in a role play but negotiated our dialogue quite differently. She agreed that her instructions were a problem at the very beginning of the activity, but then assessed that she had fixed this problem by repeating and clarifying her instructions.
K: Um. Okay. Okay. Do you think the students really understood what they were supposed to do, or do you think that you could have given clearer instructions?
00:09:25
C: Yeah! That is one thing that I missed, because I realized it when the woman in this part?
Yeah, she asked me, what, after she read the little piece, she asked, “What are we going to do?
What are we supposed to do?” And I realized, ‘Oh my gosh. I forgot.’ And I explained to her, and I think the other students may have heard what I said. So the others can kind of just go into the activity.
In this excerpt, Chaoxing minimized the extent of a problem with instructions by suggesting that the students got into the role play after she repaired her instructions. Yet my Minutes show that this was certainly not the case. She had “silent,” “quiet,” and “tuned out” students who continued
18 In first reflections, Jun and Liying agreed with my opinion that the students were “polite.” Liying agreed with my opinion that her students “follow the teacher’s rules.” In contrast, Hong Kong students in Gan’s (2013) study did not follow their student teachers and thereby created classroom managements problems for them.
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to “ask questions while” she continued to “explain” instructions throughout the activity (Minutes).
But unlike Dilin, who gave short cryptic answers when I initiated focus on problems, Chaoxing continued assessing to reconstruct what had occurred in her lesson (John-Steiner &
Meehan, 2000). By doing so, she observed that the Japanese student who came late, did not know what to do.
C: And, uh, and the Japanese girl…She, I think because of her English proficiency, she didn’t really understand the transcript. So, so actually it was not a conversation between her and the partner…
K: Um huh.
C:… It’s kind of like I’m explaining things: what kind of situation is here.
Chaoxing had now dialogically reconstructed her role play to realize that the Japanese student did not play roles with her partner. I could agree with this assessment and then understandingly add my observation that it was like that for most of the students, “The students spent a lot of time looking at their cards and not talking to each other.” Chaoxing concurred with this by adding,
“And then time’s up,” followed by another regretful “Yeah.”
Through our “joint activity” of reconstruction (John-Steiner & Meehan, 2000, p.37), we now clearly agreed that the students didn’t know what to do. It was obvious to us that
instructions were lacking. Having completed the purpose of this stage, we could now turn our attention to finding a solution for application in future lessons.
Dialogue with Dilin offered a study in contrast. Because we were unable to focus on his role play to work towards agreement on how it was a problematic lesson part for students, he never did such reconstruction. Thereby, he did not fully realize that student quietness in this activity may have had to do with his lack of instructions. So late in our reflection when I yet tried
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to initiate a search for a fix to this problem (see Instance 10 in Table 10), Dilin’s proposed solution was to “give them more freedom,” even though the students had too little guidance to begin with. Shortly thereafter, he said, “They had pretty good interaction.” Because Dilin had not followed my leads, he had not reconstructed this part to see that they had very little interaction.
However, from his perspective, they likely had more interaction than the students in his technical college classes in China. This increased interaction, too, demonstrated his communicative intent.
But compared to Dilin, Chaoxing tried harder to recognize my references and those of her classmate Shuang. She more fully gave her own assessments (which essentially informed herself, a sign of teacher development). She reflected honestly. And she trusted that mistakes were for learning and nothing of which to be ashamed, because she was trying her best. She was “open to wondering and puzzlement, and trying to construct and test explanations of the phenomena” of her lesson (Wells, 2000, p. 63). She was willing to follow the dialogical leads of her supervisor and willingly, even pro-actively, proposed solutions to problems of practice. These abilities and qualities were essential for agreement on problems and the search for solutions. But in key stages of dialogical work, Dilin was unable to exercise these abilities and qualities, which made it difficult for us to focus, agree, and find solutions to communicative language teaching problems.