Interactional Resources for Instructors' Collective Decision-Making: Evidence from EFL Teachers' Meetings in China
Open Access
- Author:
- Johnston, Duff
- Graduate Program:
- Applied Linguistics
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- April 01, 2011
- Committee Members:
- Kelly M Hall, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Joan Kelly Hall, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Karen E Johnson, Committee Member
Athelstan Canagarajah, Committee Member
Steve L Thorne, Committee Member
Xiaoye You, Committee Member - Keywords:
- conversation analysis
English as a foreign language education
organizational decision making
teacher collaboration
Chinese higher education - Abstract:
- In recent decades, efforts to improve teachers’ professional development and implement educational reform have focused attention on instructor collaboration and collective decision-making. Despite a growing body of research on such collaboration, considerable gaps remain in our understanding of how teachers make collective decisions that affect their instruction and assessment of students. In particular, relatively little is known about how group members use the resources of talk-in-interaction to reach collective decisions or make their social and cultural backgrounds relevant to their deliberations. The present study addresses these gaps in the literature by adopting the theory and methods of conversation analysis to create a fine-grained analysis of spoken interaction among a group of instructors at a Chinese university’s English language program. By analyzing two transcribed episodes drawn from the group’s face-to-face meetings, the study highlights a range of interactional resources members employed in the accomplishment of group decisions. In the first episode, members use resources that express disagreement while working to limit direct expressions of conflict among members, while in the second episode, members used person-reference resources to frame divergent positions alternately in cultural or personal terms. An implication of both analyses is that teachers making collective decisions have both the incentive to disagree with each other and the interactional resources allowing them to pursue disagreement without destroying group cohesion. The study and its findings helps outline ways in which attention to the phenomenological details of talk-in-interaction can be used by teachers, administrators, and teacher educators to create more effective forms of collaboration among pre- and in-service instructors.