Development in Dialogic Teaching Skills: A Micro-Analytic Case Study of a Pre-Service ITA
Open Access
- Author:
- Rine, Emily F.
- Graduate Program:
- Applied Linguistics
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- July 08, 2009
- Committee Members:
- Joan Kelly Hall, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Kelly M Hall, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Steve L Thorne, Committee Member
Dr Paula Golombek, Committee Member
Meredith Christine Doran, Committee Member
Dr Johannes Wagner, Committee Member - Keywords:
- ITA
International Teaching Assistant
conversation analysis
interactional competence
language socialization - Abstract:
- As universities have come to depend increasingly on international, non-native English-speaking graduate students to teach many of the undergraduate courses, they have created International Teaching Assistant (ITA) programs in order to provide ITAs with the cultural, pedagogical, and linguistic skills needed to instruct in an American university setting. While research has contributed much to the discovery of linguistic factors affecting ITA effectiveness and has argued for greater attention to pedagogy and cultural training in ITA courses, few studies have investigated what the development of these pedagogical skills actually looks like in training, or traced the changes ITAs make in order to become more recognizably teacher-like. This has left a rather large gap in the literature between the design phase of ITA training programs and their actual practices in the classroom. This dissertation investigates what pedagogical skills one pre-service ITA develops in one particular practice during a semester-long training course. The practice of interest is the dialogic lecture, which is a particular kind of interactive lecture that seeks to engage or ‘dialogue with’ the students in discussion during class time. The corpus of analyzed data is comprised of four instances of one pre-service ITA’s participation in the practice of dialogic teaching for a total of 29 minutes of interaction collected over a period of 8 weeks. In the study, I utilize a framework of language socialization in tandem with a theoretically compatible framework of language use, interactional competence (IC). The IC framework is interested in the description of interactive practices and the resources individuals utilize to participate in them. Using primarily conversation analysis (CA), I investigate two components of the IC framework (i.e. action sequencing and participant frameworks) in order to capture the dynamic unfolding of the specific practice of the dialogic lecture, as well has how the patterns of participants’ participation in this practice changes over time. The analysis of the component of action sequencing showed several changes in the ways the ITA structured and performed the sequences in the dialogic lecture. First, the ITA became more attentive to the importance of establishing and maintaining engagement and rapport with his students during both the opening and closing sections of the lecture through attention to verbal greetings, leave takings, eye contact, and body positioning. He also became more explicit in the discourse markers and announcements used to signal transitions between sections of the lecture, indicating increasing awareness of the importance of organizational markers to lecture clarity. Lastly, he showed an increasing repertoire of verbal leave taking phrases. In terms of development in participant frameworks, changes were found in the ITA’s orientation to the roles of teacher versus student three different areas: (1) increases in the use of classroom-specific language, (2) leave-taking practices, and (3) spatial and non-verbal orientation to the “teacher” space. These changes provide evidence of the ITA becoming more recognizably teacher-like over the course of the semester. This study contributes to the literature in several areas. First, it presents evidence of how development can be traced longitudinally using CA, thereby expanding the methods of inquiry one can use to study learning. Second, it illustrates how we can expand the object of analysis of what is learned in terms of interactional resources. Third, it shows how using a framework of IC expands what we know about how identity is locally constructed and displayed in interaction. Finally, it informs ITA educators by demonstrating how institutional constraints can affect dialogicality and by adding interactional competence to the areas in which ITAs are evaluated, thus shifting the discourse from one of ITA “deficits” to one of ITAs as skilled interlocutors who manage the resources they do have with their interlocutors in dynamic ways.