From Arguables to Learnables: Resolving Disagreements and Creating Learning Opportunities in L2 Methodology Classroom Interaction in a Teacher Education Context

Abstract

Pre-service teachers (PSTs) engage in various intellectual and social practices such as learning to teach, negotiating beliefs and developing identities, studying a subject matter, and becoming a part of the community of teachers. Within this process, PSTs interaction with their peers and teacher trainers in teacher education classes may play a role in negotiating and shaping their pedagogical and their professional beliefs around arguable matters. However, there are only a handful of studies that investigate L2 teacher education classroom interaction in general and language teaching methodology classes in particular, which aim at building PSTs’ pedagogical knowledge. Considering the body of literature suggesting the importance of classroom interaction for learning and teaching, this study aims to explore the interactional resources an L2 teacher educator uses during arguable episodes in a “Teaching English Language Skills” course. Using multimodal conversation analysis for the examinations of video recordings, the study details four main interactional resources used by the teacher educator during arguable sequences: reformulations, agreement-prefaced disagreements, understanding checks, and invoking sources of expert knowledge. The findings show how these resources create an opportunity for teacher learning by promoting learnables. The study has implications for pre-service language teacher education and L2 classroom interaction.