Pre-Service Teachers' Use of Designedly Incomplete Utterances as an Interactional Resource in Pre-School EFL Classrooms

Abstract

The interactional practice of Designedly Incomplete Utterances has been studied in the literature of L2 classroom interaction under many labels. Designedly incomplete utterances are teachers’ unfinished structures designed to achieve various pedagogical goals in classroom interaction. Many studies investigated the interactional unfolding of DIUs at alternating grade levels with different pedagogical purposes such as elicitation of a response. However, the use of DIUs at pre-school level received relatively little attention in the literature. Besides, there has been no studies to specifically investigate pre-service teachers’ (PSTs) use of DIU at pre-school level to elicit responses from the students. Using Multimodal Conversation Analytic, this study uncovers the interactional and pedagogical features of DIUs, their organization in the PSTs’ elicitation sequences. Data was collected from the video-recordings of 50 PSTs’ practice teaching experiences in a state pre-school in Ankara, Turkey. The findings of the study have demonstrated that DIUs are made relevant in elicitation turns by their prosodic markings as well as their embodied conducts. Another finding uncovered that the interactional outcomes of the DIU use is threefold in the local context of the research; (1) preferred student completion of the DIUs; (2) dispreferred student completion of the DIUs; and (3) no student completion of the DIUs. The results of this study provide theoretical, interactional and practical insights into L2 classroom interaction research, teaching English to young learners and training language teachers.