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128 Facilitating negotiated interaction
5.1.7 Reflect on your findings, relating them to the issues discussed in this chapter. Were the findings close to what you expected? Are you satisfied with the nature of your classroom discourse, particularly in terms of the number of IRF sequences and display and referential questions?
5.1.8 Based on your understanding of the lesson, reflect on aspects of talk management that you would or would not change. You might want to do this project a couple of more times at reasonable intervals to see whether any pattern emerges.
5.1.9 Finally, reflect on what you have learned about yourself as a teacher in doing this exploratory project on talk management.
Project 5.2: Topic Management
5.2.0 The purpose of this project is to help you reflect further on topic management. We learned earlier that learners benefit more from self- and peer-nominated topics than from teacher-nominated topics. As mentioned before, letting learners introduce their own topics and subtopics will certainly encourage them to share with the teacher and classmates their own perspectives on contemporary issues.
5.2.1 To do a self-assessment of how you manage topic control in your own class, you may use the same classroom data that you col- lected and transcribed for the previous project on talk management. This time, concentrate on topics and subtopics that came up in the lesson. Go back to your findings for 5.1.5 above. Take a look at the segments containing referential questions that are likely to prompt learner-initiated topics.
5.2.2 Analyze student responses to your referential questions and what you actually did with their responses. Try to interpret them. For instance, how many times did you pursue the topics/subtopics intro- duced by your learners? How many times did you, like the teacher in episode 5.4, “cut off” learner topic initiation in order to pursue your carefully prepared lesson plan, or to avoid a potentially controversial topic?
5.2.3 Speaking of controversial topics, during the lesson you tran- scribed did you ever feel that students were introducing unrelated or even uncomfortable topics? If so, how did you handle the situation? If no such occasion arose in your lesson, think about the following ex- ample.