Page 311 - Beyond Methods

Monitoring teaching acts 299
ticipants maintained a friendly and positive atmosphere conducive to learning. The class was highly interactive without the teacher dominating the conversational turns. They noticed that, out of the sixty-four conversational turns, there were thirty teacher turns and thirty-four student turns, however brief the student turns may have been. They also noted that a substantial number of questions asked by the teacher were referential in nature, that is, they were meant to elicit new information from the learners (e.g., turn 27: “Why did you choose . . . choose your present apartment and neighborhood?”), not just to display teacher knowledge (e.g., turn 29: “What is a para- graph?”). The teacher gave ample opportunities for the learners to participate meaningfully in classroom interaction, thus helping them stretch their still-developing linguistic repertoire.
At a more detailed level of analysis, the teacher and the observer tried to engage in a critical interpretation of the episode aimed at a comprehensive understanding of classroom events. I present below a synopsis of the teacher, observer, and learner perspectives in rela- tion to the M & M scheme.
Consider the first eighteen turns. Several things are happening here. First of all, by asking two different questions, “How many of you live in an apartment? (turn 1), and later, “How many of you live in a house?” (turn 3), the teacher has already created a distinction between an apartment and a house. S2 suggests yet another hous- ing possibility, a condo (turn 6). S3 wants to know what a condo is. The teacher says, “It’s like a house” (turn 9). Another student, S6, is still unclear about the meaning of condo, even after the teacher’s explanation: “What’s a condo?” (turn 16). The teacher replies, “Apart- ment complex. Like an apartment house.” Now, a condo, an apart- ment, and a house have all been synonymously used by the teacher, although she started with a distinction between an apartment and a house. Confusion was confounded.
What did the teacher and the observer learn from the analysis? When they talked to the two students (S3 and S6) involved in this exchange, they found out that the students were still not clear about condo, and about the difference between an apartment, a house, and a condo. Reflecting on this episode, the teacher said she wasn’t conscious of the contradictory signals she was sending. “I just didn’t notice,” she said. The observer said she knew something was amiss but could not figure it out until they examined the transcript. They termed this a cognitive mismatch and said teachers should monitor