WHAT MAKES A TEACHER IDENTITY AND CLASSROOM TALK

WHAT MAKES A TEACHER IDENTITY AND CLASSROOM TALK

            This reading provides how the teachers build the teachers identity through the discourse in the classroom. According to Fajardo, the language classroom is a context where interaction is developed and it plays an important role for the second language learning, also the language classroom provides the role of power, language, interaction, and organization where the teacher starts developing the language teacher.

            According to Cooley (1992) when he refers to “looking glass self” is because as we know it is used to describe or to observe the process in which a person, in this case, the teacher can see different points of view about how society (students) see them and use the mirror as a type of interaction where he can develop the language teacher.   

            Ball (1972) talks about professional identity making a differences between two kinds of identities, the first one is when he talks about as situated identity in which the teacher can mold his self, in other words, the teacher can change depending on the situation, for example in the hospital, school, and so on; the other kind of identity is substantial identity which means the way a person (teacher) thinks about himself.  On the other hand, also we can say about the identity in teacher also depends on his personal life or experiences, it means that teachers’ identity not only is developed or built-in classroom management, lesson planning, or assessment, teachers’ identity also is built through the personal interaction with the social, cultural, and institutional environment, however, the teacher identity is not only developed through the technical domains but also it is full of emotions.

            The teachers’ identity shows us a multi-varied-perspective of what makes teachers, but in this case to observe a teacher from his role within his/her environment which is in the classroom (a framework of pedagogically embedded interaction) or the institution where he/she works (professional identity) restricts its dimension significantly.

Talk and identity

Fajardo says that discourse is used by people to accomplish social actions,

which admit who we are, how we talk, what we say or what we mean within a context. That social construction of identity is 'accomplished, disputed, ascribed, resisted, managed and negotiated in discourse'. As we know the identity has been a field of research that attracted the conversational analysis, this study has been focused on two specific fields as institutional and ordinary settings, therefore, the ordinary is defined as a form of interaction which ii can be developed in any kind of context, while institutional interaction is limited because of the context, and it is because the word “institution” is related to schools, hospitals, courts, and so on, which means that the interaction that is going to be developed has restrictions in order to talk because people have to use a technical language or just the conversation has to be attached with the context, so the conversation is going to be pre-stablished.

            In the classroom environment, the teacher is generally in charge of asking questions in order to start a conversation or the class with the students, also the teacher has the power of pre-allocating turns, limiting or maintaining the sequence or flow of the conversation inside the classroom. The teacher’s and students’ behavior is related with the classroom or pedagogical goals which are set in terms of interactional tasks. Also, the teacher is in charge or has the power to select what kind of lexical and linguistic functions are going to be used in the classroom talk.

            Conversation analysis is not related to conversation alone. It is mainly

concerned with describing all modes of functions of talk in interaction and other forms of

conduct such as body language, gesture, facial expressions, and so on, which can provide us a better understanding of the conversation and talk that is been developed into the classroom between teacher and student.

            The IRF/E is an initial identification of a classroom structure based on three patterns: solicit, response and react, it is a cycle which is achieved into the classroom, it means that the teacher is the first one who solicits the person who starts to talk and wait for an answer or a response and of course it has a reaction. Although, in this kind of interaction the repair is observed when the talkers deal with the communication problems. It means that teacher treat and mage the emerging talk gaps. As Seedhouse explain the use of trajectories that students and teacher use in order to solve the problems communication, for example, when the student makes a mistake and corrects it himself, when the speaker identify the mistake and initiates repair it and his counterpart repairs it. With this study, we could observe that the teacher is always the center of the classroom.

Lorena Fuya