‘BEING THE TEACHER’: IDENTITY AND CLASSROOM CONVERSATION

‘BEING THE TEACHER’: IDENTITY AND CLASSROOM CONVERSATION

Taking into account this reading about identity and classroom conversation between teacher and students, as we know in the language classes, the teacher is who has control in the context of communicative language teaching and the students just follow the rules of the teacher and they follow him/her through questions that the teacher is doing at the moment, providing them a communicative context, in this sense, the language learners need to be exposed to a variety of interactional types not only related to the teacher’s questions where the teacher already knows the answer, in other words, with this action we can still observe the teacher’s control in the classroom.

The initiation response-follow up or feedback (IRF) is a common factor that we as teachers can observe within the classroom because we as teachers start the class maybe through a question expecting that one student in a voluntary way answering it and then, the teacher is going to give him/her feedback about the answer that was given by the student, in this part it is evident that the power or the control interaction is on the teacher who decides what kind of question is presented to the students and sometimes what student is going to answer it.

Another the aspect of IRF is that the teacher can give it another use, it means that IRF can be used to promote the participation and interaction among students, so the teacher can start asking questions not to evaluate but to promote participation through request justifications or counterarguments where allow the student to self-select in making his or her contributions.

According to Seedhouse highlight a challenge to the analyst of classroom discourse, especially on language lesson making a deal with the relationship between official and of the record business, and the other hand, Van Dam Van focuses on the relationship between the lesson proper and other business where he shows through an example when the class is interrupted by a wasp and the students takes it as a lesson break where the teacher is part of that saying that they have to have a time out but at the same time remembering to the students that there is still a lesson frame in force. For example, when the teacher is talking to the students and e permits that students go beyond the limits and the the teacher thinks that it is ok until a certain point because the teacher has still the power and he can decide until what point the students can go or not. It means that the teacher still has control of the classroom.

The analysis in the classroom talk has as principles the teacher and students in order to analyze what is the teacher and student achievement taking into account the social context where he oriented to identities provide proximally context and the distal context, in other words, the first one is related to turn by turn orientation to developing sequences of action at the interactional level and the second one is more oriented to extra situational where it develops the sequence of interaction.

Zimmerman propose three aspects of identity, the first one is related to the discourse identity in which it is an integral moment by moment organization of the interaction and shows how the participants get involve and engage as the current speaker, listener, questioner, and so on; second, is the situated the identity which refers to the contribution of participants engaging them into activities in the classroom where the situated identities would be the teacher and stunts, and finally transportable identity, it refers to the identities that are usually visible.

The teacher demonstrates that he is the only one who controls everything by asking questions, issues instructions, evaluate, and so on, while the students are just addressing the responses to the teacher. So, it is kind of complex interplay the personal and technical in the process of language teaching, therefore, we need to find ways to understanding the construction of talk through exploring the social knowledge in the classroom, however, in the classroom interaction is very important the relationship between discourse features and aspects of personal and institutional identity.

Lorena Fuya