Fantasy vs Reality : A comparison of recommendations for classroom practice and conversation-analytic findings

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Authors

TŮMA František FOŘTOVÁ Nicola Catherine

Year of publication 2021
Type Appeared in Conference without Proceedings
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Arts

Citation
Description Our research project comprised an analysis of how learners and teachers interact in EFL classes. We video- and audio-recorded 18 EFL lessons (multiple video cameras and voice recorders were used) in five different upper-secondary schools in Brno (Czech Republic) and used conversation analysis to uncover the practices used by the teachers and the learners. In this paper we focus on the step beyond the detailed descriptions of the interactional practices and we ask: how are these findings relevant to language teachers and teaching? In particular, we focused on literature intended for teachers (handbooks, journal articles and popular websites) and extracted the passages on errors and error correction, use of the L1 as well as group- and pair-work. By comparing our research findings with the considerations and recommendations that we found in the literature, we identified discrepancies in some of the aforementioned areas, which we will discuss in more detail by bringing evidence from our data and other studies. We conclude that in some areas the actual classroom processes are not reflected in the literature and we will show how conversation-analytic research can help bridge this gap. At the end of our presentation we will briefly outline how students in teacher education programmes can work with some conversation-analytic techniques and findings to better understand the complexity of real classroom episodes.
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