Pre-service teachers’ perceptions and strategic use of teacher-talk in multilingual classrooms

Abstract

Teacher-talk is the purposive use of language for the development of co-operative learning-centred environments. Does the pre-service Intermediate Phase teachers’ use of teacher-talk manifest an understanding of its agentive and strategic pedagogic function? The language development responsibilities of teachers in modern multilingual classrooms and the gap in literature indicated it was time to listen. Sociocultural/linguistic constructivist learning theory developed by Vygotsky, Bruner, Alexander and Mercer, with its emphasis on the pivotal roles language and the teacher in the mediation of learning formed the epistemological bedrock. The selected research design was a case study. Convenience stratified sampling was used. This study meaningfully contributed to an understanding of the pedagogic use of teacher-talk by its use of a novel predominantly qualitative post-positivistic approach within an Afrocentric methodology that allowed greater ethical and authentic participation of ten preservice students. Each participant audio recorded a complete lesson during their work integration learning and then described their teacher-talk using an analysis tool designed for this study. Questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were conducted to establish how participants’ perceptions of the nature and function of teacher-talk had been shaped. By narrating findings in experience vignettes, accessibility to data was ensured. This allowed participants their voice, in the spirit of Ubuntu, an ontological interdependency ideology peculiar to Africa. Graphs and figures were used to illustrate the data. Collated data were interrogated using elements of Corpus Linguistic/Conversation (CLCA) analysis methods. The findings revealed that the use of teacher-talk was dominated by the Initiation, Response & Feedback approach and was largely dependent on the weltanschauung of each participant. Usage of teacher-talk repertoires and interactures was indiscriminate and uninformed. This corroborated worldwide research but factors relevant to South Africa, namely the legacy of apartheid and the challenges of using English as language of learning and teaching were revealed. The study concluded that communicative expertise in teacher-talk should not be assumed. Student teachers’ understanding of the constitutive power of words and skill in aligning pedagogical goals with their teacher-talk need to be developed. The study concludes that if teachers could use strategic dialogic verbal exchanges that were positively agentive in the mini-contexts of each lesson, learning and Ubuntu humanism could prevail in post-colonial South African classrooms.