CAPÍTULO 2: Condiciones específicas del inmueble Honorato del Castillo No.2 Requisitos de diseño hacia
2.6. Premisas de diseño
2.6.1. Premisas por locales
As conversation analysis is a method used to study all types of talk and interaction,
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The interaction in L2 classrooms is addressed as the “organization of language
classroom interaction” by Seedhouse (2004). He claims that the first phase of
understanding interaction in L2 classrooms is to admit that there is a “core
institutional goal” which is that the teacher will teach the learners the L2 (original in
italics) (p. 183). This means, no matter how different the context, the individuals
taking part in the conversations and the pedagogical focus are, the core goal of the
interaction in language classrooms do not change unlike the settings in which
conversation analysis is used to analyse interaction. This uniqueness brings its own
features to the interaction in L2 classrooms presented as follows:
1. Language is both the vehicle and object of instruction (Long, 1983, p. 9).
2. There is a reflexive relationship between pedagogy and interaction, and
interactants constantly display their analyses of the evolving relationship
between pedagogy and interaction.
3. The linguistic forms and patterns of interaction which the learners produce
in the L2 are potentially subject to evaluation by the teacher in some way.
(Seedhouse, 2004, pp. 183-184)
The first feature stresses the fact that among the interactional situations, only in L2
classrooms is the language is used as both the “medium” and the “object”, or in
other words, “process” and the “product” (Seedhouse, 2004, p. 184). The second
feature deals with the reflexivity of the interaction according to the pedagogical
underpinnings of the lesson. Interaction evolves according to the pedagogical focus
and is flexibly exploited by both by the teacher and the students. Seedhouse (2004)
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interaction (task-in-process). In terms of this feature, my concern is to analyse the
focus on the task-in-process, which is the transformed interaction from the task-as-
workplan from the process and the relationship between the two. The third feature
relates to the claim that “everyone involved in language teaching and learning will
readily agree that evaluation and feedback are central to the process and progress of
language learning” (van Lier, 1988, p. 32). This claim, however, does not mean that
evaluation or giving feedback are necessarily a continuous action present in the
language classroom; they are “potential” results of teaching in language classroom
(Seedhouse, 2004). In my study, I do not mean to tag the interactions as ‘feedback’
or ‘evaluation’. Nevertheless, I believe it is an inevitable that I will come across
turns between the teachers and the students which will involve giving feedback and
evaluating, and one should be aware of these during the analysis to be more
conscious of the ‘interactional organization’ and ‘structure’ of the talk, which is a
prominent feature of conversational analytic approach.
In addition to the universal features of language classrooms and their potential
implications for conversation analysis, Seedhouse (2004) discusses a possible
sequence organization of interaction in language classrooms in three stages. Firstly,
a pedagogical focus is introduced and this introduction is generally initiated by the
teacher, though it might be initiated by the students as well. Secondly, there should
be at least two people relating to the pedagogical focus, or in other words the ‘task-
in-process’ as described by Seedhouse (2004). Lastly, the interaction among the
participants reveals their understanding of the pedagogical input and involves their
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other and generating a relationship between pedagogy and interaction. The relation
of the last stage of the possible sequence organization of interaction to my study is
the ‘possible’ display of the L2 performance of the students in the classroom and
more importantly, how this is understood by the students. As I am interested in
how code switching contributes to the interaction in L2 classroom, only paying
attention to the ‘display of the L2 performance’ of the students will not take me to
the impact of code switching on interaction; instead, I intend to examine examples
of switches by both teachers and students as a basis for exploring how the teachers
perceive this not only in the context of immediate pedagogic goals but also their
broader beliefs about its place in the broader pedagogic context.
As the discussion above reveals, conversation analysis is defined as “the study of
talk, at the most basic level” which aims to “study recorded, naturally occurring
talk-in-interaction” by Hutchby and Wooffitt (2008, pp. 11-12). However, they also
ask an important question; “What is the aim of studying these interactions?” (p. 12).
The literature reveals the following aims: to identify how participants in talk
exchange turns and in which interactional organizations they generate sequences
(Seedhouse, 2004; Hutchby and Wooffitt, 2008). Following this assumption, another
question emerges: why would a researcher use conversation analysis in their work?
Drawing on the discussions above, the reasons why I have chosen a broadly
conversation analytic approach to the understanding of my own classroom data can
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Conversation analysis operates closer to the phenomena (original in italics) than most other approaches, because it works on detailed renderings of
interactional activities, recording, and detailed transcripts, rather than on
coded, counted, or otherwise summarized representations.
Conversation analysis favours naturally occurring data rather than ‘experimental’ or ‘researcher provoked’ ones, because it considers talk-in-
interaction as a ‘situated’ achievement rather than as a product of personal
intentions ... it is therefore less ‘artificial’.
Conversation analysis perspective on human interaction is organizational
and procedural (original in italics): when people talk with each other this is
not seen as a series of individual acts, but rather as an emergent collectively
organized event; the analytic purpose is not to explain why people act as
they do, but rather to explicate how they do it (ten Have, 2007, p. 9).
In this study, I aim to understand how code switching relates to the talk in the
classroom and how it contributes to it. CA stands out the most appropriate method
to employ in this context. The first reason for that is CA’s approach to data. I do not
use coded or summarized sections from the data; on the contrary, I present detailed
transcripts of interaction and interpret them within the patterns of organization
which provides a foundation to understand the themes emerging from the
interviews and stimulated recall interviews. The close attention to detail required in
CA is helpful in terms of both transcription and attention to the development of the
talk. Although I do not provide a detailed analysis of classroom interaction in the
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the talk was constructed. Secondly, I do not rely on pre-determined patterns while
analysing the talk, on the contrary, I am interested to discover the role of code
switching in the talk. CA gives me the opportunity to analyse the selected
interaction extracts without having to rely on particular pre-determined
categorizations. CA forms the basis for the themes emerging from the analyses of
the individual and stimulated recall interviews in that, they emerge as a result of the
evidence of interaction that occurred in the classroom. In stimulated recall
interviews, student teachers discuss code switching events and the interaction
taking place in the classroom and these relevant events make sense within the
context of analyses employed by using CA. For instance, upon transcribing the
lessons I video-recorded, I particularly highlighted the instances of code switching
as that is my focus in terms of the interaction in the classroom. Without any pre-
determined themes or patterns in my mind, I re-watched and re-read the instances
embedded within the flow of the each lesson. Only after paying close attention to
those instances did I recognise that particular commonalities had started to emerge,
such as the extensive use of code switching while teaching grammar. At that point,
CA became a tool to understand how the interaction was shaped between student
teachers and their students in terms of student teachers’ code choice while
providing explanations of grammatical points and/or how they responded to the
questions they received from their students. Every occurrence of code switching and
the dynamics of the interaction differed from one another and therefore my
understanding of any classroom event depended on the exploration of in its own
terms. Inevitably, my understanding and interpretation of the events were limited
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obtained from the individual interviews and the stimulated recall interviews. Those
themes substantially filled the gap between my own interpretations of the
interactions and what student teachers actually experienced and thought. CA gave
me the freedom to analyse what had happened in the classroom and helped me to
construct a foundation for the future analysis points I gathered through the results
of the thematic analysis that I applied to the individual interviews and stimulated
recall interviews.
3.5. Interviews