Simay Birce Cirit is a PhD candidate and research assistant at the Graduate School INTERFACH, which is a cooperation between University of Kassel and Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg (Germany). Her research interests include interaction and classroom talk in linguistically diverse classses, language-sensitive subject teaching.
Interactional Adjustment Practices of Teachers in Linguistically Diverse Mathematics Classes
To enable learners to benefit more from classroom talk in linguistically diverse settings, teachers face the need to respond to “social, linguistic, cultural, and instructional needs” of learners (Parsons et al. 2018). However, most studies in the literature focus on adjustments on the design-level of teaching and little is known about how teachers make adjustments according to learners´ “in-the-moment contributions” (Boyd 2012). This study set out to investigate teachers´ interactional adjustment practices in classroom talk with a specific focus on so-called divergences in teacher-learner interaction. Divergence is defined in this study as the discrepancy between teachers´ verbal demands in classroom talk and learners´ answers.
The study employs an exploratory qualitative study design with „theory-informing inductive data analysis design„ (Varpio et al. 2020). Data collection was accomplished with video-based classroom observations from the INTERFACH video study. Conversation analysis and joint-action theory in didactics framework are used for the data analysis. Preliminary results indicate seven common interactional adjustment practices among teachers: changing the right to speak, using new modalities, refocusing, rephrasing, shifting register, giving hints, encouragement. These adjustment practices appear in the domains of content, language, communicative/ interactional organization.