A global reality that has had an impact on education and teacher education in Sweden is increased digitalization and its impact on practicum practice. Teacher educators and researchers have come up with solutions that enable digital observations of lessons that focus on micro-level details of classroom communication practices. This line of practice has been informed by investigations into the interactional dynamics of classroom discourse that portrayed aspects of teacher-learning and development (Walsh 2013; Gynne et al. 2022). Classroom interactions have increasingly been tied to the analyses of post-observation feedback encounters and dialogic reflection sessions, as these meetings are interactional events in which teachers can notice aspects of teaching and learning (Li 2019, Sert 2019). These investigations are also in line with the claim that teacher education and reflective practice should be data-led and evidence-based (Mann and Walsh 2017). Traditionally, videos have been used for reflection and feedback purposes, but other digital tools (e.g. mobile video-tagging and annotation tools) have been increasingly integrated into teacher education programmes to visualize feedback and observation practices (Çelik, Baran & Sert 2018; Hidson 2018; Sert 2019; Bozbıyık et al. 2021).

The visualized reflections have the potential to highlight how teachers interact with students in the lessons. Earlier studies argued that there is a link between the development of classroom interactional practices (i.e. Classroom Interactional Competence, Walsh 2011) and teacher development (e.g. Sert 2019; Walsh 2011, 2013; Waring 2011). Researchers argued that teachers should notice and reflect on aspects of classroom interaction, including types of questions asked, responding to and evaluating student answers, echoing and reformulating student utterances, managing multilingual repertoires, and the use of gestures and other visual resources (e.g. Seedhouse 2008; Sert 2015; Walsh 2011). Against this background, our study focuses on how student-teachers in pre-service teacher education in Sweden use a digital reflection tool together with a mentor and supervisor to focus on classroom interactional practices in practicum. The observation and reflection tool we used (Video Enhanced Observation) enables teachers and observers to tag and annotate classroom videos that can be reflected on immediately after lessons or retrospectively using a digital platform. Our initial, broad research question in this study was:

In what ways does a digitally-enhanced framework create affordances for reflection and feedback on classroom interaction practices?

We aimed at tracking classroom teaching, dialogic reflections, and portfolios of student teachers to show aspects of interactional development over time. To take a longitudinal approach to our data to investigate development over time, we also asked the following research question:

In what ways does a digitally-enhanced teacher education framework create affordances for change and development in interactional practices (over time)? 

To illustrate a case of development, for this presentation, we take a case study approach. In this particular study, we present a case study of a student-teacher’s change in classroom interaction practices as she engages in digitally-enhanced reflections and collaborative feedback during her practicum in Sweden. We specifically focus on an interactional practice that can be observed in many classrooms: teachers’ use of overt negative evaluation (i.e. “NO!”) that immediately follows learners’ incorrect answers. Using a bottom-up approach informed by conversation analysis (Sacks et al. 1974; Mondada 2018), we tracked the use of the focal interactional phenomenon across (1) video-recorded classroom observations, (2) audio-recorded triadic post observation feedback sessions, (3) student-teacher portfolios, and (4) interviews. Our discursive analysis shows that reflection and feedback with a mobile video-tagging tool can facilitate increased awareness of interactional practices.

Our broader project involved 10 different schools in five cities in Sweden, and we worked with 18 student-teachers, 15 mentor teachers and 6 university teachers. Our participants involve L2 English, Swedish, and Mathematics teachers and teacher candidates. For this presentation, as stated earlier, we focus on a case of a student-teacher. The focal student-teacher in this study was in her third year as a teacher candidate of English. She taught 2 lessons during her practicum, the first one of which has been observed by a university teacher who gave video-based feedback together with the school mentor after the lesson. The second lesson was observed by a peer student teacher, and this second lesson was also followed by a post observation feedback session, this time including the school mentor and the peer. During the observations, an observation tagset that includes a focus on student and teacher questions, elicitation, language choice, multimodality, teacher response patterns and evaluation was used. The method used to analyse the data in this study is Discursive Timeline Analysis (Sert 2020). Discursive timeline analysis draws on Conversation analysis (Sacks et al. 1974; Mondada 2018) which takes a bottom-up perspective to the analysis of interactional practices in institutional settings. CA was used to build collections of interactional phenomena that becomes of interest to the participants in the data (i.e. emic perspective). The student-teacher, mentor, and university teacher have focused on a phenomenon known as overt negative evaluation during the post observation feedback session. This phenomenon has been tracked as an emerging learning goal both longitudinally (Markee 2008) and retrospectively (Jakonen 2018) by the researchers across classroom video data, audio-recordings of post observation feedback sessions, reflective writings in student portfolios, and interviews (whenever the phenomenon under investigation is talked into being by the student-teacher). The data for the current study includes two 60-minute lessons, two (45 minute each) audio-recorded post observation feedback session, a 70-minute interview, written portfolio and ethnographic field notes. Consents from each teacher and students have been gathered prior to data collection and GDPR rules as well as ethical research guidelines of the Swedish research Council (2017) have been followed strictly. Participation was voluntary and the participants were informed that their participation can be withdrawn upon request.

Our analysis shows that reflection and feedback with a mobile video-tagging tool can facilitate increased awareness of interactional practices. Furthermore, we demonstrate that visual evidence-based reflection and feedback can transform classroom interaction practices (in this case, a teacher’s evaluation of student answers) over time, evidenced through micro-analysis of classroom interactions and reflections of the focal student-teacher. Our conversation analysis of the lessons taught by the student-teacher demonstrated that overt negative evaluation is not used by the student-teacher after noticing it in classroom interaction and getting systematic feedback based on the visual data. She used other response strategies and overt negative evaluation has not been used in the second lesson. The move from “teacher language awareness” (Walsh 2003) to “classroom interactional competence” (Walsh 2011) of the teacher has been tracked through her numerous reflections on this interactional phenomenon even after 6 months in interviews. We demonstrate that visual evidence-based reflection and feedback can transform classroom interaction practices (in this case, teacher’s evaluation of student answers) over time, evidenced through micro-analysis of classroom interactions and reflections of the focal student-teacher. It is clear that an empirical focus on specific aspects of classroom interaction (e.g. evaluating student responses, corrective feedback, teacher questions) in teacher education and development research will inform future mentoring practices. We argue that digitally-enhanced reflections should be adopted especially in pre-service teacher education programmes, since visualized reflections and feedback have the power to facilitate teacher-learning. Evidence based digital reflection tools can prepare student-teachers to the changing global realities.

Bozbıyık, M., Sert, O. & Dilek Bacanak, K. (2021). VEO-integrated IMDAT in pre-service language teacher education: A focus on change in teacher questioning practices. In Seedhouse, P. (ed.). Video Enhanced Observation for Language Teaching: Reflection and Professional Development (pp.97-116). Bloomsbury. Çelik, S., E. Baran and O. Sert (2018), ‘The Affordances of Mobile-app Supported Teacher Observations for Peer Feedback’, International Journal of Mobile and Blended Learning, 10 (2): 36–49. Gynne, A., Larsson, M. & Sert, O. (2022). Digitaliserad reflektion och lärares agerande i klassrumsinteraktion. In Nordin, A. &Uljens, M. (ed.), Didaktikens språk – om skolundervisningens mål, innehåll och form. Gleerups. Hidson, E. (2018). Video-enhanced lesson observation as a source of multiple modes of data for school leadership: A videographic approach. Management in Education, 32(1), 26-31. Jakonen, T. (2018). Retrospective orientation to learning activities and achievements as a resource in classroom interaction. The Modern Language Journal, 102(4), 758-774. Li, L. (2019). Language teacher cognition: A sociocultural perspective. Springer Nature. Mann, S. and S. Walsh (2017), Reflective Practice in English Language Teaching: Research- based Principles and Practices, Routledge. Markee, N. (2008), ‘Toward a learning behavior tracking methodology for CA–for–SLA’, Applied Linguistics, 29: 404–427. Mondada, L. (2018), ‘Multiple temporalities of language and body in interaction: challenges for transcribing multimodality’, Research on Language and Social Interaction, 51 (1): 85-106. Sacks, H., E. A. Schegloff, and G. Jefferson, (1974), ‘A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation’, Language, 50 (4): 696-735. Seedhouse, P. (2008), ‘Learning to talk the talk: Conversation analysis as a tool for induction of trainee teachers’, in S. Garton and K. Richards (eds), Professional Encounters in TESOL, 42-57, Palgrave Macmillan. Sert, O. (2015), Social Interaction and L2 Classroom Discourse, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sert, O. (2019). Classroom Interaction and Language Teacher Education. In S. Walsh & S. Mann (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of English Language Teacher Education (pp.216-238). Routledge. Sert, O. (2020). Conversation Analysis and Teacher Education. Invited lecture (webinar) delivered for “the Center for Research on English Language Learning and Teaching”, 23 October 2020, Penn State University, US. Swedish Research Council. (2017). Good Research Practice. Retrieved August 10, 2021, from: https://www.vr.se/english/analysis/reports/our-reports/2017-08-31-good-research-practice.html Walsh, S. (2011), Exploring Classroom Discourse: Language in Action, Routledge. Walsh, S. (2013). Classroom discourse and teacher development. Edinburgh University Press. Waring, H. Z. (2011), ‘Learner Initiatives and Learning Opportunities in the Language Classroom’, Classroom Discourse, 2 (2): 201–218.