From Arguables to Learnables: Interactional Management of Extended Disagreements in an L2 Teacher Education Classroom

Pre-service language teacher education classroom interaction serves as a prolific space for prospective teachers to study and practice language learning/teaching theories and methods and to construct disciplinary knowledge. Uncovering the interactional organization of extended arguments in such classroom settings may help better understand their affordances and inform teacher education professionals. However, there is a scarcity of research looking into L2 teacher education classroom interaction with a particular focus on classroom arguable sequences where extended disagreements emerge. Using multimodal conversation analysis to examine 19.5h of video-recorded classroom interaction in a second language (L2) teacher education methodology course over a semester, this study investigates the interactional practices a teacher educator employs for the management of arguable sequences emerging from various topics. The analysis highlights three interactional practices found in such arguable sequences: (a) reformulating a student's utterance, (b) agreement-prefaced disagreements, and (c) invoking sources of expert knowledge, which are used by the teacher educator to bring the arguable sequence to closure by eliciting agreement from opposing parties or ceasing any further opposition. These practices not only seem to facilitate successful management of the disciplinary talk between two or more students and/or the teacher educator but also foster emerging pedagogical foci to be negotiated in a shared space with all the participants through orientations to disagreement materials as learnables. This study offers pedagogical implications for language teacher education classroom interaction and contributes to the L2 teacher education literature.