Teacher-student interaction in one-on-one ESL writing conferences

Yoon, Jihye

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/95587 Copy

Description

Title

Teacher-student interaction in one-on-one ESL writing conferences

Author(s)

Yoon, Jihye

Issue Date

2016-12-01

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Koshik, Irene

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Koshik, Irene

Committee Member(s)

• Golato, Andrea
• Golato, Peter
• Hayashi, Makoto

Department of Study

Linguistics

Discipline

Linguistics

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• conversation analysis
• writing conference
• teacher-student interaction
• advice
• preference
• epistemic access
• epistemic responsibility
• epistemic primacy
• claim of insufficient knowledge

Abstract

With a conversation analytic approach, this study analyzes how teachers and students interact in one-on-one ESL writing conferences, focusing on the preference structure of advice-giving, epistemic displays, and teachers’ management of students’ no knowledge claims. This study analyzes the preference structure of advice-giving activities, and shows that advice-giving is performed as dispreferred. Characteristics of dispreferred actions, such as being delayed and mitigated, are observed in advice-giving turns in writing conferences. Advice-giving turns are delayed, often prefaced by compliments. Advice-giving is also accompanied by justifications and often mitigated. It is further shown how conditionals can be used to characterize dispreferred responses in this context. In addition, the problem-solving sequences, in which the advice-giving turns are included, are also produced as dispreferred, as they are delayed by compliments or other comments at the beginning of the conference. The next chapter analyzes the epistemics displayed by teachers and students in one-on-one ESL writing conferences. Recently, a lot of attention has been focused on the role of knowledge in conversations. This chapter aims to contribute to this line of discussion by investigating how teachers and students in one-on-one writing conferences display epistemic access, primacy and responsibility (Stivers, Mondada, & Steensig, 2011). Analysis shows that participants’ display of epistemic access is closely related to the participants’ orientation to their epistemic responsibility. I describe how participants display epistemic access and lack of epistemic access in two different sequential contexts, as an initiation and as a response. How teachers and students display their epistemic primacy is also explored in this study. I show that there can be a conflict over who has epistemic primacy in the interaction, even between a teacher and a student. This study also analyzes how teachers manage students’ no-knowledge-claims. In a one-on-one writing conference, the teacher cannot allocate the turn to another student when a student claims no knowledge. Rather, the teacher has to interact with the student to help him/her reach a knowing ([K+]) status. This study analyzes different contexts in which the teachers use follow-up questions and provide explanations to deal with students’ no-knowledge claims. It seems to be important for the teachers to use the appropriate tool, depending on the topic of the question and the teacher’s expectation for the student to be able to provide the answer after being given additional hints. This study first contributes to our understanding of preference structure, showing how advice-giving is dispreferred in one-on-one writing conferences. This study also provides additional evidence for the claim that preference structure is context-sensitive. The findings of this study also contribute to our understanding of how epistemic displays affect the interaction in an academic setting, suggesting that there is a close relation between participants’ display of epistemic access and epistemic responsibility. Lastly, this study has implications for writing pedagogy. This study provides examples of how teachers deal with students’ no-knowledge-claims, showing two tools used by teachers in this situation. This study also sheds light on how using compliments when giving advice can help the teachers to effectively point out the students’ writing problems. This study also has implications for the training of international teaching assistants or lecturers, as this study provides a microanalysis of the interaction between American teachers and international students in writing conferences.

Graduation Semester

2016-12

Type of Resource

text

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/95587

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2016 Jihye Yoon

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