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This study aims to explore the communicative features of teacher talk in English for General Purposes (EGP) vs. English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classes in Iranian contexts based on the Self-Evaluation Teacher Talk (SETT) framework.

For the purposes of this study, EAP and EGP classes run by three language instructors and three content instructors were observed and interviews with teacher participants were conducted. The data were analyzed by content analysis, and emerging overarching themes were recorded.

The findings of this study indicate that the translation of texts into Persian was the dominant theme in classes run by content instructors who were less aware of the communicative features of teacher talk. However, one of the content instructors who was familiar with the communicative features of teacher talk as well as general language instructors were found to be highly aware of the potential of their teacher talk to encourage communication in his classes. The innovative and communicative features in the language/content instructor suggest the importance of teacher agency in bringing change in education at the micro-level. This study has implications for various agencies involved in teaching EAP, EGAP and English for Specific Purposes (ESAP), raising awareness regarding the communicative features of teacher talk as a driving force leading learners and teachers to more communicative opportunities in language classrooms. The findings suggest that teacher talk is an essential component of classroom discourse, shaping students' linguistic and academic development, and that teacher agency is crucial in promoting communicative opportunities in language education. To boost communication, the authors recommend translanguaging with a focus on both communication and optimal use of the mother tongue in EAP classes.

There is little empirical evidence on the communicative aspects of teacher talk in higher education. This study can inspire more parallel research on EAP settings in higher education with a focus on communication and teacher talk features.

This paper discusses findings from a four-year research and development project using lesson study in a Norwegian elementary school. There are only a limited number of studies which have investigated how talk mediates teacher learning in lesson study, whereas research has shown that the form communication takes is the key to whether or not collaboration leads to learning. Focus in this paper is therefore on the talk which takes place in teacher teams when they meet to plan the research lesson in lesson study. The article explores sequences of talk that afford opportunities for teacher learning in order to understand what triggers and characterizes these opportunities.

Data consisted of audio recordings of four teacher teams made during planning meetings. Based on theoretical criteria, sequences of teacher talk which indicated potential for learning were selected for further analyses. These sequences were then coded with respect to what themes triggered this talk and what conversional routines were found.

The most frequent trigger of talk affording opportunities for learning was in relation to students and more specifically different needs of individual or subgroups of students. Didactic and purely curriculum-focussed issues triggered this kind of talk to a small degree. Conversional routines in the selected sequences concerned (1) taking a student perspective, (2) discussing impact on student learning behaviour and (3) generalizing (moving from specific accounts of classroom practice to general reflection on one's own practice).

This study aims to investigate what triggers and characterizes talk with learning potential in the lesson study work of teacher teams.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the extent of systematic examination of students’ educational (support) needs by teachers participating in lesson study (LS) meetings within a framework of formative assessment (FA).

The study took place in the context of upper preparatory vocational education in the Netherlands. The learning trajectory of two LS teams was examined qualitatively, using the framework of FA to analyze teachers’ explorative talk during LS-meetings. The sample included Dutch language teachers and mathematics teachers.

Findings revealed how the process of FA was intertwined with the LS process. Systematic examination of teaching practice was partly identified, however, FA was frequently inadequately applied. Teachers tended to rush into talk about pedagogics, instead of identification of goals and students’ educational (support) needs. In total, 12 characteristics of teacher talk were related to the extent to which FA was applied.

The findings of this study suggest that guidance and support during LS-meetings is desirable for systematic practices during LS-meetings and this guidance and support should adapt to specific weaknesses and strengths of a LS team.

This study builds on previous findings suggesting that a systematic approach is important for teachers during LS-meetings. The findings provide a starting point for realizing the potential of LS in preparatory vocational education, by revealing potential pitfalls of systematic practice during LS-meetings. Moreover, this study presents a framework of FA as a potential tool in facilitating a systematic practice of LS.

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on teachers’ attention to student learning in post-lesson discussions in Lesson Study (LS) by exploring the depth and analytic stance of noticing (van Es, 2011) and by identifying interactions that may extend or narrow the levels of noticing.

The study has dug deeply into post-lesson discussions in the context of two different LS groups at a Norwegian lower secondary school.

The paper provides empirical insights about crucial elements of teachers’ learning processes pertaining to their professional noticing. Sharing of rich descriptions of evidence of student learning appeared to be a necessary foundation for the deepening of the teacher groups’ analytic approach. The study highlights the importance of teacher groups’ openness and attention to the collected data and a shared willingness to go deep into the interpretations. Interthinking and exploratory talk (Littleton and Mercer, 2013) are emphasised as important social interaction and talk modes to deepen the analytic stance and depth of noticing.

Even though this is a small study, it brings to light important knowledge about how interactions in post-research lesson discussions in LS can influence teachers’ professional noticing.

An implication of the study is to design observation forms that capture student learning as tools for teachers’ professional noticing.

This paper fulfils an identified need to investigate teachers’ learning processes in LS, including how interactions within a teacher group influence noticing.

The authors explain their approach to teaching literatura infantil (children’s literature) in Spanish to bilingual teachers pursuing their master’s degree in bilingual education at a university in South Texas. In this Self-Study of Teacher Education Practice (S-STEP) research, the authors investigated how teachers can transform their practice and come to value their students’ abilities to interpret literature. They engaged the teachers in projects using quality children’s literature. The projects were carried out by graduate inservice teachers teaching Spanish/English bilingual students studying at different grade levels. Some teachers taught along the Texas/Mexico border and others taught in a large metropolitan school district in central Texas. The authors used their analysis of the inservice teachers’ projects as data to inform their own practice as teacher educators. In the first project, the bilingual teachers engaged their students in exploratory talk that allowed them to bring their backgrounds and experiences into discussions of what they read. The second project challenged the teachers to consider the importance of the images in high-quality illustrated children’s books. The teachers asked their students to read the images and expand their understanding of the books by considering more than the words in the texts. In the final project, the teachers guided their students through Ada’s stages of creative dialogue using children’s literature. The authors describe the projects in detail and give examples from four different teachers showing what they learned about teaching children’s literature and how they changed their perspectives about what their emergent bilingual students could do. Although only four teachers are highlighted, they are representative of students taking the course and engaging in the projects over three different semesters.

To explore annotated video-based portfolios and the communicative practices embedded in this technological mediation as a means for teacher candidates to construct pedagogical knowledge and develop self-examination skills leading to a deeper reflection on practice, greater perceived value of the reflection process, and the ability to identify specific behaviors for improvement.

In this chapter, we present the development of an online graduate practicum course in a Masters in Reading program, and the supportive measures put into place so students could reflect on their own and others’ practice within a video-based portfolio construction.

Observations indicate course members’ discussion regarding teaching follows a clear progression: the importance of teachers’ management of materials, space and time; developing their ability to discern patterns in student behavior; and a growing recognition of the impact teacher talk and habits have on their students. To support practicum students’ progress, we have developed a set of assumptions to guide talk about practice during annotation and discussion of video, as well as ways of using talk effectively during a video lesson.

We share this glimpse into the design of our practicum course as a means to make transparent the support systems developed so students could capture and discuss quality practice within the context of their own work with a student. We hope sharing our journey will provide others engaged in this work with a common language and lens for discussion about quality, resulting in positive outcomes for students.

The purpose of this study is to examine how dialogic spaces were co-constituted (opened, broadened and deepened) between students engaged in divergent and convergent collaborative learning tasks, orchestrated by teachers in Finnish primary and secondary schools. The concept of dialogic space refers to a dynamic, shared resource of ideas in dialogue and has come to represent an ideal form of educational interaction, in the contexts of collaborative learning, joint creative work and shared knowledge-building.

A socio-cultural discourse analysis of video-observed classroom dialogue, entailing the development of a new analytic typology, was undertaken to explore the co-constitution of dialogic space. The data are derived from two qualitative studies, one examining dialogue to co-create fictive video stories in primary-school classrooms (divergent task), the other investigating collaborative knowledge building in secondary-school health education (convergent task).

Dialogic spaces were opened through group settings and by the students’ selection of topics. In the divergent task, the broadening of dialogic space derived from the heterogeneous group settings, whereas in the convergent task, from the multiple and various information sources involved. As regards the deepening of dialogic space, explicit reflective talk remained scarce; instead the norms deriving from the school-context tasks and requirements guided the group dialogue.

This study lays the groundwork for subsequent research regarding the orchestration of dialogic space in divergent and convergent tasks by offering a typology to operationalise dialogic space for further, more systematic, comparisons and aiding the understandings of the processes implicated in intercreating and interthinking. This in turn is of significance for the development of dialogic pedagogies.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether race-specific language use can advance organizational learning about the racialized nature of school problems. The study addressed two questions: first, is teacher use of racial language associated with how they frame school discipline problems during conversational exchanges? Second, what do patterns of associations suggest about racial language use as an asset that may influence an organization’s ability to analyze discipline problems?

Co-occurrence analysis was used to explore patterns between racial language use and problem analysis during team conversational exchanges regarding school discipline problems.

When participants used race-specific and race-proxy language, they identified more problems and drew on multiple frames to describe school discipline problems.

This paper substantiates that race-specific language is beneficial for organizational learning.

The findings suggest that leading language communities may be an integral, yet overlooked lever for organizational learning and improvement. Prioritizing actions that promote race-specific conversations among school teams can reveal racism/racial conflict and subsequently increase the potential for change.

This paper combines organizational change and race talk research to highlight the importance of professional talk routines in organizational learning.

This research explores the impact of the locally grown strategies for learning support, as a positive deviance (PD) study, during the COVID-19 pandemic in rural Uganda.

The researchers employed a randomized control trial (RCT) as an original design whereby 50 schools received a full package of SMS and WhatsApp peer groups of head teachers, 50 schools received SMS only and another 50 served as a control group. As an analytical method, this study adopted a difference-in-difference (DID) model to analyze the impact of the radio talk shows promoted through SMS followed by discussion among WhatsApp peer groups. The data collected in June 2021 and February 2022 were used due to the COVID-19-related data limitation of the baseline survey collected in 2019.

The authors found that the local radio talk shows as a PD intervention had a humble impact on preventing pupils’ dropout during the school closures for two years in Uganda. However, the authors did not obtain a significant result on the impact of the PD intervention on pedagogical support or learning outcomes at the school level. The authors also found that the pupils have significantly dropped their level of proficiencies in literacy and numeracy during the pandemic.

The findings could be of value for the leaders, educators and policymakers to understand the most recent update of learning situation in Uganda and the potential impact of locally grown strategies for learning which does not require external inputs.

Learning to teach effectively is a complex enterprise, and many efforts have been made in order to conceptualise the challenging work of teaching by identifying fundamental teaching practices. Findings reported from structured literature reviews on lesson study have revealed that incorporating a lesson study approach in Initial Teacher Education is challenging. This chapter considers how lesson study might adapt fundamental teaching practices and make use of new tools to enhance lesson study as an approach for improving student-teachers’ teaching practice. The four tools discussed here are lesson study with given activities, practicing talk moves in lesson study, rehearsing research lessons and research lessons with time-outs. The authors argue that these activities are tools which can help student-teachers enhance their learning of the complex work of teaching when involved in lesson study cycles. To illustrate these approaches, we use examples from the teaching of mathematics.