Waring2020c

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Waring2020c
BibType INCOLLECTION
Key Waring2020c
Author(s) Hansun Zhang Waring
Title Harnessing the power of heteroglossia: How to multitask with teacher talk
Editor(s) Silvia Kunitz, Olcay Sert, Numa Markee
Tag(s) EMCA, classroom interaction, heteroglossia, multiple demands, evidence-based teacher training, multitasking
Publisher Springer
Year 2021
Language English
City
Month
Journal
Volume
Number
Pages 281–301
URL Link
DOI
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title Classroom-based Conversation Analytic Research
Chapter

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Abstract

To a large extent, the quality of classroom communication hinges on the teacher’s ability to tune in and respond to emerging students’ voices, which requires the astuteness and agility to hear layered messages, offer tailored assistance, and follow students’ leads. It requires responding to multiple contingencies in real time. One important resource for managing such contingencies is heteroglossia (Bakhtin MM, The dialogical imagination. The University of Texas Press, Austin, 1981, p 324). Teacher talk can be deeply heteroglossic: a particular utterance can be saturated with more than one voice or can achieve more than one goal, making evident the multiple and potentially competing demands that teachers manage on a moment-by-moment basis. In this chapter, I illustrate what heteroglossia looks like in the language classroom and demonstrate how understanding heteroglossia as teacher talk can be usefully marshaled to create evidence-based teacher training. Throughout the chapter, problem scenarios that place the teacher in the difficult bind of having to manage competing demands such as honoring individual voices vs. cultivating inclusiveness are presented. Detailed transcripts of classroom interaction are then shown to demonstrate how heteroglossia can present at least one solution to these problems. A guided reading of each transcript will highlight the specific interactional resources that may be drawn upon to effectively produce heteroglossia. The chapter ends with a step-by-step plan for utilizing similar videotaped materials for teacher training purposes. It is hoped that understanding heteroglossia as a resource can awaken us to the ingenuity of teacher talk, and consequently, inspire us to become part of that ingenuity.

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