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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Abbreviations
- BB:
-
board
- LL:
-
students/class
- T:
-
teacher
- TB:
-
textbook
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Conventions for Transcribing Embodied Conduct
Conventions for Transcribing Embodied Conduct
{((words))-words} | dash to indicate co-occurrence of nonverbal behavior and verbal elements; curly brackets to mark the beginning and ending of such co-occurrence when necessary |
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Waring, H.Z. (2021). Harnessing the Power of Heteroglossia: How to Multi-task with Teacher Talk. In: Kunitz, S., Markee, N., Sert, O. (eds) Classroom-based Conversation Analytic Research. Educational Linguistics, vol 46. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52193-6_14
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