This presentation will report on a project we have been implementing at Universidad Austral since 2010 in the Anglophone Literature and Culture courses of our English as a Foreign Language teacher training programme. In groups, students carry out simulated co-teaching sessions with their peers in which they test activities to teach English using the Literary pieces taught in the course as authentic materials. We are now incorporating a worksop on Classroom Interactional Competence and the SETT framework (Walsh, 2011) in order to tackle our trainees' most common interactional difficulties when leading the sessions.
English teacher training in Chile is undergoing major transformations as programmes are put under a microscopic lens through nation-wide standardised tests and strict accreditation processes. Before 2019, the ELT training programme at Universidad Austral de Chile did not include early instances in which trainees accessed real classrooms, thus, co-teaching practice sessions were introduced in the Literature modules. In couples or trios, students designed and applied a 60-minute-micro-lesson based on one of the literary pieces of work covered (Lazar 1993; Duff & Maley 2007; Paran 2006). This paper provides an overview on the project and describes one of the most common interactional difficulties we have identified with regards to trainees' Classroom Interactional Competence: providing instructions when teaching in pairs of groups of 3. Trainees present difficulties when coordinating actions among students when 'doing being the teachers', we will report on two cases that exemplify this and will also report on students' use of gestures when doing classroom management.
Data consists of 16 co-teaching sessions (two semesters) of Anglophone Literature and Culture courses at the training programme. Teaching sessions are being analysed through a multimodal CA approach (SSJ 1974; Mondada 2016) to identify trainees' embodied practices. We have been applying the. SETT framework to identify classroom modes and trainees' use of the different interactional features. Our preliminary results show that pre-service teachers make full use of the interactional features in the managerial mode, whereas in the classroom context mode, some of them make little use of practices to provide interactional space (initiating self-repair or doing scaffolding). Trainees at this early stage orient more to getting their class done, than providing feedback to their students. However, during the post-session workshops they showed great interest in reflexive practices and increased use of metalanguage and critical self-evaluation (Walsh 2006). This study highlights the need for early training on interactional and instructional practices in the language classrooms and showcases an instance through which we have allowed trainees to teach through literature and culture while also enhancing their reflexive practices.
