Seeing and noticing: L2 Teachers’ first steps in developing classroom interactional competence

Studies on classroom interaction conducted from a conversation analytical (CA) perspective offer high potential for the field of foreign language teaching and learningas has been increasingly recognized over the past decade. Meanwhile, a significant amount of scholarship has provided powerful insights into how L2 classroom interaction is orchestrated, and this research can in turn be translated into useful proposals for teacher education. However, instances of CA-informed pre- and in-service teacher training frameworks (as those reported by Schwab 2014, Sert 2005, Walsh 2003, 2006) are scarce and thus, there are still many open questions concerning the implementation of CA in L2 teacher education and specifically on languages other than English. This paper reports on a Spanish as a Foreign Language teacher training university course. Working within an action research framework, the course draws on classroom recordings, video-tagging tools (Haines/Miller 2017) and data-led reflection (Mann/Walsh 2013, 2017) in order to raise the interactional awareness and the L2 classroom interactional competence of the participants. The data comprises participants’ instances of teacher-led classroom discourse during a four-week school-based internship and the reflections and opinions expressed both in writing assignments as well as in the qualitative interviews conducted after the conclusion of the academic program. By bridging two perspectives – microanalytical description of classroom interaction and teacher reflections – as proposed by Lazaraton/Ishiara (2005) and Sert (2019), the study aims to compound a rich picture of prospective teachers’ actual and experienced benefits and challenges of taking part in a CA-informed teacher training.