Abstract Summary
The paper provides a micro-analytical perspective of classroom management in EFL classrooms. It demonstrates that, by understanding classroom management as an on-going accomplishment by teachers and pupils and not as a pre-analytical concept, the focus of research and teacher training can shift from a deficiency-orientated perspective towards a competence-oriented approach.
Abstract :
Strategies for successful classroom management have been readily available to current practitioners for at least half a century (e.g. Kounin 1970). However, despite the large body of knowledge available there appears to be a great deal of scope for further research in terms of developing a more detailed understanding of classroom management practices (e.g. Svahn 2017). In addition, recent findings suggest that the implementation of classroom management strategies is often ineffectual (e.g. Hagermoser Sanetti et al. 2018). Therefore, the detailed insights micro-analytical investigations can offer are increasingly important in classroom interaction in general and in the language classroom in particular (e.g. Ishino 2017).
Drawing on a corpus of 58 hours of video and audio recordings in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms in Lower Saxony, Germany, the paper therefore provides a micro-analytical perspective of classroom management. More specifically, it contributes to the body of current research by placing a focus on how teachers respond to pupils’ classroom norm violations (i.e. “parallel activities” Koole 2007), that is, those teachers’ actions that have been identified as critical component for successful teaching and learning (e.g. Emmer & Sarbornie 2015). Through a conversation analytic (CA) investigation of these social actions, the paper provides valuable insights into the details of the in-situ production of classroom management strategies and their underlying interactional mechanisms.
It demonstrates that, by understanding classroom management as an on-going accomplishment by teachers and pupils and not as a pre-analytical concept, the focus of research and teacher training can shift from a deficiency-orientated perspective towards a competence-oriented approach. Therefore, classroom management can be regarded as a component of teachers’ interactional competences and related strategies as “objects already in hand, visible, and perhaps teachable” (Macbeth 1994: 151). This has important implications for L2 classroom research and teacher training.
