Studying and Reflecting on (Subject-)Teaching.

The Contribution of In-teraction Analysis for Professionalizing Teachers in Education

Abstract

In classrooms, language is the most essential feature for conveying knowledge. Thereby, oral communication is often the first medium in which learning and school-related socialization processes take place. Yet, classroom in-teraction differs from interaction in everyday life in many ways. In addition, it is very complex: various processes need to be managed simultaneously by partici-pating in teaching and learning discourses. From this point of view, research-based learning in the “Praxissemester” means acknowledging and deliberating upon teaching classes as a special form of communication. This might be achieved by providing university students with a suitable research method for an-alyzing videotaped, authentic learning lessons. While investigating these data by a Conversation Analysis inspired approach, students are enabled to reduce the complexity of teaching situations by focusing only certain, observable features of teacher-pupil-interactions. Thus, classroom interaction can be “dissected” in a micro-analytical way. Furthermore, this method can be helpful for taking subject-specific, didactic aspects into account by examining, how these contents are taught in a certain situation. Therefore, it is important to consider as well how both, teachers and children, collaborate on organizing the learning process and in-teractively negotiate meanings of the subject-matter. The conversation-analytical paradigm to refrain from normative evaluations, can particularly contribute to professionalizing prospective teachers by guiding them to explore “authentic teaching and learning reality” from a descriptive viewpoint. Thus, students are encouraged to reflect (critically) upon foreign or own teaching and communica-tion practices. By demonstrating the methodological principles of conversation analysis based on an example of a single sequence drawn from an orthography lesson in primary school, this paper suggests to include interaction analytical re-search approaches into classes of all subjects concerned with professionalizing students in the “Praxissemester” and aims at highlighting its opportunities for re-search-based learning.