Supporting talk? Partnership teachers in classroom interaction

Abstract

The literature on classroom discourse has too long constructed the classroom as a place of one teacher and many pupils. This paper challenges this view by investigating classroom discourse in two-teacher classrooms. Specifically, it presents a case study of an English as an additional language teacher and geography teacher working together in the geography classroom from a year-long ethnography. It draws on interview data and classroom transcripts to look at how the two teachers construct their roles and looks at how the two teachers' discourses differ in their interaction and negotiation with two individual bilingual students. The ethnographically informed discourse analysis shows the importance of balancing different kinds of pedagogic discourses within the classroom. Although discourses of facilitation and accessing are often viewed as secondary to the discourses of transmission, this paper shows the skills involved in teacher questioning and response in learning interactions.