Turn initiators in professional encounters
Teacher education discourse in an Irish University setting
This paper investigates some of the pragmatic considerations behind the use of
turn initiators within one specific Irish-English setting, that of teacher education.
During the course of their studies, student teachers have reason, and
are often obliged, to engage with professionals and peers as they are initiated
into their new community of practice (CoP) (Lave and Wenger 1991). Under
models of social constructivism (Vygotsky 1978) and progressive education,
this engagement has been increasingly conducted through the mode of spoken
language: face-to-face, and more recently, computer-mediated communication
(CMC) (Hanson-Smith 2006). This chapter examines pragmatic turn initiators
in a Teacher Education Discourse (TED) Corpus, consisting of spoken
and online language data from MA in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers
of Other Languages) students in an Irish university context. The variables of
speaker relationship, mode of communication and task orientation are explored
to determine their influence on the pragmatic functions at the beginning of
speaker turns.
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Cited by
Cited by 3 other publications
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