Announcing
PhD in Second Language Studies Dissertation Defense
Josephine Lee
The Interactional Organization of Bilingual Co-teaching in South Korea
Chair: Gabriele Kasper
Wednesday November 5, 9:00 a.m.
Moore 258
Conversation Analysis (CA) studies on classroom discourse have uncovered intricate ways in which classroom talk is organized, demonstrating recurrently observed patterns and features of instructional activities (e.g., Hellermann & Pekarek Doehler, 2010; Lee, 2007; Markee, 2005). The scope of these studies expanded to include bilingual, multilingual, and foreign language learning contexts (e.g., Cekaite, 2007; Seedhouse, 2004), but it has mostly focused on typical classroom formations where only one teacher is present in the classroom.
Therefore, this dissertation examines an under-researched context of bilingual co-teaching wherein two teachers – an American and Korean teacher – concurrently use both English and Korean to carry out a content-based lesson. Guided by the theoretical and methodological framework of CA, this study takes interest in describing the interactional organization of co-taught lessons as well as the semiotic resources that teachers deploy to coordinate an integrated lesson. The first analysis chapter marks initiation-response-feedback (IRF) sequences in co-teaching with a distinct type of interactional structure wherein the co-teachers and students flexibly work around the affordances of IRF to manage their local classroom contingencies, coordinate student participation, and achieve the curricular focus of the lesson. The second analysis chapter focuses on the relevance of embodied conduct to unveil how the participants use language and bodily conduct to build temporally-unfolding frameworks of participation and construct socially available resources in their organization of L2 vocabulary instruction. In the third chapter of the analysis, the asymmetries that emerge from co-teacher interactions are investigated to gain a deeper understanding of their differentiated access to language, entitlement to remedy instruction, and authority to student discipline and classroom management. Lastly, the dissertation concludes with pedagogic implications that inform bilingual co-teaching practices in Korea.