フィードバックによる学術的社会化―EAP授業における教師のポスト・パフォーマンスフィードバックの会話分析 Socializing Students into Academics Through Feedback—Conversation Analysis of Teacher’s Post-performance Feedback to EAP Classroom Presentation

Abstract

学術目的のための英語 (English for academic purposes: EAP) 授業を担当する教師は、アカデミック・プレゼンテーションなどでの学生のパフォーマンスに対して、どのようなフィードバックを与えることで学習者の学術世界への社会化を促進できるのか。この問いに具体的な回答を行うことでより良いEAP授業の実践に貢献することを本研究の目的とし、日本の２つの大学における185のEAP授業を撮影したビデオデータを対象に、エスノメソドロジー的会話分析を用いて分析を行った。結果、学生たちの不適切なパフォーマンスを再現し、そこからその問題源を体験させるという相互行為手続きを取ることによって、教師のポスト・パフォーマンスフィードバックは学生の学術世界への社会化を促す媒介となる、ということが分かった。EAP授業において教師は、学術世界での専門家として学生のパフォーマンスの問題とその問題を見極めることができる能力、さらにその専門家としての見方を体験させられる相互行為能力が必要である。 In classes such as English for Academic Purposes (EAP) wherein the pedagogical focus is on knowledge and competence required in academic settings such as academic presentation, what kind of feedback should teachers give to students about their performance to socialize them into becoming academics? Studies investigating students’ perceptions about the teacher’s post-performance feedback support the necessity of the dialogical process for students to understand the teacher’s feedback and to utilize it for their next performance. However, very few studies in the context of higher education have been conducted to examine what constitutes effective dialogic feedback, or how teachers and students actually achieve a mutual understanding of the point of feedback in classroom interaction. Meanwhile, ethnomethodological conversation analytic (EMCA) research on instruction from a professional to a novice member of a community explicated the interactional process on how the point of a teacher’s post-performance feedback is understood. The interactional feedback practices performed by the professionals such as a senior archeologist or a master of Japanese calligraphy described in those EMCA studies indicate that a professional’s post-performance feedback can develop a member’s competence necessary for his or her socialization into a particular domain of cultural activity. EAP is aimed at socializing students into the culture of academic research (de Chazal, 2014). So, appropriating the EMCA perspective of instruction from professional to novice in a community to investigate teacher’s post-performance feedback in the EAP classroom will give insight into what and how teachers should give feedback to students about their performance. Therefore, the aim of this study is to explicate teachers’ post-performance feedback practices given for students’ academic presentations in EAP classrooms through the microanalysis of actual EAP classroom feedback practices from an EMCA perspective. The data used for this study were based on the video corpus of 185 post-performance feedback interactions in EAP classrooms of a national university and a private university in Japan. Microanalyses of teacher feedback on student presentations in EAP classes at Japanese universities suggested that making the students personally experience the trouble source of their presentations makes the teacher’s feedback a catalyst in the academic socialization of the students. In the case where the trouble source of a student’s problem in his presentation was his or her lack of understanding of the audience’s perspective, the physical representability of the audience viewpoint allowed the teacher to reenact how she and the audience found the problem and its cause. The teacher’s feedback was composed of replaying the problem, switching the student’s perspective from that of the presenter to the audience, collecting the actual audience’s agreement to her interpretation, and showing the exchange between her and the audience member to the target student. Through the step-by-step feedback practice to make the target student personally experience the trouble-source, the teacher put the student into a sequential position where he or she was normatively required to display how the demonstrated issue was treated. The real challenge is how to make the trouble source of the students’ mistakes evident when it is about an abstract idea, such as a lack of understanding about why a clear statement of the purpose is essential to a presentation. In such a case, the teacher’s feedback practice involves students in a type of puzzle-solution sequence. First, the teacher presents out-of-context talk to the students to make them confused; after the talk, the teacher enacts what the confused students might have thought while they were told an out-of-context talk and this works as a solution to the puzzle. The puzzle-solution sequence is a way of making experientially accessible to the students the importance of abstract norms such as making the aim of the presentation explicit. The lived experience becomes a catalyst for students’ academic socialization by constructing a link between the goal behavior (i.e., correct performance) and the students, who had lacked the insight into the importance of the goal behavior, which was the trouble source of the issue with their presentations. The findings of this study further show that the analytic method used in this study, EMCA, is a promising way of representing the effective interactional feedback practices in detail. Of course, the results of this study do not represent the entirety of post-performance feedback practices used by teachers engaged in EAP classrooms. Future studies should examine a variety of teachers’ post-performance feedback practices in EAP or ESP (English for Specific Purposes) classrooms so that a knowledge base of pedagogically meaningful feedback practices is developed and made available for the language teachers today to rely on when they teach classes where the educational focus is not only the linguistic aspects of the target language, but the content or academic/professional competencies.