Teacher epistemic stance as a trouble in foreign language classroom interaction

Abstract

In foreign language learning, students are commonly encouraged to share their experiences, opinions and beliefs. Such actions position the teacher as an interactant with no access to this knowledge unless the student makes it publicly available. At the same time, it is normatively expected that teachers have primary access to knowledge related to their responsibilities as language experts. Such contextual constraints shape classroom interaction within which moments of epistemic incongruence may arise as, for example, when an epistemic stance is not in line with the assumed epistemic status. Taking a conversation analytic approach, this study aims to investigate teacher epistemic stance as a source of trouble that emerges during episodes of meaning-and-fluency foreign language classroom interaction. The analysis reveals that incongruent teacher epistemic stance unfolds in two ways: 1) when students have initiated a word-search that must be repaired by the teacher, and 2) when the teacher inaccurately anticipates some information pertaining to the students' territory of knowledge. In both cases, the teacher displays an epistemic stance that is seen to be incongruent with the participants’ epistemic statuses. Findings also indicate that these episodes require certain repair work to resolve the resulting dissonance to which the interactants orient.