| The purpose of this study is to describe teachers' conversations about teaching in a particular setting: the conversations between supervisors and teachers in the post-observation conferences that occur as part of teacher-education practica in Teaching English as a Second Language (TESOL). This study draws upon the philosophical perspective that language is action: it does something; therefore, what was examined in the study was accomplishment through conversation, in this case, the conversations about teaching that constituted eleven post-observation conferences between supervisors and student-teachers at three different TESOL M.A. programs.;Analysis of the eleven supervisory conversations showed how it could be said that there is, in effect, but one conversation: the canonical conversation called "doing a supervisory conference." The "demands" of this normal or canonical conversation do not strictly determine what (and how something) is said, but are nevertheless conscriptive: the pattern of sequences and other features identified in this study are oriented to, and performed, in one way or another by all the speakers. The features of the canonical conversation include a three-part sequence: opening evaluative move, evaluation phase, and closing phase. The heart of the conversation is the evaluation phase, which is segmented into three parts: evaluation, justification, and prescription. Other features of the normal conversation include a focus on problems, valorizing certainty of knowledge, attribution of single, rather than multiple causation, use of privileged representations or interpretations, and representation/interpretation on the basis of single, rather than multiple, characteristics.;The canonical form of the conversation, though conscriptive, nevertheless allows for a variety of additional conversational "work" to get done; thus, while the canonical form of the conversation has a quality of finiteness, the other kinds of conversational work that may get done are not as limited. The speakers, for example, were shown to be engaged in doing face work in varying degrees, handling asymmetries in the teacher-supervisor relationship, managing the tension between expertise and equality, handling issues of responsibility and control, and working at discursively maintaining the value of the teaching profession. |
