Teacher development through classroom discourse analysis: the Self Evaluation of Teacher Talk (SETT) instrument developed by Walsh

Zotzmann, Karin (2018) Teacher development through classroom discourse analysis: the Self Evaluation of Teacher Talk (SETT) instrument developed by Walsh. In, Evans, Dave (ed.) Language, Identity & Symbolic Culture. 1st ed. London. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Abstract

The chapter reports of a teacher development project with a group of four Spanish teachers who analysed a transcription of their respective classes using a discourse analytical instrument developed by Walsh (2006). The SETT (Self-Evaluation of Teacher Talk) instrument consists of a range of analytical concepts and procedures that are designed to foment the awareness of teachers about the language they use in class, the appropriateness of these discursive patterns to the pedagogic aims they pursue and the learning opportunities they thereby create for their students. In the context of the teacher development project reported on, the SETT instrument proved to be very useful as it offered accessible metalanguage for the participants to discuss and analyse classroom discourse in an insightful and theoretically informed way without being overly complex. At the same time, though, it became apparent that the exclusive focus on what is present in classroom discourse and the marginalisation of what is absent from it but nevertheless causally effective is a severe limitation of the SETT. On the basis my conversations with these teachers, I argue that this and similar discourse analytical models used for teacher education and development would benefit from attention to factors outside of classroom discourse such as, for instance, values as reasons for particular courses of action and structures, surrounding institutional practices, interpersonal relations and the socio-economic reality the teaching and learning is embedded in. In more theoretical terms, what happens on the discursive level should be viewed in the wider context of structures and agency.

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