Interpersonal Struggle in an EFL Writing Talk Task : Challenging a Teacher's Interpretation

A variety of second-language classroom instructional constraints may often lead the teacher to interpret by assumption or appropriation the "successful completion" of small-group workshop talk tasks. As a consequence, individual contributions to "shared" teaching-learning talk may go unrecognized (Fulmer, 2003c, 2004a). This paper presents one example of challenging this teacher-researcher's (the first author's) interpretation of what transpired in a small group's talk task and why. Specifically, five Japanese university EFL writing learners participating in an English writing workshop were encouraged to review their classroom video and audio tapes and task sheets and to describe what they believe occurred in one talk task. The participating students were invited to recount reflectively how they resolved the functional English paragraph and essay metalanguage recall/inference task and to comment on their "cooperative" relations within the group during their task resolution. Three of the students revealed that, under pressure of the task-specific requirements, they purposefully oriented away from normal conversation convention, ignored or left unresponded the other two students' queries, and pressed ahead to conclude the task. Doing so gave rise to an interpersonal struggle that dramatically deepened as students' writing task-generated discourse progressed. This post-analysis interview with students suggests a possibly more insightful alternative to customary teacher "interpretation at best" (Christie, 2002) of the successes we may believe learners are "accomplishing together" in their small-group talk work.23KJ00004174456departmental bulletin pape