The social organisation of talk-in-interaction at work in a language teacher professional community

This paper investigates how a group of language teachers negotiated their practice through ‘talk at work’ in the context of language teaching reform in China. The data is derived from the teachers' interaction in joint lesson planning conferences, and has been subjected to ethnomethodological analysis. The findings show that the participants employed a wide range of structural procedures to accomplish the interaction, as well as performing different identities in talk. The interplay between interaction and identities produced an asymmetric power relationship that limited the participants' equal access to discourse resources, hence constraining their opportunities for learning. The research attempts to provide a new way of theorising teacher learning in the workplace by offering a bottom-up solution to social orders. Such theorising suggests the possibility of talking the democratic social institutions into being through changing the way we interact with and relate to each other in professional practices.