Understanding how pre-service English teachers adopt stance toward academic teaching inquiry tasks

• We study pre-service teachers’ (PSTs) stances in teaching-inquiry presentations.
• We consider teachers’ discussions of teaching as a unique academic register.
• We combine grammatical analysis with observational data analysis.

While teacher education literature views teachers’ stances toward teaching inquiry as important to teachers’ commitment to classroom improvement, little research has analyzed teachers’ use of stance markers. This project builds on Biber's (2006) framework to study stances taken by three high school English pre-service teachers (PSTs) in oral teaching-inquiry presentations completed during preparation coursework. This study considers: How do English PSTs enrolled in a teacher education program reveal stances through completion of oral presentations of teaching inquiry projects? The study employs methodology combining grammatical analysis with analysis of observational data from an in-depth study of PSTs’ experiences in their preparation. Findings reveal PSTs take varied, nuanced stances toward inquiry presentations, focal students, and project findings. Implications include that (1) studying how teachers formally discuss teaching activities can provide unique perspectives on teachers’ stance and (2) linguists can gain depth of understanding about participants’ stance by combining grammatical and observational analysis.