Teacher self-talk: Interactional resource for managing instruction and eliciting empathy

This study reveals the significant role of teacher self-talk in managing classroom interaction during unplanned moments of instruction and in building affective teacher–student relationships. We examined 24 hours of video-recordings collected from nine university level courses: three upper level ESL courses; one undergraduate linguistics course; a split-level undergraduate/graduate course and four graduate courses, all broadly related to the topic of applied linguistics. Drawing on conversation analytic methods, we present a detailed analysis of five examples of teacher self-talk. Findings suggest that the practice of teacher self-talk, accomplished via specific prosodic cues, eye gaze direction, and body positioning, plays a significant role in managing the moments when aspects of the pedagogical task need to be monitored or adjusted. By making the students aware of the teacher's predicament, self-talk helps to maintain the instructional space while trouble is being resolved by keeping students’ focus on the instructional task. Moreover, teacher self-talk acts as an affordance for eliciting self-initiated empathetic responses from students. The findings confirm the importance of examining how unplanned classroom moments are accomplished in talk-in-interaction, and reveal how practices like self-talk, which may appear on the surface be slight or unimportant, in fact make significant contributions to teaching.

► The focus of the study is on the side-sequence of teacher self-talk.
► Findings show that the sequence occurs when unexpected issues arise in instruction.
► It is marked by specific prosodic cues, eye gaze direction, and body positionings.
► It serves to maintain student attention while the issue is being resolved.
► It also elicits empathic student responses, thus reshaping their institutional roles.