REINTERPRETING STUDENTS’ EVALUATIVE COMMENTS: A REPLY TO BASTHOMI

Abstract

Abstract: This essay is intended to critically reinterpret Basthomi's interpretation of his students' evaluative comments upon his teaching performance. Basthomi's argument that the students of Speak­ing I have misunderstood his typical question implicitly reveals his unreadiness to treat a textualized ut­terance in the sphere of speaker-listener communication, suggesting that the meaning of his utterance is merely what he means by it. This article is built on a premise that the students' interpretation resulted from their compre­hensive understanding of the said, i.e. the lecturer's utterance, and the unsaid, which might be construed from his unspoken daily performance in the classroom. This notion also strengthens the presence of in­tertextuality process in the students' comments since the comments resulted from their previous "reading" of a large number of different "texts", both spoken (the said) and unspoken (the unsaid), provided by the lecturer. With this in mind, there is no reason to view the students' evaluative feedback as indeter­minate and tentative; rather, it should be seriously taken into account since their feedback might help him, and any lecturer in general, to improve his future teaching performance.

Keywords

• teaching performance
• evaluative comment
• the unsaid
• the said
• intertextuality
• tentativeness
• indeterminacy