Expanding teacher candidate linguistic knowledge: Analyzing recorded virtual exchange sessions

Abstract

Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) teacher candidates must have a working knowledge of English linguistics in order to support their students’ language development. This article reports on TESOL teacher candidates’ reflective practice to highlight how interaction with non-native speakers can develop awareness of linguistic features of the English language through virtual exchange. Sixteen teacher candidates from a university in the United States were paired with 22 undergraduate English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners from a university in Mexico. The teacher candidates completed journal entries in which they analyzed authentic language produced by their EFL partners during their virtual meetings. Teacher candidates were taking a course that covered topics related to pragmatics, semantics, morphology, phonology and syntax. Each teacher candidate submitted a final error analysis of recorded conversations to determine how many linguistic errors were made by their partners. This study describes the errors the teacher candidates were able to identify in order to explore the benefits of this reflective activity on their understanding of linguistics. This study confirms the need to utilize virtual exchange in teacher preparation programs and subsequent self-reflection in order to give teacher candidates a way to put linguistic content area into practice.

Keywords

• teaching english to speakers of other languages (tesol)
• teacher candidates
• virtual exchange
• english language linguistics
• english as a foreign language (efl)