Exploring Intersubjectivity in Teacher-Student Conversation: A Pilot Study

This pilot study aims to look at the role intersubjectivity plays between students and teachers in an EFL classroom. Intersubjectivity in EFL educational settings enhances effective communication between instructors and learners, and improves teachers’ teaching quality and students’ learning development (Duran et al., 2022). Yet, although intersubjectivity emphasized teacher-student interaction, the recent studies discussed this notion primarily from teachers’ perspectives, rather than from the students’ perspectives (Khatib & Kardoust, 2022; Jafaigohar et al., 2022). To fill in this gap, this pilot study plans to investigate how teachers and students communicate and interact in an EFL conversation classroom at university level, by drawing on the three-order model framework (Stevanovic & Koshi, 2018). In the EFL conversation classroom where data is planned to be collected, the instructor is expected to use various interactional strategies to facilitate student engagement and co-construct meaning. Students are expected to respond, negotiate meaning, and contribute to the interaction by actively participating in discussions and demonstrating their understanding through verbal and nonverbal cues. Classroom observations and semi-structured interviews with the instructor and the students will be conducted. Conversation analysis is used to analyze the observation data, and thematic analysis is carried out to analyze interview data. Expected results include 1) the teacher may demonstrate power distance with the learners, 2) students may either accept or resist the instructor’s commands via verbal and non-verbal languages, and 3) the teacher and the students may negotiate incongruence among knowledge, emotion and power. Pedagogical implications of this research include increasing teachers’ awareness of the unequal power between instructors and the learners, and then co-constructing a more interactive teaching and learning environment with their students. Preliminary findings of the pilot study will be reported.