Varying the IRE turn: pre-service language teachers adopting an intercultural stance in their pedagogy

Our paper explores the learning of pre-service language teachers who have engaged with anexamination of classroom questioning techniques. Previous research by Harbon and Moloney (inpress) showed that teacher awareness of using variations of Initiation-Response-Evaluation (I-R-E) inclassroom discourse may result in students becoming intercultural ‘investigators’ through enquiry.The analysis of classroom language allows teachers to examine how they construct themselves andothers through discourses they use and encounter. Our previous study found that the languageclassroom can feature the fluid development of inter-subjectivity in students, through the constructionof intercultural enquiry within language learning. There has been limited research attention to thedevelopment of discourse awareness and the new skills necessary for teachers to employ this strategy.The researchers conducted training workshops to introduce two groups of pre-service languageteachers to discourse analysis strategies. Teachers examined examples of the I.R.E turn, exploringwhether they could recognize and adopt the intercultural stance being illustrated. Data fromConcurrent Verbal Reporting with pairs of pre-service teachers at the intensive training, andsubsequent reflective journal entries, shed light on whether and how the teachers were able to learn toconstruct an intercultural classroom discourse.