Change of Epistemic Stance of Transnational Pre-Service Teachers in-and-through Collaborative Data-Led Reflective Dialogues

Abstract

Following the social-oriented view of teaching and learning, reflection has become a significant pedagogical tool to furnish pre-service teachers (PSTs). This study explored collaborative data-led reflective dialogues of transnational PSTs without the presence of a teacher trainer by using Multimodal Conversation Analysis. The study draws on the screen-recordings of a Virtual Exchange (VE) project which involves collaborative online task design, implementation of tasks by actual L2 students, and reflection on students’ performance and their experience of VE project. The focal point of the study is collaborative video-mediated data-led reflective dialogues of PSTs. The close examination of the data shows that through collaborative reflective dialogues, PSTs (i) raised their awareness of their practice and generated knowledge; (ii) made connection between theory and practice; (iii) became more aware of their epistemic stance; (iv) identified and described a problem and found solutions to these problems (Farrell, 2015). Therefore, micro-moments of learning and understanding were created in and through reflection and it was revealed explicitly through reference to lack of knowledge in the past. This study has implications for teacher education programs which should encourage reflective dialogues of transnational PSTs to create opportunities for teacher learning.