Managing negative evaluation and alternative action proposals using modal verb constructions: Pre-service teachers’ academic language use in video-mediated interactions

Abstract

This study deals with pre-service teachers' use of English for academic purposes in video-mediated interactional settings and is situated at the interface of interactional linguistics, conversation analysis, and language teacher education. Using multimodal conversation analysis as the research methodology and drawing on the grammar-in-interaction perspective informed by interactional linguistics, this study investigates pre-service teachers' collaborative video analysis meetings based on video clips taken from real classrooms of other, more experienced teachers. In and through video-mediated multiparty interactions, the participants (pre-service teachers) critically analyze teacher classroom interactional practices with divergent evaluative stances (i.e., on a gradient of positive to negative). Specifically dealing with negative evaluations based on a collection of cases, the study shows how pre-service teachers display their negative evaluative stances using a specific grammatical construction consisting of third-person subject pronoun, modal auxiliary verb, and alternative action proposals. In doing so, the participants jointly achieve identifying ‘what could be done’ differently in language classrooms, while also collectively portraying ‘ideal’ teaching practices in situ by proposing alternative courses of actions. The findings bring new insights into grammar-in-interaction, video-mediated interactions, EAP, and language teacher education research.