ABSTRACT
Thus far the nature of this research in relation to language teacher education and corpus-based discourse analysis has been established and, from this springboard, the remaining chapters explore the primary data (corpus and survey). This and the next chapter, against the backdrop of a focussed profi le of the POTTI discourse participants, give an overview of the spoken and written feedback discourse combining analytical frameworks. This chapter begins by uncovering the spoken discourse participants’ preconceptions about the impending TP experience, including the feedback component, which are documented in diary entries and questionnaires. These reveal the relevant priorities, emotional predispositions, and anticipations of the student teachers and provide the start of a more emic interpretation of the discourse data. The second stage of investigation examines the data in two complementary ways. Traditional discourse analysis provides a rudimentary framework of functional categories into which the POTTI and POR data sifts. This identifi es, in qualitative terms, the data as fi tting broadly within the genre of teaching practice feedback as described in the previous research (Blumberg and Cusick 1969, Zeichner and Liston 1985, Christensen 1988, Roberts 1991, Arcario 1994, Wajnryb 1994a, Phillips 1997, Hopkins 1999, Kurtoglu-Eken 1999, Phillips 1999, Jarvis 2001, Randall and Thornton 2001, Jarvis 2002, Williams and Watson 2004, Vásquez 2005, Vásquez and Reppen 2007). Simultaneously, a corpus-based investigation uses procedures and methodologies commonly employed in bottom-up approaches to the automatic examination of computerised texts (Tognini-Bonelli 2001, McEnery et al. 2006). In this way, frequency lists, keywords, and clusters consolidate and refi ne the categories proposed in the discourse analysis to produce a framework which is supported by discourse and corpus procedures, and by qualitative and quantitative fi ndings. The combined manual and automatic analysis of POTTI and POR, containing approximately 80,000 and 90,000 words respectively, fi rmly establishes the specifi c features which make TP feedback
relatively unique as a genre and also those items which fall within the realm of pragmatic and interpersonal use, which are of specifi c interest in this research. The more transactional components from the framework, namely refl ection and direction, will be presented in detail in this chapter, and the more affective features of evaluation and relational talk will be detailed in Chapter 5. These chapters also empirically identify the areas for examination in a more micro-analytical mode in subsequent chapters using concordance lists and recontextualised examples in various illustrative extracts. Throughout the remainder of this book, the qualitative analysis is supported by numerical results from the corpus searches and vice versa, but does not fi t within the tradition of general quantitative research methodology where more detailed statistical tests and predictions such as inferential statistics are used (see, for example, Leedy 1995:262). As outlined in Chapter 3, the corpus-based methodology in this research falls within the qualitative tradition (McCarthy et al. 2002:70), which is most appropriate given that the data interpretation and production is highly contextualised and conducted within the spirit of action research and refl ective practice. And while there are inherent dangers in generalising from the results, many other LTE programmes will share similarities with the one described here and may benefi t greatly from the forthcoming analyses and discussions. Of course, transferring any recommendations or conclusions should always be done with the requisite understanding of all contextual variables.
