Turn initiators in professional encounters: teacher education discourse in an Irish university setting

This paper investigates some of the pragmatic considerations behind the use of turn initiators within one specific Irish-English setting, that of teacher education. During the course of their studies, student teachers have reason, and are often obliged, to engage with professionals and peers as they are initiated into their new community of practice (CoP) (Lave and Wenger 1991). Under models of social constructivism (Vygotsky 1978) and progressive education, this engagement has been increasingly conducted through the mode of spoken language: face-to-face, and more recently, computer-mediated communication (CMC) (Hanson-Smith 2006). This chapter examines pragmatic turn initiators in a Teacher Education Discourse (TED) Corpus, consisting of spoken and online language data from MA in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) students in an Irish university context. The variables of speaker relationship, mode of communication and task orientation are explored to determine their influence on the pragmatic functions at the beginning of speaker turns.