I think we should just accept our horrible lowly status: analysing teacher-teacher talk within the context of community of practice.

While interaction inside the classroom frontstage discourse has been a subject ofstudy and has been considered the most significant type of discourse that teachersengage in, I propose that interaction outside the classroom backstage discourse isequally significant and has not thus far received as much attention as it merits. Thispaper is concerned with the institutional interaction of English language teachers usinga corpus of (currently) over 40,000 words, consisting of a variety of meetings. Itwill consider the characteristics of the community of practice (CofP) and how membershipis realised in language. It looks at the inexplicit nature of the language thatteachers use in relation to their practices as indicative of this membership, and howhumour is related to the establishment of a shared communicative space, as well asevidence of it. Highlighted also is the creation of this space within the meeting withthe construction of in- and out-groups. The paper concludes that reflection not onlyon our practices within the classroom, but our practices as a professional communityopens a new window on our profession as a whole.