Abstract

Acquiring strong classroom-talk skills is vital to pre-service teachers’ future career success. However, they often find this challenging, and their classroom talk tends to be limited to simple phrases that seldom facilitate students’ reasoning. One widely used pedagogical approach to developing pre-service teachers’ classroom-talk competency is microteaching. Therefore, we designed a training programme that integrated microteaching with video-visualisation technology, peer review, and self-reflection, and implemented it among 67 pre-service teachers. The role of the interactive and process-focused video-visualisation platform, which was also designed by the authors, was to facilitate detailed investigation of classroom discourse and of how teachers and students contributed to dynamic classroom-interaction processes. A mixed-methods approach was adopted, combining quantitative classroom-talk data, survey data, reflection reports, and interviews. Our qualitative results, derived from semi-structured interviews with a randomly selected subsample of 22 participants, showcase variation and common themes in their microteaching discourse. Our questionnaire results, meanwhile, indicate that after the training, the 67 participants improved significantly on multiple measures of teacher self-efficacy. The qualitative results, and reflection reports collected from all 67 teacher candidates, suggest that video visualisation enhanced their perceptions of both classroom talk and of academic productive-talk strategies, while helping them to take holistic and analytical views of classroom talk. In short, the intervention was a valuable part of their preparation for internships.