Attitudes and feedback from the relevance-theoretic perspective

Anna Nizegorodcew (Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland)

Email: annanizegorodcew@yahoo.com

 

ABSTRACT:

The proposed presentation focuses on difficulties involved in negotiations for meaning in the process of providing and receiving feedback during one-to-one conferences between the supervisor and the teacher trainees. The conferences are part of a diploma seminar, and they are expected to result in more satisfactory teacher trainees’ diploma projects. The projects involve lesson planning, teaching the previously planned lessons, and reflecting on the taught lessons. It is claimed in the proposed presentation that the lack of teaching experience and the effort involved in the task of planning and teaching a few lessons leads to the formation of characteristic expectations and attitudes (mindsets) of inexperienced teachers. According to those mindsets, good teaching equals covering the designed lesson plans, that is meeting the formal requirements of the task. The trainees who closely follow their lesson plans, self-assess their lessons as fully successful. In turn, the supervisor assesses the described lessons from the perspective of more general teaching aims, that is from a less formal perspective. In consequence, the supervisor’s critical assessment of the lessons is frequently misunderstood. Such a misunderstanding has negative effects both on the form of the diploma projects and on the rapport of the supervisor and the students. An attempt is made to interpret difficulties in the mutual misunderstandings in the light of Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986), on the part of the teacher trainees, as failing to perceive the relevance of the supervisor’s less formal comments, and on the part of the supervisor, as failing to perceive the relevance of the trainees’ more formal comments, due to their different expectations and attitudes (mindsets). Such a cognitive and pragmalinguistic interpretation of difficulties in feedback giving and responding to it is a new application of Relevance Theory. The author of this presentation has recently written a book (Nizegorodcew 2007), in which she also tried to apply Relevance Theory to foreign language classroom discourse and to the facilitating role of the teachers’ input in shifting the students’ attention from meaning to form and vice versa. On the other hand, the application of Relevance Theory to feedback giving and responding to it is a new reflection in teacher training.