The Discourse of Advocacy in a Simulated Environment

• In Event: Dialogic Practices in Learning Contexts

Abstract

In this presentation, we outline a technology-driven simulation experience for ESL teaching candidates (TCs) as part of an online ESL Methods course. In the simulation experience, TCs interact with an avatar (simulator) controlled by a trained actor who behaves as a relatively hostile general education teacher that consistently uses deficit-oriented language to talk about a “problematic” English Learner in her class. We adapt Wortham and Reyes’s (2015) three-phase model for discourse analysis and combine it with the framework of relational trust (Bryk & Schneider, 2002) to examine three TCs’ attempts to (re)establish social trust between themselves and the simulated colleague. We discuss how TCs utilized linguistic indexicals to frame the context of the dialogue, or relationship, between the interlocutors.

Authors

• Will Fox, University of Virginia

• April Simun Salerno, University of Virginia