Assessing pre-service teaching practicum: a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of field experience supervision forms

Abstract

This study analyses the moves, linguistic realisations and mitigation devices of four teaching practicum supervisors' cmmnents written to eighteen supervisees on fifty- four standard field experience supervision forms. Broadly speaking, the results reveal that the supervisors use evaluative adjectives, modality markers and imperatives to give praise and acknowledge good practice, identify weaknesses, and suggest improvements in relation to teaching and managing learning. As the supervision exercise can be face-threatening, the supervisors demonstrate sensitivity to redress their negative comments through such mitigation strategies as hedging, praise-criticism pairs, rhetorical questions and personal attributions, although the strengths of such devices may vary according to contextual issues. These findings enable readers to understand how the pragma-linguistic resources realise two global communicative purposes, i.e., "Assessment of Learning" and "Assessment for Learning".

Date of Award	1 Nov 2014
Original language	English
Supervisor	Phoenix W Y LAM (Supervisor)