Analysis of the Exchange Structure in Online Tutoring by Pre-service English Teachers

Abstract

Based on the national strategy of revitalizing teacher education, as an important part of talent training, pre-service teacher education plays an important role in the process of building a high-quality education system. However, affected by many factors, there are still many problems in the practice teaching of pre-service teacher education. In recent years, private tutoring by college students has developed rapidly. Similar to other practice courses for normal students, private tutoring provides pre-service teachers with the opportunity to practice teaching, reflect on learning and improve their professional competence. This emphasis on self-reflection is in line with The Exchange Structure proposed by Sinclair and Coulthard (hereinafter referred to as S&C) at the University of Birmingham in 1975, which is widely used in classroom conversation analysis. As pointed out by Atkins (2001), it is a very valuable work for teachers to apply this model to analyze classroom teaching activities, because they can better understand the courses they teach and improve classroom teaching in this way. However, the existing researches mainly focus on the traditional classroom exchange of in-service English teachers, and there are few on the classroom conversation between pre-service English teachers and students in online tutoring. Therefore, in order to truly reflect the characteristics of exchange structure of online English tutoring, this study selects a clip of the author's (pre-service English teacher) online teaching audio one year ago and transcribe it with the transcription system developed by Hutchby & Woffitt (1999). Then, the text materials are analyzed according to the original Exchange Structure (S&C, 1975), so as to provide suggestions for the professional improvement of pre-service English teachers. At the same time, the application of the Exchange Structure can be expanded to provide data for related studies, and suggestions are put forward for the improvement of the theoretical model.