"This is a lot of work" - metalinguistic interaction of teacher students

Abstract

The study of the interaction between students of a teacher training course during the resolution of a Grammar Lab is guided by two goals, (i) to characterize metalinguistic interactions between schooled adults in the face of grammatical problems, in collaborative work and (ii) to consolidate a model of integrated analysis of the interaction, deepening the relationship between metalinguistic argumentation and metalinguistic knowledge. Metalinguistic interaction is understood as an extension of metalinguistic activity, and materialized in dialogical verbal discourse, in our case contextualized in the resolution of grammar problems. Framed by other studies of interaction in the sociocultural-Vygotskian framework (Mercer, 2019; Edwards & Mercer, 2013), the analysis follows the integrated model of Fontich (2010a), which explores the relationship between metalinguistic argumentation and verbalized metalinguistic knowledge. The results show three different patterns of interaction and point to a dissociation between the grammar knowledge expressed as a product, in the answer, and the ability to explain that same knowledge.