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The growing use of peer observation in teacher professional development has created an interest in understanding how it is carried out and what the benefits are. Post-observation feedback is a crucial component of peer observation practices. This study seeks to contribute to a better understanding of peer observation feedback in foreign language teacher’s professional development. Adopting a conversation analysis perspective, we aim to establish how the interactional infrastructure is developed between observers and observees after a negative assessment during peer observation feedback. The results show that, when the observer is assessing a specific teaching action negatively and the observee expresses alignment with the observer’s position, the observer adopts an affiliative stance through the use of his/her epistemic expertise in two ways: either putting his/her self in the shoes of the observee or, in other cases, expressing the affiliative stance by appealing to the epistemic community to which they both belong.

The author interviewed Dr. Paul Seedhouse (Newcastle University, United Kingdom) about Video Enhanced Observation (VEO) in teacher training, profesional development, and classroom research.Dr. Paul Seedhouse is Professor of Educational and Applied Linguistics at Newcastle University, UK. His 2004 monograph The Interactional Architecture of Language Classroom, published by Blackwell, won the Modern Language Association of America Mildenberger Price. He also co-edited the collections Applying Conversation Analysis (Palgrave MacMillan, 2005) and LanguageTeaching and Learning as Social Interaction (Palgrave MacMillan, 2007) and is co-author of Research Methods for Applied Language Studies (Routledge, 2012). His main research is about how people communicate in professional settings, specifically, uncovering how the organization of interaction in an institutional setting is related to institutional goals. In this area of research, Dr. Seedhouse has published many articles, papers and book chapters. He is currently PI on the project Video Enhanced Observation, an Erasmus Plus KA2 Partnership for School Education Grant.

In foreign language teaching, teacher discourse plays a fundamental role in managing the actions carried out in class. The teacher generally manages student participation in interactional activities by formulating questions, proposing topics of conversation or directly identifying the next speaker, using a series of verbal and nonverbal actions to direct turn-taking. The study presented here analyses the use by the teacher of the expression “muy bien” – equivalent to the English “very good” or “ok”, among other translations – in a series of interactions with students in a meaning-and-fluency context in the Spanish as a foreign language classroom. The results show that “muy bien” is used as a transition token between speakers, as a means of focusing the attention of the interaction or IRF sequence, or as a transition token between activities. Detailed analysis demonstrates the interactional complexity of the use of “muy bien”, an expression that should be considered a key element in didactic discourse and teacher training.