Author Archives: Olcay Sert

“You need to be reminded about those small things that make differences”: Classroom interaction and language teaching

I was invited to write a guest blog for Karlstad University, Centre for Language and Literature Education. I wrote about the importance of classroom interaction in language teaching, arguing for a focus on classroom interaction in initial teacher education and continuous professional development. The full text is available at https://sola.kau.se/cslblog/2023/05/31/you-need-to-be-reminded-about-those-small-things-that-make-differences-classroom-interaction-and-language-teaching/ I would like to thankContinue reading ““You need to be reminded about those small things that make differences”: Classroom interaction and language teaching”

Call for chapters: Conversation Analysis as a Change Agent in Language Teacher Education

We are soliciting manuscripts for an edited volume on conversation analysis as a change agent in language teacher education. Over the last decade, conversation analytic (CA) findings from classroom discourse studies have started feeding into language teacher education contexts, yielding a number of CA-based teacher training frameworks such as SETT (Walsh 2013), IMDAT (Sert, 2019)Continue reading “Call for chapters: Conversation Analysis as a Change Agent in Language Teacher Education”

How do teachers handle errors in mathematics classrooms?

Originally posted on Mälardalen INteraction & Didactics (MIND) Research Group:
How teachers handle errors of students in classrooms has been a topic of interest for researchers across disciplines. Mathematics is no exception to this. In this guest blog post, researchers Odd Tore Kaufmann (Østfold University College, Norway), Maria Larsson (MIND & M-TERM Research groups,…

Some reflections on the ECER 2022: from Mälardalen to Yerevan

I am one of those who think that one needs to balance “big” and more focused “small” conferences during a year: you can dig in deep in more subject/methodology/field specific small conferences, and map the broader field in a big one. For me, the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) 2022 in Yerevan was aContinue reading “Some reflections on the ECER 2022: from Mälardalen to Yerevan”

On “Armchair Teacher Education”: Some observations and humble suggestions

Teaching is an embodied practice. You get your hands dirty with chalk and board markers, or by collaboratively annotating a document with your students in a Zoom room. You go around in the classroom in-between desks, receive questions, respond to students, laugh out loud together with your learners. For your own professional development, you thinkContinue reading “On “Armchair Teacher Education”: Some observations and humble suggestions”

Who is the expert? School teachers and university teachers in Swedish teacher education

Teacher education in Sweden and other Nordic countries is highly practice based. Student-teachers spend a significant amount of time in schools during their studies, engaging in teaching and other daily school activities under the supervision of school-based mentors. This is, in my humble opinion, one of the success drives of Northern European countries in education.Continue reading “Who is the expert? School teachers and university teachers in Swedish teacher education”

Blurring faces in pictures: GIMP

Many classroom interaction researchers struggle with blurring their participants’ faces in the images that will be used for publications and presentations. I am sure there are thousands of easier ways, but I use GIMP, a free image editing software that works both on MAC and Windows. I created a gif explaining the process. I hopeContinue reading “Blurring faces in pictures: GIMP”

Corrective feedback: an angel or an angle?

Do you remember the first time a teacher corrected something you said in a classroom? I do. I was 12. It was a Mathematics lesson in Gemlik (Bursa, Turkey) that was being taught in English. The teacher had asked a question. I do not remember, though, what it was exactly about. I raised my hand,Continue reading “Corrective feedback: an angel or an angle?”