Informing Non-native Teachers’ Decision Making and Pedagogical Reasoning Through Skills and Systems Mode

Decision making and pedagogical reasoning are two of the core concepts that play an important role in teaching skills. Developing the former is highly crucial because teachers are consistently making on-the-spot classroom decisions, and it is the latter that helps teachers make cogent decisions. This study aimed to help novice English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers inform their classroom decisions pedagogically through employing the pedagogic goals and interactional features (interactures) of one of the modes of the self-evaluation of teacher talk (SETT) framework, namely skills and systems mode. To do so, five novice Iranian EFL teachers, three females and two males aged between 20 and 22, participated in the study. The data derived from classroom observations were collected using Camtasia and analyzed employing conversation analysis. The findings showed that the teachers focused on accuracy more specifically after the instruction of grammatical points and relied on the metalinguistic terms of the mode to justify their reasons. In addition, being socioculturally guided, the teachers offered contingent and gradual assistance, primarily during reformulation. All in all, although analyzing the whole framework in a single study is a complicated task, it is a worthwhile point to be considered in future studies.