Stances in Student-Teachers’ Spoken Reflection: An Exploratory Linguistic Study to Enhance a Reflection Inventory

Reflective Teaching as a relatively new approach toward teaching and education can be traced back to Dewey’s (1933) assertion of reflective action. To date, methodologies remain almost recursive. Arguably, the modality of written genres may tempt the teachers to produce cursory reflective writings. This exploratory paper presents the sorts of linguistic stance resources such as boosters, hedges and attitude markers culled from one-hour case of spoken, peer reflection with three English practice teachers. Themes were analysed from these linguistic stance resources. Overall, the student- teachers’ reflection is enthused with a seesaw between force and conviction; mitigation, apprehensions, and misgivings of teaching-learning practices. Arguably, this pendulum results in the unstable positive and negative affective attitude about the teaching-learning process. Based on the themes, indicators for reflective practices were added to the reflective inventory designed by Akbari, Behzadpoor, and Dadvand (2010). Limitations, linguistic research trajectories and implications for mentoring are offered accordingly.