The Interactional Organisation of Co-Teaching in Language Educational Settings: The Case of Mandarin Language Teaching in Scotland

Co-teaching is a common feature of language education in schools. It usually involves two adults holding different sets of expertise and working jointly with the same group of learners. Despite the prevalence of co-teaching in language educational settings, little is known as to how co-teaching is organised and negotiated in classroom talk. Drawing on Membership Categorisation Analysis, this paper aims to shed light on the interactional organisation of co-teaching in language educational settings. To do so, we differentiate the institutional label of “classroom teacher” from the practical social identity of “teacher-hood” and investigate who, in a co-teaching setting, performs “teacher-hood” (or in other words, who is “doing being” the teacher). We take the case of a Chinese student volunteer who teaches Mandarin alongside a classroom teacher in a Scottish primary school and present a series of ethnographic vignettes where the teacher and the student volunteer find multiple and creative ways of negotiating “teacher-hood.”