Peer reflection on microteaching plays a crucial role in teachers' training programs as it equips novice teachers with opportunities to understand their peers' practices. It enhances their reflective thinking, teaching awareness, and bridges the gap between theoretical and practical teaching practices.
While structured activities such as journals, feedback forms, and appraisal sheet scaffolds are common, video-based peer reflection processes are also gaining prominence. The dialogic feedback sessions, based on video-recorded sessions of microteaching, allow pre-service teachers to reflect on and improve their microteaching by designing effective task introductions.
Despite advances, gaps persist in examining the interactional dynamics of the peer reflective talk, including responses to self-assessment and advice. Conversation analysis (CA)-based approaches can bridge the gap, as they allow the documentation of sequential and multimodal dynamics of such interactions. In a recently published study, Associate Professor Mika Ishino from the Global and Regional Studies Department, Doshisha University, Japan, and Professor Eunseok Ro from Pusan National University, South Korea, focus on understanding how pre-service teachers respond to self-assessment and advices from peers in peer-reflection discussions.
"I knew Dr. Ro as we have been members of a collaborative research project that is led by two other Japanese and Korean researchers. However, we mainly see each other for online meetings and hardly meet in person. When we finally had a chance to talk in person at a conference in 2024, we realized that we are using the same syllabus for our teacher education programs. So, we came up with the idea of allowing our students to collaborate over a virtual exchange program to understand and study the interaction dynamics," mentions Dr. Ishino, as she was talking about the motivation behind the study. The study was made available online on November 15, 2025, and will be published in Volume 137 of the journal System on February 01, 2026.
The study was based on virtual exchange among four undergraduate pre-service teachers with prior training in classroom interactional competence. Two of these participants were from Korea, while the other two were from Japan, and all of them had conducted microteaching sessions as part of their coursework. The students were paired across national contexts for the study and structured Zoom prompts were used to guide the sessions. While the students shared their thoughts on the challenges they faced and what worked in their favor during the microteaching, the peer-reflection included positive feedbacks and advices. The study focused on the engagement between the students, which was largely based on the self-assessment and peer feedback.
The analysis revealed contrasting trajectories in self-assessment responses. While task focused on minimal acknowledgments that prioritize procedural flow, affiliative responses involved personal comparisons, elaborations, and discussions. Advice responses also followed a spectrum. While one interaction demonstrated minimal alignments that ensured task progression without any elaboration, another one supported the development of intercultural rapport through affiliative engagement. "One of the interactions also demonstrated epistemic upgradation," mentions Dr. Ishino. "The advisor provided a theoretical rationale to strengthen the validity of the suggestion, while the recipient acknowledged the pedagogical validity of the advice." This allows the co-construction of professional knowledge.
The findings portray how peer reflection unfolds along a continuum. Task-focused procedural alignment fulfils the institutional aim, the affiliative interaction fosters solidarity, and epistemic elaboration helps to improve pedagogical knowledge. This diversity should be recognized as a resource, not a limitation. The study also reaffirms the importance of peer reflection in teacher training. The findings from this study can help in developing improved CA-designs, especially in English as a foreign language setting that can provide epistemic depth and relational engagement. "Future work involving larger dataset can help to develop the professional vision of pre-service teachers," concludes Dr. Ishino.
About Associate Professor Mika Ishino from Doshisha University, Japan
Dr. Mika Ishino is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Global and Regional Studies at Doshisha University in Japan. She completed her doctoral research in Language and Culture from Osaka University. Her research areas include applied linguistics, socio linguistics, conversation analysis, etc. She has published 35 research articles till date. She has presented her work in various conferences and she has received the Best Paper Award from Japan Society for Educational Sociology in September 2022. She is a member of different societies, including The Japan Society of Educational Sociology and The Japan Association for Language Teaching.
About Associate Professor Eunseok Ro from Pusan National University, South Korea
Dr. Eunseok Ro is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of English Education at Pusan National University, South Korea. He obtained his Ph.D. in Second Language Studies from the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. His research primarily focuses on the analysis of interactions in L2 education settings, using conversation analysis as his research methodology. His work has been published in Language Teaching Research, Computer Assisted Language Learning, and Linguistics and Education.
Funding information
This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 22K13184.
