PUTTING ON THE SPOT: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS’ VERBAL AND NONVERBAL BEHAVIORS IN THE VIRTUAL TEACHING ENVIRONMENT AND ROUTINE UNIVERSITY CLASSROOM ENVIRONMENT

This study explores pre-service teacher candidates’ verbal and nonverbal behaviors in a virtual teaching environment and in a routine university classroom environment. Thirty graduate students enrolled in a language and literacy course participated in the study. The study was carried out at two stages. Stage 1 involves documenting participants’ naturalistic language use and nonverbal behaviors in routine university classroom interactions (10 minutes recorded sample for each participant). Stage 2 consists of recording participants’ naturalistic language use and nonverbal behaviors in a virtual teaching environment (TeachLive Lab). Participants were asked to teach a topic in their subject areas. Video-recorded data were transcribed and coded with a coding scheme developed by Wang et al. The results of the study suggest that when pre-service teacher candidates were “putting on the spot” to teach a subject in a virtual environment (simulation of classroom environment), they dramatically changed their language use, as evidenced in the increase of their lexical diversity, lexical density, and lexical complexity. Moreover, participants also changed their nonverbal demeanors and produced more deictic and iconic gestures as well as more regulatory gestures/movements. Overall, the study suggests that when pre-service candidates are “putting on the spot,” most of them are able to transform their roles from novice to a teaching professional, at least in the aspects of verbal and nonverbal behaviors. Implications for how to use the finding of this study in teacher preparation programs are discussed.