Post‐lesson debriefing: delayed or immediate? An investigation of student teacher talk

This paper seeks to evaluate a specific implementation of a reflective approach to teacher education in a pre‐service course in teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) in a UK university. This implementation is the use of delayed debriefing (supervisory conference) after lesson observation, providing the student teacher with support for reflection in the form of a time delay and completion of a structured journal. Six delayed debriefing events are compared with six immediate debriefing events from another institution providing a course leading to the same award. Three analyses of student teacher talk in the debriefing events are presented: topic initiation, modal verb use, and types of ‘reasoning’ talk. The analyses offer some evidence of a higher level of reflective analysis by the student teacher in delayed debriefings.