This paper investigates
some of the pragmatic considerations behind the use of turn initiators within
one specific Irish-English setting, that of teacher education. During the
course of their studies, student teachers have reason, and are often obliged, to
engage with professionals and peers as they are initiated into their new
community of practice (CoP) (Lave and
Wenger 1991). Under models of social constructivism (Vygotsky 1978) and
progressive education, this engagement has been increasingly conducted through
the mode of spoken language: face-to-face, and more recently, computer-mediated
communication (CMC) (Hanson-Smith 2006). This chapter examines pragmatic turn
initiators in a Teacher Education Discourse (TED) Corpus, consisting of spoken
and online language data from MA in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of
Other Languages) students in an Irish university context. The variables of
speaker relationship, mode of communication and task orientation are explored
to determine their influence on the pragmatic functions at the beginning of
speaker turns.