Analysing Lesson Transitions: Insights from Pre-Service EFL Teacher Microteaching Sessions

Microteaching is widely used in EFL teacher education to support preservice teachers’ development of instructional and classroom management skills. However, relatively little is known about how preservice EFL teachers interactionally accomplish lesson transitions during microteaching lessons. Drawing on applied conversation analysis, this study examines how lesson transitions are sequentially organized in 15 video-recorded microteaching lessons conducted by Korean preservice EFL teachers. Analysis of teachers’ and students’ talk, embodied conduct, and orientation to material resources identified three recurrent transition practices: (1) explicit announcements of the next activity, (2) intra-activity instructional shifts accomplished through verbal, embodied, and material resources, and (3) distributed transitions in which movement to the next activity is achieved incrementally across multiple turns. Across these practices, lesson transitions were shown to be collaboratively accomplished, with students displaying their understanding of activity boundaries through timely uptake and alignment rather than through explicit negotiation. The findings highlight both conventional and less explicit ways preservice teachers manage instructional progression in microteaching, and they underscore the value of examining transitions as interactional achievements rather than as isolated pedagogical techniques. The study contributes to CA-informed research on classroom interaction and offers insights for teacher education by illustrating how microteaching provides opportunities for practicing the interactional work of managing lesson transitions.