Creating “Reflect‐ables”: A Conversation Analytic Study of Feedback Practices in Language Teacher Education

ABSTRACT This study examines how second language (L2) teacher educators provide feedback on student teachers' (STs) microteaching performances. Although conversation analysis (CA) research has extensively analyzed classroom interaction, there has been limited focus on how CA‐specialized teacher educators shape STs' classroom interactional competence through feedback practices. Specifically, as researchers and teacher educators, we lack sufficient understanding of how teacher educators guide STs in managing classroom interaction, respond to their contributions, and support them in refining their pedagogical talk. Drawing on multimodal CA, this study explores typical feedback patterns of two teacher educators in CA‐informed L2 teacher education courses in Japan and Korea. The findings reveal how instructors construct specific teaching action as “reflect‐able” by retrospectively referring to the STs' prior interactional event and providing positive and negative feedback. This “action” focused feedback is often facilitated by the instructors' use of notes and other situated objects, creating opportunities for STs to engage in self‐reflection and refine their teaching practices based on detailed, practice‐based feedback. This study contributes to CA research on classroom interaction and feedback in general, and on L2 teacher education specifically, by illustrating how teacher educators use feedback to create a space for STs' reflection on their effective classroom interaction and teaching.