Incorrect or creative answer: Teachers’ third positions in IRF sequences of collaborative teaching

This study explores the interactional and pedagogical functions of teachers’ third positions within initiation–response–feedback (IRF) sequences in co-taught classrooms. Using a conversation analytic approach, it examines how collaborative teaching both parallels and departs from single-teacher classroom interaction. The dataset comprises two lesson hours of video recordings featuring three co-teaching pairs in a second-grade English–Korean bilingual elementary school in South Korea. Analysis revealed that while some third positions showed co-teachers jointly affirming or correcting student responses, others functioned as sites of divergence, exposing different instructional priorities and stances. In aligned cases, co-teachers jointly deliver feedback with shared polarity, using coordinated verbal and embodied resources to provide cohesive evaluations and maintain task focus. In diverging cases, teachers respond to the same student action with contrasting assessments or epistemic orientations, reframing student responses through different evaluative lenses, prompting revision of an initial stance, or reconfiguring the participation framework entirely. These findings show that, unlike in single-teacher classrooms, third positions in co-teaching are not merely expanded feedback slots, but interactionally rich sites where pedagogical and relational contingencies are negotiated moment by moment. This study contributes to classroom interaction research by empirically documenting the actions co-teachers employ in third positions of multiparty instruction.