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From dialogue to multilogue: a different view on participation in the English foreign‐language classroom
Abstract
Drawing on the methodological framework of conversational analysis, this paper explores aspects of the participation structure of teacher‐fronted plenary interaction in the English foreign‐language classroom. The analysis is demonstrated along six transcribed sequences of video‐recorded interactions of adolescent English‐language learners in a German secondary classroom (‘Hauptschule’). The data were collected over a period of two years. The focus of this article is on teacher–student interaction in whole‐class settings, which can be seen as a basic participation framework of language teaching and a starting point for other settings like pair or group work activities. In order to describe such a framework of participation, I will argue for a slightly different understanding of it that evolves into the term ‘multilogue’; that is, pedagogical intended face‐to‐face interaction including more than two participants.
... She then points at group five, the other group who is responsible to provide feedback on the grammar section of the exam prepared by group one, and asks them what they think of this question. Both Den's use of the inclusive "we" pronoun in line 3 (we can eliminate) and Tea's orientation to group five at the end of the sequence (line 62) signals that this is an instance of multilogue (Schwab, 2011) in which multi-party interaction takes place. ...
... and 12 to express that there are five additional true-false questions to answer which receives an acknowledgement token from Lin (yeah) and another acknowledgement token from Tea (hmm hmm) in lines 13 and 14 respectively. It is seen that Mir's feedback receives orientation and responses not only from Tea but also from other classroom members in this interaction (Schwab, 2011). ...
... In an overlap with Nes's comment, Cey provides another solution to the problem with the item design by suggesting that they can ask for students to provide justifications to their answers. This marks that Nes's feedback was oriented to by classroom members other than Tea (Schwab, 2011). Tea's turn in line 27 initially provides agreement to Cey's suggestion by employing a confirmatory repeat of his utterance (Park, 2014), which is followed by the contrastive marker "but" and an expansion on her earlier suggestion of including "not given" option by referring to one of the resources the trainee teachers are supposed to read for the course. ...
This study uncovers an unexplored phenomenon of “Assuming Learner Behavior” (ALB) emerging within the context of testing and evaluation course in an English Language Teaching (ELT) program by using Conversation Analysis (CA). It involves the analysis of video-recorded classroom interaction (12 hours) of fourth year ELT students and an ELT professor in a university in Ankara, Turkey. Using CA, this study has investigated how the phenomenon of ALB emerges in the classroom interaction of pre-service teachers during feedback and presentation sessions in the testing and evaluation course. Moreover, this study has explored the interactional functions of ALB in different sequential positions and how pre-service teachers’ orient to the different aspects of test items by means of ALBs. In addition, the analysis has indicated that ALB creates learning opportunities for pre-service teachers in developing their testing and evaluation knowledge and skills. In light of these findings, this study provides insights into classroom interaction in a higher education context in general and has implications for L2 teacher education, classroom learning of pre-service teachers, and the development of testing and evaluation knowledge and skills.
Keywords: classroom interaction, assuming learner behavior, English language teaching, testing and evaluation, L2 teacher education, conversation analysis
... During the last phase of the course (see Section 3, Phase 4), the lecturer elicited verbal reports on the task outputs, which included further instances of students' displays of target content knowledge in the whole-class sessions (Koole, 2010). In the last phase, the lecturer incorporated the verbal reports into her talk based on their relevance to the course materials and multimodally marked the epistemic progression (Balaman & Sert, 2017;Gardner, 2007) by adding new items to the list shared on the course LMS in the university portal, thus creating a whole class learning opportunity based on the emergent co-constructed content knowledge (Schwab, 2011). ...
There is a growing research interest in the dynamics of English Medium Instruction (EMI) university classroom
interactions in non-Anglophone contexts. In the present study, we track the procedural unfolding of content
knowledge co-construction across multiple online activities in an online EMI university classroom. Using
Multimodal Conversation Analysis to examine the screen recordings of an undergraduate course on Educational
Sciences at a state EMI university in Türkiye, we show how translanguaging plays a central role in enabling the
participants’ displays of content knowledge by deploying multilingual (English, Turkish, the focal EMI university
jargon) and multimodal (i.e., coordinating verbal and multimodal materials on the screen) resources across four
phases of the online class, namely (i) lecturer talk, (ii) pre-task, (iii) task engagement in breakout rooms, and (iv)
sharing outputs in the main room. The study brings implications for higher education EMI classroom interactions
by describing the multilingual, multifaceted, multimodal, and sequential organization of screen-recorded online
environments.
... Assessing classroom dialogues has been a significant area of focus in pedagogical research, particularly in the fields of mathematics and science [4,5,20]. Various approaches have been employed, such as collecting student feedback for detailed evaluation [38,39], and using machine learning methods for prediction [41,42]. Some studies have evaluated the students' thinking process from diverse points of view [27], while others have focused on dialogic practices in achieving specific goals [16] or the performance of student group interactions [20] and actual performance scoring [19]. ...
This perspective paper proposes a series of interactive scenarios that utilize Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance classroom teaching, such as dialogue auto-completion, knowledge and style transfer, and assessment of AI-generated content. By leveraging recent developments in Large Language Models (LLMs), we explore the potential of AI to augment and enrich teacher-student dialogues and improve the quality of teaching. Our goal is to produce innovative and meaningful conversations between teachers and students, create standards for evaluation, and improve the efficacy of AI-for-Education initiatives. In Section 3, we discuss the challenges of utilizing existing LLMs to effectively complete the educated tasks and present a unified framework for addressing diverse education dataset, processing lengthy conversations, and condensing information to better accomplish more downstream tasks. In Section 4, we summarize the pivoting tasks including Teacher-Student Dialogue Auto-Completion, Expert Teaching Knowledge and Style Transfer, and Assessment of AI-Generated Content (AIGC), providing a clear path for future research. In Section 5, we also explore the use of external and adjustable LLMs to improve the generated content through human-in-the-loop supervision and reinforcement learning. Ultimately, this paper seeks to highlight the potential for AI to aid the field of education and promote its further exploration.
... What makes the real difference in the focal context was the lecturer's interactional management of the EMI classroom by creating the space for the students to report understanding troubles and involve with their peers in resolving troubles in translingual turn structures (Bozbıyık & Can Daşkın, 2022). This was eventually exploited by the lecturer to ensure a whole-class understanding (Schwab, 2011). Accordingly, the lecturer strategically transformed the moment of translingual peer involvement into opportunities for learning the content in the EMI classroom. ...
The internationalization of educational settings has been increasingly leading to wider recogni- tion of English Medium Instruction (EMI) in higher education institutions, and a growing number of studies have investigated EMI policies of universities with diverse research foci. However, only little attention has been paid to classroom interactional dynamics with a particular focus on actual teaching/learning practices, and an examination of translanguaging as a pedagogical resource in multilingual learning environments has not been an exception. Although previous studies have explored lecturers’ translanguaging practices in EMI classrooms, students’ trans- lingual contributions seems terra incognita. In this regard, using multimodal Conversation Anal- ysis, this study closely examines translingual peer involvement through students’ multilingual and multimodal repertoires that become observable while resolving troubles in understanding. Based on the video-recorded classroom interactions in an undergraduate program on Mathe- matics and Science Education at a state EMI university in Türkiye, the current study demonstrates how students actively participate in ongoing interactions to resolve understanding troubles. The findings show how translingual peer involvement emerges across English and Turkish languages, and an invented language, and creates space for the lecturer to enhance learner contributions. The study brings new insights into EMI classroom discourse in an emerging context.
... When working in a group, students learn from both the teacher and the peers. Thus, the dialogue between the teacher and the students is in fact not a dialogue, it is a multilogue (Schwab, 2011). Dennen and Wieland (2007, p. 283) argue that learning "is not narrowly de ned as a one-or two-way dialogue between individual student and teacher" and requires students to negotiate a shared meaning and, as a result, develop intersubjectivity. ...
In language learning, e-learning is often contrasted to on-campus face-to-face (F2F) in what is known as media studies. This approach ignores the fact that most university courses are already blended, with synchronous element accounting for approximately 1/3 of the student’s workload, with the other 2/3 being asynchronous and delivered mostly online. Focusing on the synchronous part only allows us to compare the two distinct modes of its delivery: on campus and by videoconferencing, with its corresponding effects on the rest of the course. This single-case study is conducted with a group of first-year university studying a foreign language for translators and interpreters via videoconferencing in the first semester and on campus in the second semester. The research design is cross-sectional with data proceeding from course statistics and a final questionnaire. The conceptual framework is based on Transactional Distance Theory by Moore and Zone of Proximal Development Theory by Vygotsky. Our students regarded class dialogue in online F2F as being maintained though affected by technology issues additional to those present in on-campus F2F communication. Moreover, students valued positively the fact of having more time available for study, they improved their autonomy and reported feeling more comfortable when had classes online. The traditional universities after the pandemic face a new technological panorama, with students happy to socialize on campus but already conscious of existing alternatives to on-campus teaching. Deeper research into class dialogue, on-campus, online and mixed, is urgently needed for the universities to decide whether they should adopt these alternatives.
... A dialogue captures both a dilogue and a polylogue (multilogue), and a polylogue further diffuses into several more specific forms, such as dilogues, trilogues, tetralogues, pentalogues, etc. (and thus interaction is dyadic, triadic, and so on). As for multilogue, it is often used interchangeably with polylogue, yet while the latter is more a technical term used in linguistic accounts, the former is also deployed beyond linguistics (especially in pedagogy, psychology, environmental studies, computational sciences) to mean communication between stakeholders in general, (e.g., Ginzburg and Fernándes, 2005;Schwab, 2011;Ginzburg et al., 2012), wherein all participants are included, whether ratified or unratified (Schwab, 2011: 7). In the same general sense of communication, particularly in folk knowledge, the term dialogue tends to be used, often mistakenly, to designate an exchange between only two interactants. ...
The paper discusses the concept of offensiveness, both explicit and implicit, in film dialogical discourse based on three parts of a romantic comedy. The differences between explicitness and implicitness on the one hand, and between implicitness and (in)directness on the other are presented in the theoretical part. Indirectness and implicitness are treated in the study as independent concepts that instantiate covert meaning. On the other hand, explicitness and implicitness are viewed as gradual concepts that allow some overlap; thus, direct implicitness and indirect explicitness emerge as possible options. Furthermore, the category of offensiveness is presented as a broad category, a superordinate term that subsumes offensive language, typically realised through explicitly offensive words, such as swearwords, and (non)offence, encoded by rhetorical devices. Offensive language can have the function of offending the target addressee, i.e., to cause offence, or to build, inter alia, a jocular, intimate or friendly atmosphere. Offensiveness can thus embrace propositions that lead to offence or convey other, non-offensive meanings. Examples of both offensive language (explicit/direct forms) and subtypes of offence (figurative forms), as well as a combination of both (e.g., figurative forms such as ironic comments that contain swearwords), are gleaned from the corpus of three parts of the eponymous romantic comedy. The analysis has shown that figurative forms are often conflated (to create metaphorical irony, ironic hyperbole, and the like), the implicit forms of offensiveness occur almost as frequently as explicit forms and are distributed equally across gender, varying forms of offensiveness play the whole gamut of functions, disparagement being only one of them.
This study explores the interactional meaning of an invitation to bid in Korean elementary school EFL classroom interaction by adopting a conversation analytic perspective. The study argues that participants use invitations to bid to indicate that a question elicits knowledge worthy of public demonstration. The analysis of thirteen video-recorded EFL lessons revealed that teachers use invitations to bid, fulfilling instructional agenda or demands whether they are set up at the beginning of an activity or arise midway. Students similarly invite themselves to bid, showing their understanding of the meaning that the practice carries. While teachers overwhelmingly accept students’ self-invitations, they may reject them in light of the details of instructional here and now. It is argued that deciding which student population should reply is a matter of negotiation although teachers have the final say, oriented to consequences of turn allocation on the work of teaching in progress.
Growing evidence shows the role of teachers gestures not only in L2 learning ( Stam & Tellier, 2021 ) but also in supporting learning in the L1 classroom ( Alibali et al., 2014 ; Crowder, 1996 ; Wilson et al., 2014 ). The current study aims at contributing to this last perspective. Based on data from a 3rd grade plurilingual classroom in an Italian school, it observes the ‘catchments’ ( McNeill, 2000 ) in teacher’s gesticulation during a cycle of lessons on “The origin of life”. The analysis identifies conceptual components based on the time is space metaphor associated with gestures, and observes their alignment with lexical items – either technical or common words ( evolution, ages, ancestors, archaic ; change, back, old ) – in speech. The gesture-word association supports both the conceptualization of the notions and the acquisition of the related lexicon: gestures connect recurring concepts to their different verbalisations, ensuring a conceptually coherent representation over the lesson; they establish synonimic relations between technical and common words; and they can also work as memory triggers towards and between concepts and lexical units.
In this chapter, the territory of CALTE will be mapped out to clearly introduce the original knowledge and praxis bases, the defining features and the dedicated LTE models informed by multimodal CA, and CA research on reflective talk. The chapter will conclude with an identification of the gaps and the devised digital solutions in response, which unpacks the scope of the subsequent analytic chapters.
This study shows how learner initiatives are taken during classroom discussions where the teacher seeks to make room for subjectification. Using Conversation Analysis, subjectification can be observed when students take the freedom to express themselves as subjects through learner initiatives. Drawing on data from classroom discussions in language and literature lessons in the mother tongue, the authors find that learner initiatives can be observed in three different ways: agreement, request for information, counter-response. A learner initiative in the form of an agreement appears to function mostly as a continuer and prompts the previous speaker to reclaim the turn, while the I-R-F structure remains visible. In contrast, making a request for information or giving a counter-response ensures mostly a breakthrough of the I-R-F-structure and leads to a dialogical participation framework in which multiple students participate. Findings illustrate that by making a request for information or giving a counter-response, students not only act as an independent individual, but also encourage his peers to do so.
In this article, we begin by delineating the background to and motivations behind Firth and Wagner (1997), wherein we called for a reconceptualization of second language acquisition (SLA) research. We then outline and comment upon some of our critics' reactions to the article. Next we review and discuss the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological impact the article has had on the SLA field. Thereafter, we re-engage and develop some of the themes raised but left undeveloped in the 1997 article. These themes cluster around the notions of and interrelationships between language use, language learning, and language acquisition. Although we devote space to forwarding the position that the dichotomy of language use and acquisition cannot defensibly be maintained (and in this we take up a contrary position to that held in mainstream SLA), our treatment of the issues is essentially methodological. We focus on describing a variety of aspects of learning-inaction , captured in transcripts of recordings of naturally occurring foreign, second, or other language interactions. Through transcript analyses, we explore the possibilities of describing learning-inaction devoid of cognitivistic notions of language and learning. In so doing, we advance moves to formulate and establish a reconceptualized SLA.
An exciting new collection by world-leading researchers in L2 learning addressing: Why do conceptions of ‘learning’ vary so much in L2 learning research? Is there a conceptualisation of ‘learning’ to which members of different schools of SLA can subscribe?. © Paul Seedhouse, Steve Walsh and Chris Jenks 2010 and their individual authors 2010.
The following chapter explores the relationship between participation and learning. It does so for a particular type of learning situation, a young learners’ class taught in a teacher/whole-class alignment. The chapter addresses the following research question: How does participation contribute to the instructed learning of a foreign language?
There is currently considerable interest in the relationship between Conversation Analysis (CA) and Sociocultural or Social Constructionist (SC) approaches to language learning. This chapter analyses extracts of L2 classroom interaction to discover the extent to which SC constructs may or may not be manifest in the details of the interaction. If such constructs are evident, then how are they talked into being and how are they organized in interactional terms? Do they provide an adequate account of language learning in the L2 classroom?
The aims of this concluding chapter are to tie together a number of themes that have emerged from the chapters in the collection and to reflect on the processes of research manifested in the chapters, positioning these in relation to linguistic and social science research paradigms. A frequent complaint by researchers outside CA is that CA practitioners tend not to make their methodology and procedures comprehensible and accessible to researchers from other disciplines. It has sometimes been acknowledged by CA practitioners (Peräkylä 1997) that more could be done in this respect. A full explication of CA methodology and procedures would start with a discussion of the ethnomethodological principles underpinning CA. Considerations of space prohibit such a discussion here; however, see Bergmann (1981), Heritage (1984b) and Seedhouse (2004). Similarly, this chapter cannot provide an introduction to CA methodology; however, see Hutchby and Wooffitt 1998; Psathas 1995; Seedhouse 2004; ten Have 1999. In this first section I will focus on two areas relevant to this collection, namely the CA view of language and the emic perspective.
Introducing language use and interaction as the basis of good teaching and learning, this invaluable book equips teachers and researchers with the tools to analyze classroom discourse and move towards more effective instruction. Presenting an overview of existing approaches to describing and analyzing classroom discourse, Steve Walsh identifies the principal characteristics of classroom language in the contexts of second language classrooms, primary and secondary classrooms, and higher education settings. A distinct feature of the book are the classroom recordings and reflective feedback interviews from a sample group of teachers that Walsh uses to put forward SETT (Self Evaluation of Teacher Talk) as a framework for examining discourse within the classroom. This framework is used to identify different modes of discourse, which are employed by teachers and students, to increase awareness of the importance of interaction, and to maximize learning opportunities. This book will appeal to applied linguists, teachers and researchers of TESOL, as well as practitioners on MEd or taught doctorate programmes.