Stephen Looney

Pennsylvania State University | Penn State · Department of Applied Linguistics

Second language (L2) teaching is complex interactional work. Although how teachers teach is known to be significant to student engagement and learning, the specialized nature of teaching is typically represented as knowledge and beliefs about teaching. This is changing, however, as the number of studies drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation...

This paper investigates the use of laughter and smiling to manage (dis)affiliation during two types of disturbances in the interactional unfolding of classrooms: delayed and disaligning responses. The analysis reveals that the sequential position and embodied turn design are integral to understanding the (dis)affiliative work laughter and smiling d...

This article compares the sequential position, action, and design of teasing sequences in classroom and mundane interaction. This collection of teases comes from a university Geosciences classroom, and the analysis demonstrates that, like teases in ordinary conversation, classroom teases are sequentially bound and designed in extreme fashions. None...

This conversation analysis (CA) study extends our understanding of the complexity of three turn instructional sequences by investigating the multimodal turn design of a teacher's third turn repetitions (TTRs) and the actions accomplished in the third turn position as well as subsequent post-expansions. The videorecorded data are from an undergradua...

Locally-administered placement tests for International Teaching Assistants (ITAs) impact the quality of ITAs’ graduate studies and the quality of undergraduate education. However, in-house testing programs face challenges in terms of funding, time, and expertise to ensure the reliability and address the validity of their ITA tests. This chapter exa...

Recent work has reconceptualized language and interaction in terms that blur lines between languages, modalities, and material resources, and much of this work has taken up terms such as translingual and translanguaging. These perspectives understand that bi/multilinguals draw on a variety of semiotic resources in interaction and prioritize communi...

No PDF available ABSTRACT While a range of measures based on speech production, language, and perception are possible (Manun et al., 2020) for the prediction and estimation of speech intelligibility, what constitutes second language (L2) intelligibility remains under-defined. Prosodic and temporal features (i.e., stress, speech rate, rhythm, and pa...

Current leading mispronunciation detection and diagnosis (MDD) systems achieve promising performance via end-to-end phoneme recognition. One challenge of such end-to-end solutions is the scarcity of human-annotated phonemes on natural L2 speech. In this work, we leverage unlabeled L2 speech via a pseudo-labeling (PL) procedure and extend the fine-t...

Part 1: Broad Description: This Early-concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER) funding project focuses on exploring and developing a novel operational collection of speech, language and perception-based measures to objectively assess speech intelligibility for second language (L2) speech production, as well as providing effective learner-spe...

This article investigates the inter-personal and intra-personal functions of the discourse marker (DM) okay in sequences of self-directed talk during university Mathematics lectures. This article takes a conversation analytic approach to the use of okay in the self-directed talk of three graduate students giving Mathematics lectures at a U.S univer...