The Practical Nature of L2 Teaching: A Conversation Analytic Perspective
... One of the notable features of Internet-mediated teaching websites and its educational platforms is their interactive interface designs. This is particularly so in view of the attested practical nature of L2 teaching in general (Hall et al., 2023). Suffice it to see and know how technologically progressive such designs seem to be in the current digital era of online teaching and learning (Öztok, 2019;Daniela, 2020;Kergel, 2021;Lütge, 2022;Kumpulainen et al., 2022;Sadeghi, 2022;Kergel et al., 2023). ...
This study offers new insights into the educational-linguistic visual semiotics of online teaching as a digital practice with kinetic-vectorial design. Towards this end, a twofold social semiotic approach is utilized as a synthetic methodology. First, Van Leeuwen"s (2016) kinetic design model is employed with a view to revealing the movement types of Internet-mediated L2 teaching practices. Second, Kress and Van Leeuwen"s (2021) model of ideational vector analysis is used in a way that uncovers the subtle pedagogical practices of the same type of teaching as directional and transactional acts addressed to educational-website networked L2 learners worldwide. The data sets targeted for analysis comprise screenshot-styled images from the BBC Learning English Website available for public purposes of L2 teaching. A total number of functionally related five images have been selected with an eye to the BBC"s pedagogic content online on the techno-semiotic levels of design kinetics and vectoriality. The current study has reached three findings (with emerging relevant implications). First, the synthetic kinetic-vectorial method of analysis has proved to be empirically effective in investigating the visual semiotics of design mediated by educational websites such as the BBC Website. Second, there emerged kinetically motivated "pedagogic" and "digital" vectors, respectively controlled by the BBC instructors and the design features of the website itself. Third, and last, the kinetic-vectorial analysis of the BBC Website revealed a sort of spatiotemporal compression of pedagogic content; further, the visual aspects of spatial and temporal movements (mobility and movability) appeared to have occurred across different semiotic modes, verbal and visual.
This PhD thesis primarily investigates the interactional unfolding and management of students' claims and teachers' interpretations of insufficient knowledge in two 'English as an Additional Language' classrooms from a multi-modal, conversation analytic perspective. The analyses draw on a close, micro-analytic account of turn-taking practices, repair, and preference organisation as well as various multi-semiotic resources the participants enact during talk-in-interaction including gaze, gestures, body movements, and orientations to classroom artefacts. In this respect, this is the first study to investigate claims of insufficient knowledge (e.g. I don't knows) from a multimodal perspective. Furthermore, although the phenomenon has been investigated from a CA perspective in casual talk and institutional interactions (e.g. Beach and Metzger 1997), this is the first study thus far to thoroughly examine students' claims and teachers' interpretations of insufficient knowledge in educational contexts, and in particular in instructed language learning environments, where English is taught as an additional language.
The research draws upon transcriptions of 16 (classroom) hours of video recordings, which were collected over a six-week period in 2010 in a public school in a multilingual setting; Luxembourg. The findings show that establishing recipiency (Mortensen 2009) through mutual gaze and turn allocation practices have interactional and pedagogical consequences that may lead to claims of insufficient knowledge. The findings also illustrate various multi-modal resources the students use (e.g. gaze movements, facial gestures, and headshake) to initiate embodied claims of no knowledge and that are a focus of orientation for the teacher to interpret insufficient knowledge by initiating 'epistemic status checks'. Finally, it is suggested that certain interactional resources (e.g. embodied vocabulary explanations, Designedly Incomplete Utterances) deployed by the teacher after a student's claim of insufficient knowledge may lead to student engagement, which is a desirable pedagogical goal. The findings of this thesis have implications for the analysis of insufficient knowledge, teaching, and language teacher education. It also has direct implications for L2 Classroom Interactional Competence (Walsh 2006) and the effect of teachers' language use on student participation.
Evidence from usage‐based studies of second language (L2) acquisition reveals that a main source of L2 learners’ developing grammars is the L2 input to which learners are regularly exposed. What learners develop from their extended engagement in the sequences of actions comprising the input is not an acontextual system of grammatical units but rather thoroughly social, positionally sensitive grammars linked to the linguistic designs of the sequences. A growing body of research drawing on the theoretical framework and analytic methods of conversation analysis (CA) has identified the recurring interactional activities of L2 classrooms, which, for most adult L2 learners, are a major source of L2 input. Less examined are the linguistic designs of the interactional activities. This is the focus of the study reported here. Drawing on the shared theoretical and methodological framework of CA and interactional linguistics (IL), and building on previous work, the study examines the linguistic designs of information‐seeking sequences by which whole‐group instruction is accomplished. The focus is on teacher questions seeking factual information, the type of ‘knownness’ embodied in the questions, and both the actional types and linguistic designs of the student responses they engender. Findings show that while a great deal of opportunities for participation are made available to L2 learners in the information‐seeking sequences, the linguistic quality of the sequences is fairly limited in that the questions are designed primarily to engender one word or multiword phrases. These findings suggest that the possible pathways that learners’ developing L2 positionally sensitive grammars can take from their extended engagement in these sequences are also limited. For L2 teacher education, studies such as this one can enhance teachers’ understanding of the links between classroom input and learners’ developing L2 grammars, and the key role the teachers themselves play in designing the linguistic input of their L2 classroom contexts.
This book presents an international range of conversation analytic (CA) studies of classroom interaction which all discuss their empirical findings in terms of their theoretical and methodological contribution to the field of second language studies and their potential pedagogical relevance. The volume is thus unique in its focus on the theoretical and practical insights of CA classroom-based research and on the impact that such insights might have at the pedagogical level, from teaching to testing to teacher education. Given the growing interest in the pedagogical applicability of CA research, this book is a timely addition to the existing literature.
This article considers the use of negative polarization in polar (yes/no) questions. It argues that question polarity is used to take an epistemic stance toward the probability or improbability of the state of affairs referenced in the question and that taking such a stance is effectively unavoidable. Focusing on negatively polarized questions (NPQs), four main kinds of evidence are adduced that NPQs are associated with the questioner's stance that the question's underlying proposition is unlikely: (a) self-repair to reverse or otherwise adjust polarity; (b) evidence from the prior talk from which the question is occasioned; (c) contexts in which a particular state of affairs is relevant but has remained unstated; (d) overall structural organizational features of talk (e.g., conversational closings) that militate against the likelihood of affirmative responses. Finally, the article proposes that question design represents a distinct organizational layer vis-à-vis the preference-organizational characteristics of actions, and it appears to function in distinctive ways in relation to recruitment-and affiliation-relevant questions (e.g., requests, offers, etc.) by comparison with information-seeking questions. Data are drawn from corpora of British and American English conversations.
Drawing on video-recorded violin lessons as data, the article describes the violin teacher's use of Finnish second-person declarative and interrogative directives in mobilizing student compliance. It is shown that the declarative directives are regularly used when (1) the student is already engaged in the task at hand and (2) the nominated actions concern the basics of violin playing. The paper argues that these directives are thus not only about mobilizing recipient action locally but also about establishing normatively-desired behavior more generally. The interrogative directives, on the other hand, are typically used when (1) there has been a momentary shortcoming in the student's prior behavior and (2) the mobilized action is a one-time accomplishment remedying the smooth unfolding of the instructional encounter.
In classroom settings, laughter and smiles are resources for action that are available to both teachers and students. Recent interactional studies have documented how students use these resources to deal with trouble of various kind, but less is known about the sequential and activity contexts of teachers’ laughter-relevant practices, as well as their pedagogical functions. We use multimodal conversation analysis (CA) to investigate the interactional unfolding and pedagogical orientations of teacher smiles during instructional IRE (initiation-response-evaluation) sequences in a corpus of 37 bilingual lessons collected in schools in Finland and Spain. In analysing the focal smiles, we pay attention to their temporal relationships to students’ preceding and subsequent facial expressions and the unfolding of on-going talk. We argue that smiling can index teachers’ affiliative and pedagogical responsiveness to troubles and competences implied by prior student actions. The analysis of selected data fragments shows how smiling is part of multimodal action packages through which teachers manage momentary action disalignments and restore a sense of students as competent actors. The findings contribute towards recent CA research on the embodied and interactional nature of teaching and learning by showing some ways in which smiling is a situated practice used for professional purposes.
In this article we illustrate how trainers and trainees negotiate epistemic and deontic authority within systemic family therapy training. Adult education principles and postmodern imperatives have challenged trainers’ and trainees’ asymmetries regarding knowledge (epistemics) and power (deontics), normatively implicated by the institutional training setting. Up-to-date, we lack insight into how trainers and trainees negotiate epistemic and deontic rights in naturally occurring dialog within training. Drawing from discursive psychology and conversation analysis, we present an analysis of eight transcribed, videotaped training seminars from a systemic family therapy training program, featuring three trainers and eleven trainees. Our analysis highlights the dilemmatic ways in which participants resist and affirm the normatively implicated trainers’ deontic and epistemic authority. Trainers are shown as mitigating directives and trainees as resisting them, with both displaying (not)knowing, while attending to concerns about (a)symmetry. We discuss our findings’ implications for systemic family therapy training.
Using the methodology of conversation analysis to examine interactions in outdoor activities, this study explores how participants specifically see an object or event in the development of an activity. In particular, the distinction between (visual) perception and knowledge is oriented to by the participants as a practical issue that informs their alternative action constructions. This distinction matters as a resource for implementing an action in an interaction. The data are in Japanese with English translations.
This paper explores the classroom socialisation of a mundane institutional language policy regarding the use of the target language: Japanese. Based on audiovisual recordings in a Japanese as a heritage language (JHL) classroom, it analyses episodes when teachers initiated repair on children’s novel English loanwords (i.e. English-based words pronounced in Japanese but not widely accepted and used), in ways that treated them (or sometimes the social actions performed through them) as problematic. Through a multimodal analysis of other-initiated repair turns and the sequences in which they were lodged, it examines how students responded, and whether and how teachers engaged in correction. In aiming to bridge research on classroom discourse using conversation analysis (CA) and language socialisation, the paper argues how repair and correction are practices for conveying the school language policy to ‘speak only in Japanese’. It also argues that these practices have the potential for socialising students beyond the classroom, to membership into (an imagined) Japanese society where monitoring one’s language use as a bilingual Japanese-English speaker may be important because the excessive use of English loanwords can become an object of others’ negative attitudes and evaluations.
This volume presents a new approach to motivation that focuses on the concept of 'vision'. Drawing on visualisation research in sports, psychology and education, the authors describe powerful ways by which imagining future scenarios in one's mind's eye can promote motivation to learn a foreign language. The book offers a rich selection of motivational strategies that can help students to 'see' themselves as potentially competent language users, to experience the value of knowing a foreign language in their own lives and, ultimately, to invest effort into learning it. Transformational leaders' vision for change is one of the prerequisites of turning language classrooms into motivating learning environments, and the second part of the book therefore focuses on how to ignite language teacher enthusiasm, how to re-kindle it when it may be waning and how to guard it when it is under threat.
This study investigates how pre-service teachers of English as a foreign language do correction during their initial teaching practice at lower-secondary schools. The study employs multimodal conversation analysis on a dataset of 16 lessons taught by three pre-service teachers in Czechia. The analysis focuses specifically on how the teachers orient to the task format when doing correction in answer-check sequences. It demonstrates how the teachers employ talk, gesture and gaze to make the task format (such as fill-in-the-blanks, matching) relevant and thereby use the materials as points of reference as well as resources for structuring classroom discourse. This use of materials contributes to the completion of the correction sequences. It is concluded that (over-)reliance on teaching materials and limited flexibility, which can be observed in not accepting alternative answers produced by learners, seem to be manifestations of some of the traits of pre-service teachers’ performance.
This conversation analytic study explores German turn-final oder nich(t), as in Soll ich jetzt weiterlesen oder nicht (“should I continue reading or not”). These oder nicht-appended questions raise one state of affairs and invoke its negated version via oder nicht. They emerge in environments in which epistemics and/or deontics are negotiated. Through these turns, participants index their commitment to the likelihood of the state of affairs expressed in the question. Oder nicht works as an epistemic stance marker and minimizes the potential for disconfirmation. As such, oder nicht is a resource for questioners to design their questions in ways that index their stance that an agreeing response is more likely. Thus, oder nicht effectively constrains the recipient’s options (similar to English polarized tag questions). Data are in German with English translations.
In this paper, we address the larger notion of cooperation in interaction and its underlying dimensions as defined in Conversation Analysis: alignment and affiliation. Focusing on three cases from three different languages (Danish, Estonian and Finnish) we investigate a specific practice, that of anticipatory completions, in a particular context, that of storytelling, and show that the practice of completing another speaker’s turn in an anticipatory manner is not de facto definable as either an aligning or non-aligning action, nor can it be said to be either affiliating or non-affiliating. Through our analyses, we aim to distinguish and illustrate the manifold layers of and perspectives to alignment and affiliation and argue for their relevance for studies of interactional phenomena. We conclude that the notion of cooperation and its implementation through affiliating and/or aligning actions is a multi-layered and complex issue, the intricacies of which are best understood and captured through detailed sequential analyses.
This paper demonstrates how the tools of Interactional Linguistics can be applied to the study of change in language use. It examines the particle OKAY as used in everyday American English interaction at two different points in time, the 1960s and the 1990s/early 2000s. The focus is on the remarkable increase of OKAY as a response in epistemically driven sequences. Three uses of epistemic OKAY are identified in the newer data, one of which is unattested in the older data: OKAY in response to information that has no implications for the recipient’s agenda or expressed beliefs. This novel use of OKAY appears in the newer data where OH would have occurred earlier, although OH is still attested with displays of affect such as surprise and empathy. The study concludes by arguing for an examination of ‘possibility spaces’, the set of options for filling a given sequential slot in conversational structure, at different points in time as a means for identifying changes in language use.
This paper focuses on the transformation of conversation analytic findings on L2 classroom interaction into resources for changing teachers’ pedagogical practices. It argues that identification of problems in student-teacher interaction or of interactional sequences that create learning opportunities can provide valuable insights for teachers, as many of these practices display commonalities across different contexts. However, research is scarce on integrating CA findings into teacher education, especially in the form of audio-visual materials. To enable this, CA findings of classroom interaction need to be based on a comparative research agenda. In order to illustrate how this can be done, the chapter presents analyses of three different extracts of talk that exhibit different trajectories of code switching behaviors by teachers and students in two different countries. More specifically, these analyses show how two teachers in EFL classrooms in Luxembourg and Turkey managed their students’ use of the L1s, and how the students responded to this behaviour. These analyses potentially have pedagogical value for language teachers in that they may be used to develop audio-visual tools that are designed to help teachers engage with their own on-going professional development. This is demonstrated through detailing the integration of a mobile application into a teacher education framework known as IMDAT, thus transforming CA findings into future L2 teaching practices.
This paper adopts an ethnomethodological, conversation analytic approach to analyze the social organization of the instruction-giving sequences that were accomplished by a teacher of Italian as a foreign language during the last phase of a writing task conducted in pairs. Specifically, the paper explores the linguistic, prosodic and embodied resources mobilized by the teacher as she engages in various rounds of instruction giving to prompt each pair of students to read their texts aloud. As the analysis shows, while the first round (targeting the first pair of students) is rather lengthy and subject to repair, the last round (targeting the last pair of students) consists of a minimal summons-answer sequence. Such minimization results from the students’ increased familiarity with the task. That is, by the time the teacher is about to select the last group of students as next speakers, these students have already listened to multiple rounds of instruction-giving sequences and seen multiple implementations of the task. Overall, the paper contributes to the research concerning the mundane, yet complex, social action of doing pedagogical instructions. The implications of these empirical findings for teacher education are discussed at the end of the chapter.
Drawing on a corpus of pre-service teacher training classroom interactions in an English-medium instruction university in Turkey, we examine teacher follow-up turns that introduce specialized terms, showing how a teacher transforms student’s responses into pedagogically relevant points using academic language. We argue that teacher third-turns following student contributions accomplish several interrelated actions, not only introducing new terminology to these teachers-in-training, but also familiarizing them with ways of thinking specific to their discipline, i.e., these turns model “doing being a teacher.” These teacher actions are used to bridge student contributions to more scientific talk, that is, the teacher confirms contributions as subject-relevant by steering the direction of the upcoming talk, while also introducing students to potentially unfamiliar terminology, speaking as a member of an unnamed group of subject-matter experts. Notably, we argue that these content-based follow-ups are realized multimodally, drawing on prosodic, gestural, and proxemic resources, among others, and that these multimodal actions are an important aspect of teacher’s classroom interactional competence, showing how instructors socialize pre-service teachers into thinking and talking like professionals, i.e., like teachers.
This conversation analytic study explicates the differential actions of the English phrase I don’t know (IDK) and its equivalent in Japanese, wakannai , as deployed by Japanese learners of English during peer discussions for language learning. By examining natural classroom interaction, we explore second language (L2) speakers’ use of these tokens for various pragmatic actions. The data consist of 47 h of discussions in English language classes in three Japanese universities. The discussions were carried out in the target language, English, for the most part, but occasionally the participants used their common first language (L1), Japanese. All cases of IDK and wakannai examined here occurred in first positions during production of opinions or first assessments. The analysis revealed that within a single discussion session, the participants marshalled IDK and wakannai to perform differential actions. Overwhelmingly, in our data, IDK was deployed to manage their epistemic stance, while wakannai was produced to make a public assertion of their insufficient knowledge.
This text introduces techniques for teachers to explore their classroom experiences and for critical reflection on teaching practices. This book introduces teachers to techniques for exploring their own classroom experiences. Numerous books deal with classroom observation and research, but this is the first to offer a carefully structured approach to self-observation and self-evaluation. Richards and Lockhart aim to develop a reflective approach to teaching, one in which teachers collect data about their own teaching; examine their attitudes, beliefs, and assumptions; and use the information they obtain as a basis for critical reflection on teaching practices. Each chapter includes questions and activities appropriate for group discussion or self-study.
Bringing together thirteen original papers by leading American and British researchers, this volume reflects fresh developments in the increasingly influential field of conversation analysis. It begins by outlining the theoretical and methodological foundations of the field and goes on to develop some of the main themes that have emerged from topical empirical research. These include the organisation of preference, topic, non-vocal activities, and apparently spontaneous responses such as laughter and applause. The collection represents the most comprehensive statement yet to be published on this type of research.
This conversation analytic study investigates the sequential organization and question constraints of alternative questions in English with a focus on response formats. Building on research on polar and wh-questions (among others, Enfield, Stivers and Levinson 2010 ; Raymond 2003 ; Thompson, Fox and Couper-Kuhlen 2015 ), this article shows that responses to alternative questions that include a repeat of one of the alternatives are type-conforming, those that do not are nonconforming. Additionally, even though the concept of contiguity ( Sacks 1973/1987 ) might suggest that the second alternative be confirmed, participants confirm either alternative unproblematically. Finally, my work shows that alternative questions can create difficulties for action ascription, because as they are being produced, they often resemble polar questions. My study adds to our understanding of question-answer sequences in English by providing an overview of an understudied question type in English. The data are in American English.
There is little doubt that Sacks’s notion of the “preference for agreement” is generally valid. However, that it is valid does not tell us how it is valid. This article further unpacks the preference for agreement by conversation-analytically grounding one of its many underlying mechanisms. Specifically, this article examines the practice of formatting an action—in this case, a type of information seeking—as a positively formatted polar interrogative without polarity items (e.g., Did you go fishing?). This article demonstrates that doing so enacts a speaker stance that the question’s proposed state of affairs (e.g., that the recipient went fishing) is probable and thus that a response is more likely to constitute affirmation than disaffirmation. Additionally, this article describes the preference-organizational effects of such formatting on some aspects of response construction. Data are gathered from videotapes of unstructured, face-to-face conversations, included 289 interrogatives, and are in American English.
This article finds empirical evidence of second language (L2) interactional competence (IC) and its development by focusing on one of the interactional practices: self-repairing. Compared to prior repair IC studies which mainly have explored how L2 speakers deal with evident L2-related troubles in conversation, this study focuses on cases in which they deploy self-repair when there are no such linguistic problems in previous talk, taking Mauranen’s (2006) dichotomy between retroactive and proactive self-repairs. After analyzing the conversation by L2 speakers with different oral proficiency, this study discovers whereas novice and intermediate speakers self-repair for correcting what is lexically or grammatically problematic, advanced speakers deploy self-repair mostly for pre-empting possible misunderstandings. Advanced speakers replace the previous items into words that are specific in the meaning range by fine-tuning the level of ‘granularity’ (Schegloff 2000) to avoid ambiguity and further other-initiated repair. The findings suggest that the development of L2 IC involves speakers’ ability to detect potential problems in the eyes of the recipients and replace them in advance.
Using video recordings as data to study how dyads follow instructional videos to achieve practical tasks, this article focuses on how partici- pants coordinate the temporality of the video with that of their task by pausing the video. We examine three types of pausing, each display- ing participants’ online understanding of the instructions and differ- ent articulations between demonstrations and practical task: pausing to raise a correspondence problem, to keep up with the video, and to turn to action. From this exemplar case, we discuss how ordinary people experience and make time with interactive media.
This conversation-analytic paper investigates word searches in collaborative storytelling. Through detailed multimodal analysis of video recorded French conversations, in which couples jointly recount shared experiences, two recognizable participation formats are distinguished: in solitary searches, current tellers withdraw their gaze from their co-teller and display a preference for self-repair by means of verbal, vocal, and gestural resources. In joint searches, tellers mobilize their co-teller's assistance to different degrees. They signal an upcoming problem early in their turn and establish a framework for potential coparticipation even before the progressivity of the turn is halted. Gaze, especially mutual gaze, is found to be the strongest mobilization device, while pragmatic and depictive gestures facilitate consociate turn entry. Turn-constructional features, particularly the production format and semanto-syntactic projection of the turn-in-progress, are shown to either delimit coparticipation (i.e., searches for a precise or delicate item) or invite open-ended co-tellership (i.e., open searches). In addition to a number of clear-cut cases, the analysis of a more complex case shows that current tellers can shift participation as a search is in progress.
Teachers’ instruction-giving practices in classrooms are largely recognized as the primary condition for the smooth progression of pedagogical activities. Following the formulation of the instruction by teachers, students are expected to perform preferred actions in the next relevant place in interaction. It is also likely that potential troubles in understanding teacher instructions might arise, which leads to delays of activity completion. Such troubles are made visible in interaction through two ways: (1) students’ explicit claims of non-understanding and (2) teachers’ identification of trouble in understanding without students’ explicit claims. Using multimodal conversation analysis for the examination of video-recorded higher education English as a foreign language classroom interactions (25h), this study mainly deals with the latter in response to gaps in the literature and sets out to describe a method in particular deployed by an L2 teacher for the identification and resolution of understanding troubles in instruction-giving sequences, namely third position repairs. The findings provide insights into L2 classroom discourse.
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Conversational storytelling involves producing multiple turns that are sequenced consecutively to form a connected whole. Producing a connected story is a challenging task for second language (L2) speakers because their language use may generate repairs of various kinds. In this regard, L2 tellers have the dual obligation of moving their stories forward while managing language issues that may interrupt the progress of their telling. The present study was designed to trace how language issues are handled during L2 storytelling and what relevance this has on the topical themes of the stories-in-progress. The data were taken from two corpora in which nonnative speakers of English engaged in storytelling sessions. The findings revealed the diverse ways in which language issues are exposed or embedded through repair sequences. While tellers’ uncertainty regarding language use often prompts repair sequences, these repairs are subject to their contingent decisions to resume their stories. This study provides insight into how language moments are configured into storytelling sequencing, a topic that has received limited attention in applied linguistics.
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 do. Around delayed responses, a teacher and students smile and produce standalone laughter that orients to students not responding promptly in teacher-initiated sequences as well as to subsequent actions of the teacher. Following disaligning responses, students produce standalone laughter that orients affiliatively to the non-serious nature of disaligning turns. In contrast, the teacher’s interpolated particles of aspiration and smile voice, while recognising the playfulness of disaligning turns, is more disaffiliative and precedes turns in which the teacher redirects the nature of the interaction seriously. Thus, the work that laughter does is not necessarily purely affiliative or disaffiliative but falls on a spectrum of (dis)affiliation. The analysis suggests that laughter and smiling are key resources in the management of sensitive moments in classroom interaction involving uncertainty, the mitigation of sensitive actions, and (dis)affiliation.
Drawing on an analysis of Japanese calligraphy (shodô) lessons where a master reviews his students’ works, I explore the organization of sequences in which the master proposes the correction or improvement of how they draw Japanese or Chinese characters. In such cases, the master faces two organizational issues: (a) how to organize his seeing of a drawn character in an adequately convincing manner, under the aspect of the drawing action that caused its appearance; and (b) how to organize the instruction sequences in a pedagogically adequate manner, by beginning with an explicit indication of the problem regarding the appearance of the character. I argue that the eventually accomplished sequences are the result of the simultaneous solution of these two issues. In conclusion, I reflect on some implications for further investigations of multimodal perception in distinct activities. Data are in Japanese with English translations.
Using video recordings of draft meetings conducted as part of an intramural basketball program as data, this conversation analytic study examines the use of an incomplete utterance in a joint evaluative activity. In particular, we focus on how the participants, volunteer coaches, who meet to draft players for their respective teams, produce a syntactically incomplete utterance as a means to critically assess a player, a non-present third party to the interaction. Analysis reveals that the participants use an incomplete utterance as part of dispreferred design; it allows them to withhold articulating overt criticism of others. By trailing off where the criticism is due, the participants display reluctance to verbalize what is to be said and treat its articulation as delicate. The syntactic structure of the utterance that includes a contrastive conjunction (‘but’) and accompanying embodied actions such as head shakes help them convey a critical stance. We examine the use of incomplete utterances in both agreement and disagreement sequences; the recipients display their unproblematic understanding of the critical assessment and respond by providing their own assessments that either affiliate or disaffiliate with the conveyed critical stance.
The construct of classroom interactional competence builds upon propositions made by the sociocultural theory of learning to explore the interactional consequences of teacher talk in the foreign language classroom. The sociocultural theory upholds learner participation as the key for learning to take place. Meanwhile, studies with a conversation analytic methodology have shown that learner participation depends in part on teachers' interactional practices or their classroom interactional competence. That is, teacher talk has the potential to shape learner contributions in the classroom and either facilitate or obstruct their participation. The present study has investigated how teacher talk can do so across question-answer sequences in two EFL classes in Japan and Taiwan in a Collaborative Online International Learning program. The microanalytic study of question-answer sequences in the data indicated that while referential questions, as opposed to display questions, are more likely to generate more elaborate learner responses, the interactional context in which questions are posed can influence their outcome as well. Among the interactional practices identified as facilitators of learners' participation were asking referential questions at TRPs, asking referential follow-up questions when a communicative breakdown emerges, teacher echoing of learner responses, and paraphrasing the referential question already asked. On the contrary, practices including self-elaboration, self-answering, asking referential questions in or after extended teacher turns, teacher interruptions, and teacher turn completions were found to have obstructive effects on learners' responses.
