Taking learner initiatives within classroom discussions with room for subjectification

This chapter reports on an observational study of children’s talk with their teachers and its impact on the acquisition of English as a foreign language (L2) (In this paper the term (L2) is used most times to refer to “second/foreign language”, which means any additional non-native language. L1 refers to speakers’ mother tongue) in pre-primary bilingual education classrooms. The focus is the nature of teacher-child classroom discourse, including an analysis of child L2 emerging grammars. The data, comprising classroom observation, field notes and 30 h of audio-recordings over a period of one school year indicate (1) that English grammar construction is driven by oral classroom discourse, and (2) that the practices which facilitate talk amongst teachers and child learners are determinant to help learners during the developmental process. The emerging child English L2 grammars are determined greatly by instructional classroom discourse. During teacher-child interaction, a wide range of teaching and learning discourse strategies were observed: questions, repetition, language mixing, recast, elicitation, explicit correction, expansion, formulaic expressions, metalinguistic feedback and clarification request. Findings suggest that teacher-child communicative interactions help language development by facilitating comprehension and by having an impact on the L2 grammar construction. Finally, the chapter brings together classroom discourse and child L2 acquisition by proposing a range of pedagogical practices to boost conversational skills during teacher-child oral interactions.

Making room for subjectification during classroom discussions A Conversation Analytic study of interactional practices in the Dutch language classroom<br/><br/>This dissertation examines classroom discussions in which Dutch language and literature teachers in secondary education make room for subjectification, one of the three educational functions of education. Subjectification concerns the emancipation and freedom of the student and the responsibility that comes with it. One way to introduce students to this freedom and responsibility is through conducting equal dialogues in which participants can present themselves as unique, independent individuals and in which encounters can take place.<br/><br/>By applying Conversation Analysis (CA) as a research method, this dissertation, consisting of four sub-studies, demonstrates that asking for opinions and experiences allows students to express themselves as subjects, and that the teacher’s response, after expressing an opinion or experience, is crucial for the emergence of a dialogue. It also becomes clear that moments when students take turns without being prompted lead to dialogical interaction. The results of this dissertation show that during such dialogical interactions, students mainly express opinions, which in turn provoke new opinions. It becomes clear that students often stick to their own perspectives and rarely ask questions on their own initiative. This means that if teachers want to work on subjectification, they should explicitly encourage students to understand and appreciate perspectives of others.<br/><br/>This dissertation thus provides both fundamental knowledge about stimulating dialogical interaction and practical insights for teachers who want to make room for subjectification during their lessons through conducting classroom discussions.

This study examined interactional sequences in which students initiated storytelling in classroom interactions. The data consisted of 13 stories initiated by students in intermediate and advanced Persian language classes at two North American Universities. The study drew on conversation analysis in combination with membership categorization analysis to detail the sequential structure and category work in the students’ stories. A key finding was that students exhibited their knowledge affordances through storytelling. Specifically, the study explored how students’ identity work via self-initiated stories enabled them to make relevant their knowledge of and experience with certain cultural matters. Storytelling became an interactional site for students to show their sociocultural knowledge about the target community, and students’ initiation of stories invoked symmetry in classroom discourse and promoted agency. The current study contributes to research on storytelling in classroom interaction and to the growing body of research on epistemics in classroom discourse.

Discourse is language as it occurs, in any form or context, beyond the speech act. It may be written or spoken, monological or dialogical, but there is always a communicative aim or purpose. The present volume provides systematic orientation in the vast field of studying discourse from a pragmatic perspective. It first gives an overview of a range of approaches developed for the analysis of discourse, including, among others, conversation analysis, systemic-functional analysis, genre analysis, critical discourse analysis, corpus-driven approaches and multimodal analysis. The focus is furthermore on functional units in discourse, such as discourse markers, moves, speech act sequences, discourse phases and silence. The final section of the volume examines discourse types and domains, providing a taxonomy of discourse types and focusing on a range of discourse domains, e.g. classroom discourse, medical discourse, legal discourse, electronic discourse. Each article surveys the current state of the art of the respective topic area while also presenting new research findings.

Second language (L2) classroom discourse (CD) refers to the interactional practices employed in teaching language in instructed learning contexts. Since language is both the medium and the content, the teacher plays a central role in the L2 classroom context (Walsh, 2006). Specifically, the teacher uses language to provide comprehensible input, model appropriate pragmatic competence, and effectively facilitate student participation. In his book, Olcay Sert claims it is possible to understand the pedagogical and epistemic phenomena of L2 classroom interaction by applying micro-analytic research methods; therefore, he sets out to familiarize readers with Conversation Analysis (CA) and show its usefulness in studying L2 classroom discourse. This is done by first providing an overview of the framework, followed by utilizing it to analyze his data set of 16 hours of video-recordings from two English language classrooms in Luxembourg.

Advances in computer technology have produced a flood of new data sets for understanding human language. However, nearly all of these new data sets are based on written, rather than spoken, language. This means that, despite their importance, open-access data on naturally occurring spoken-language conversations are much more difficult to obtain. The major exception to this is the TalkBank system, which provides online multimedia data for 15 types of spoken-language data: language in aphasia, child language, stuttering, child phonology, autism spectrum disorder, bilingualism, conversation analysis, classroom discourse, dementia, psychosis, right hemisphere damage, Danish conversation, second-language learning, traumatic brain injury, and daylong recordings in the home. This article reviews these resources and describes the ways that they are being used to further our understanding of language learning and usage.

This chapter introduces the themes that constitute this book, which is written by and for educators and applied linguists who wish to get a comparative overview of research on classroom discourse and interaction. The book is concerned with both language learning and use, and how these domains of language are co-involved in understanding everything that routinely happens in language classrooms. More specifically, it is concerned with instructed second language acquisition theory and discourse analysis. These themes are explored in a Research Methodology and Assessment section, and in six research “Traditions:” the Educational, Language Socialization, Conversation Analysis and Critical Theory Traditions. It also provides an extensive discussion of context in classroom research. The book focuses on second, foreign and heritage language classrooms that are located in Canada, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Timor Leste, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In order to situate this volume within a broader educational perspective, some attention is also paid to academic and vocational classrooms in which content subjects are taught through the first language, as well as to the organization of talk in institutional contexts which lie somewhere in between traditional classrooms and completely informal contexts of language learning is organized.

As the most prominent features uttered by EFL teachers in classroom interactions, questioning plays important roles to invite student responses. This study was an attempt to analyse questioning practice employed by EFL teachers in terms of ways or strategies namely contingency, convergence-divergence, and syntactical form in their interactions with students. Data were gathered from four purposefully chosen English teachers’ questions employed during their interactions with students at a larger corpus project of UMSpEAKs (Universitas Negeri Malang Spoken English in Academic Kontexts), thus, transcribed and analysed following the principle of Conversation Analysis (CA). The Conversation Analysis revealed that the contingent questions differently appeared for each teacher. The most question type used to be contingent was a clarification. Besides, the teacher questions were mainly convergent and divergent by means of display questions that consistently evolved student contributions and enlarge the talks. Meanwhile, the most frequently occurring question- syntactical form was W-h questions and followed by yes-no question forms. The W-h questions having more syntactically complex utterances than yes/no questions were powerful and would prompt more students’ responses. Meanwhile, yes/no questions were posed when the teachers felt that students have difficulty in answering or understanding the W-h and how/what about questions and invited short responses. Thus, contingency, convergence-divergence, and syntactical form that was differently constructed following the commodity exchange in the classroom discourse were very beneficial to invite student responses, discursively carry functions, and extend the classroom discourse.

The article is concerned with the issues of development and preservation of ethnic identity of Russian-speaking school children in Latvia studying the Russian language (mother tongue) under the conditions of diaspora. The authors, relying on the results of research activities, are convinced that one of the most important sources of preservation and development of Russian-speaking ethnic identity with the schoolchildren is the inclusion in the content of the school course “Russian language and literature” intracultural and intercultural dialogues.

The language class is closely related to the assumption that students will learn and generate the target language. Students are supposed to be able to relate, at least, with the language they have studied. The teacher hopes to not only teach but also use the target language in their teaching-learning process and show the students how to use it. This research explores the teacher's target language in the classroom discourse from the teacher’s point of view—a Qualitative approach employed in this research. The teacher believed that the use of the target language has to be in a maximum way. However, drawn away by the situation of students’ target language knowledge, the use of target language becomes infrequently used. She only used target language for simple words or sentences, which is she knew her students able to comprehend. She needed to use the target language and the students’ first language and mother tongue to help the students more comfortable comprehending the lesson.

ABSTRACTThis paper deepens our understanding of the customer’s role in institutional face-to-face encounters. It includes an in-depth analysis of authentic Finnish forestry advisory conversations to illuminate the specifics of the pursued customer perspective and collaboration. From a total 9:02:09 hours of video recordings the data yielded 89 qualified customer-initiated questions for comprehensive analysis. Results indicated that family forest owners (FFOs) can initiate if they so wish. Most of the posed questions (92.1%) were requests for information or for confirmation, which re-established the institutional positioning of the encounter. The forestry advisory professional presented topics that complied with the meeting’s standard procedure. The actual impact the customer had on the agenda appeared quite limited and genuine collaboration was not quite balanced. Cautious tactics of asking emerged specifically when related to more personal questions. In the shift to a new forestry advisory service era, where publicly funded services are now open to various market-based agents and new tailored advisory traditions are being developed, FFOs are even more important customers. Good advisory services and relationships will be key assets to service providers. Understanding the interactional mechanisms of an institutional encounter is crucial to promote the customer perspective, the initiative and learning of the FFOs.

Learning reflection in the classroom is a process through which students think about their learning and articulate – either orally or in writing – what has been successful, and what has not, while noting what they could do differently next time in order to achieve better results. This process is crucial as it enables learners to identify the causes of their learning successes and challenges and, whenever necessary, to adjust their actions accordingly. As a result, it helps reduce impulsivity in learning, since actions are increasingly considered before being taken. Learning reflection not only supports cognitive development but also enhances students’ ability to manage their own learning and promotes greater independence and responsibility.However, fostering learning reflection is not an automatic process. Students’ initial engagement with reflection typically requires guidance and support from teachers, who play a key role in facilitating and planning time for learning reflection during lessons. Despite this issue, research – conducted both in Lithuania and internationally – indicates that, in various subject lessons, including mother tongue, learning reflection is infrequent, episodic, or entirely absent due to a lack of supportive conditions. Teachers may forget to plan for learning reflection, or else they may assume that it happens implicitly, even when it is inconsistent and ineffective.This contradiction – which is manifested between the acknowledged theoretical value of learning reflection and its practical lack of implementation – prompted the current study, which aimed to examine how primary school students in Lithuania engage in learning reflection during Lithuanian language and literature classes, as perceived by primary school teachers. The study addressed the following questions: How often do teachers intentionally plan opportunities for learning reflection? At which stage of the lesson is reflection facilitated, and how do teachers justify it? What types of tasks are used to promote learning reflection, and what sources do teachers draw from?The study employed semi-structured interviews with 14 primary school teachers. Thematic analysis was used to interpret the data. Three main themes emerged in relation to the research questions: 1) the frequency of planned learning reflection in Lithuanian language and literature lessons; 2) the stages of the lesson in which students engage in learning reflection; 3) the types and sources of tasks used to support learning reflection.The findings show that learning reflection has not yet become a consistent and systematically planned part of the learning process. It is most commonly applied only 1–2 times per week, or even less frequently, and usually at the end of a lesson. Several factors hinder the planning of learning reflection: lack of lesson time, strong focus on the subject content, undervaluation of the reflection process, insufficient positive practical experience, and limited understanding of its benefits for students. To ensure that learning reflection becomes an integral part of Lithuanian language and literature lessons in primary education, sustained professional development for teachers is essential.

The analysis of videotaped naturally occurring adult—child interaction led to the isolation of the clarification request as a consistent feature of adult interactive styles. The analysis of the form and function of adult clarification requests demonstrated the importance of the interactive demands adults encounter when interacting with young children. The nature of these interactive demands and how adults deal with them are discussed in regard to Cicourel's (1970) notion of interpretive procedures. Finally, a discussion of the possible effects of adult interactive style on the child's development of communicative competence is presented. (Developmental sociolinguistics, conversational analysis, adult—child interaction, US English.)

“Did you just say transformers?” A Child's agency and social actions in language-focused sequences

This study aims to investigate wait-time, more specifically student reaction wait-time, in high school English as a foreign language classrooms with specific regard to two classroom micro-context modes (the classroom context mode and material mode). The data was collected via audio-recordings of classroom interaction in its natural context. The audio-recordings were analyzed using the principles of Conversation Analysis. The analysis of the data demonstrated that the effectiveness of student reaction wait-time is highly related to the current pedagogical goal; if the purpose is to increase learners’ involvement in classroom discourse or if it requires analytical thinking, an extended wait-time of three to five seconds is likely to enhance the learning opportunity. However, as a social process, opportunities for learning are likely to be missed if the purpose is to monitor understanding or display answers which are explicitly given in the material that is being used. In this sense, this study has implications for studies on wait-time, foreign language classroom interaction, teachers’ interactional competence, and foreign language learning contexts in general.