ABSTRACT Language education institutions world-wide regularly use Oral Placement Tests (OPTs) to diagnose test-takers’ second language (L2) accuracy and fluency to place them in the most appropriate class. Despite their widespread use, there are very few studies into the ways OPTs unfold. This study draws on a corpus of 26 video-recorded OPTs at a language institution in the UK. In these OPTs, examiners are given test sheets that contain various topics that they use to initiate a series of question-answer sequences that are followed by the examiner creating a written record of the test-taker’s answer. Successfully achieving these sequences requires the examiner to carefully design their turns to meet with the abilities of each test-taker. We contend that designing turns that are appropriate for multiple test-takers of varying levels during first encounters is a considerable professional challenge facing examiners. By examining interactions stemming from the same test-sheet topic (i.e. job/study) across multiple OPTs using multimodal conversation analysis, this study reveals the ways examiners achieve mutual understanding and ultimately accomplish the institutional goal of completing part of the test-sheet. This contributes to explorations of L2 Interactional Competence in an under-researched testing setting.

ABSTRACT This study investigates how a group of three fifth-grade students – one autistic and two non-autistic – collaboratively create a fictional story through proposals and joint decisions. The video-recorded data were collected during L1 lessons (total of 3.5 hours). The students first developed a story using a mind map, followed by collaborative writing in a shared online document. Using multimodal conversation analysis, this study examines the design features and distribution of students’ procedural and content proposals and the subsequent decision-making, with particular attention to content proposals that require greater interactional work to achieve joint decisions. The findings show that proposals often consisted solely of nominal elements. Additionally, procedural proposals were generally straightforward and readily accepted, whereas content proposals often prompted extended negotiation through supplements, counterproposals, or rejections. These disalignments were occasionally rooted in differing orientations. For example, the autistic student occasionally appeared to prioritise unconventional story elements, whereas the non-autistic students tended to favour more socially normative storytelling. Despite these differences, the group generally reached joint decisions. This study highlights collaborative storytelling as a valuable context for practicing storytelling skills, initiative-taking, and joint decision-making in inclusive educational settings.

ABSTRACT In task-based language teaching methodology, one way to familiarise learners with the upcoming task is through question-and-answer sequences that target task-relevant topics. In such instances, learners’ prior experiences and knowledge states may come into conflict with expectations held by educators, and their responses may require elaboration. Using multimodal conversation analysis, this study examines how these problems of acceptability arise in pre-task interaction at an experiential language-learning institution. A primary resource for signalling acceptability trouble is to seek confirmation of some previously stated information. Because this method masks the problem as one of hearing or understanding, the learner is left to diagnose the problematic nature of the response, occasionally resulting in a misconstrual. If so, a secondary resource used by educators is to employ post-expansive questions that locate a specific issue within the learner’s response. This unambiguously exposes the interactional trouble and works to pursue an alternative response. Resembling a natural ordering of multiple repair initiators from weak to strong, this study demonstrates the tendency for post-expansive questions to be deployed after confirmation checks fail to solicit a satisfactory account. Analysis of such sequences provides insight into the role of repair practices in promoting learner participation in pre-task interaction.

ABSTRACT This study serves as an example of Conversation Analytic (CA) research with a focus on the interactional management of learning in classroom interactions, while simultaneously illustrating the several steps and procedures used for conducting these analyses. In this case, the method of CA is used to study students’ ‘oh’-prefaced utterances in one-to-one classroom interactions centred around explanations. The interactions are studied from the participants’ perspective by means of a turn-by-turn analysis of the selected fragments on the basis of video recordings and detailed transcripts, as is common practice in CA. This study aligns with previous CA research focusing on the details of classroom interaction relating to students’ learning processes. The results of the close analysis of the data provide insight into the orientation teachers and students show to interactionally exhibited knowledge displays in relation to the entire explanation activity they are involved in. This detailed analysis of one-to-one explanation interactions in secondary school classrooms provides insight into students’ learning processes as well as into the accompanying teacher practices.

ABSTRACT Previous conversation analytic (CA) studies have explored how affiliation is created in L2 classrooms. This study adds to the research by documenting the opportunities for creating affiliative moments between teachers and students afforded by side sequences, an under-explored topic in L2 classroom research. A CA analysis of five side sequences occurring in 4 h of video recordings of an IEP grammar course reveals that the teacher and students deploy a wide range of interactional resources to display affiliation while mitigating disaligning moments, managing epistemic relations, and engaging in humorous talk in side sequences. These affiliative moments create opportunities for student engagement in ways that pre-planned instructional activities may not.

ABSTRACT Moment-to-moment educational interactions affect longer-term outcomes of those involved in those interactions. In the present study, we illustrate with two cases of teacher–teacher interactions how Orbital Decomposition (OD) analysis can be used to analyse sequential patterns in real-time interactions. OD analysis is based on symbolic dynamics and is specially designed to identify recurring sequences of events in a time series of nominal categories of observed behaviour. First, we explain what OD analysis entails, after which we illustrate OD analysis using a study on teacher–teacher interactions between teachers in Professional Learning Communities. We show the analysis of conversational moves and turn-taking behaviour of two cases of teacher groups. The results reveal which interaction partner was in the lead and which conversational moves were associated with interdependent knowledge-building as compared to merely sending and receiving information. OD focuses on interaction patterns rather than basic frequencies and as such can be used to provide insights into interaction processes as these unfold over time.

ABSTRACT This study focuses on a design and making project carried out in a Finnish school and situated within the schedules of a multidisciplinary learning module and English as a foreign language. A group of technology students led the project as part of their university studies. Design and making are a recent development at school that allows the ideals of maker culture and school to converge. In this study, we analyse the sense making that emerged from this convergence during the project. The school participants were ninth graders, approx. 15 years old, working in teams. During the project, the teams ideated, planned, and produced artefacts envisioned to promote entrepreneurial goals for their professional future. The primary research materials include video recordings gathered from students’ work in the classroom and the digital fabrication lab (Fab Lab) as well as group interviews. Field notes provided additional support for the analysis. The research advanced through the cycles of engaging, navigating and changing the nexus of practice. Nexus analysis shed light on how participants’ pasts, interactions and discourses in place were shaping design and making at school. The study provides implications for guiding the design and making projects at school and inquiry-driven collaboration more generally.

ABSTRACT How do people use objects and gestures to shape scientific argumentation? This paper engages the concept of “entanglement” as a heuristic for considering the potentials and constraints that gestures and materials create for interactants. Drawing on video recorded data from an academic-year-long linguistic ethnography of a high school science classroom in southern Arizona, USA, I examine the entanglement of discourse, bodies, and objects in one act sequence to reveal differences in the situated practices of high school students as opposed to professional scientists. The analysis reveals that objects and gestures allow scientific novices to engage in collaborative sense-making as they transform discourse and are transformed in discourse. At the same time, the flexibility and contingency of objects and gestures can be problematic for novices dealing with ambiguous understandings of natural phenomena, leading to interpretations that may or may not correspond to expert understandings. Reckoning with materiality in science argumentation must account for the limitations of objects and bodies as forms of evidence as well as their potential to afford forms of agency.

ABSTRACT While existing research into L2 classroom discourse has highlighted how knowledge and knowledge positions are negotiated, no attention seems to have been paid to what might be called conceptual epistemic domains. Drawing on 22 hours of video-recorded data from Iranian EFL classrooms, our conversation analytic study illustrates how invoking conceptually accessible epistemic domains creates interactional space for teachers to introduce conditionally relevant vocabulary. We define conceptual epistemic domains as areas of world knowledge to which learners have ostensible access. The bottom-up analysis of our data showcases that such practices serve two pivotal pedagogical functions: (1) providing contingent assistance; (2) initiating and maintaining warm-up activities. In the former, the teachers invoke the conceptually accessible epistemic domain facing learners’ claims of insufficient knowledge to elicit relevant further talk. In the latter, the teachers sequentially build up a shared conceptual access to conduct a warm-up activity. Both cases unfold interactional space where relevant vocabulary items emerge as learnables. We argue that by bringing to the fore what is conceptually accessible to the learners, teachers orient to relevant vocabulary items as teachable objects. Our findings thus shine light on an interactional resource through which the need for vocabulary teaching is talked into being.

ABSTRACT Collaborative writing (CW) tasks require heightened Engagement with Language (EWL), as their learning potential has been shown to be mediated by the number of language-related episodes (LREs) or learners’ patterns of interaction. Recent research on CW with young populations has investigated different dimensions of EWL, but a holistic view of the three main aspects of EWL – social, cognitive and affective – is inexistent. This study tries to fill this gap and explores EWL in a group of 69 young Spanish EFL learners (ages 11–12) who completed a picture narration writing task in pairs. The three dimensions of EWL were analysed qualitatively and quantitatively by means of number of turns and LREs, patterns of interaction, and a semi-structured post-task interview. The results indicated that these learners were capable of correctly resolving different linguistic issues, but the extent to which they elaborated on these discussions was low, regardless of their pattern of interaction, which was either cooperative or collaborative most times. A collaborative pattern seemed to lead to more affective engagement and LREs, indicating certain interrelation between these three dimensions, although encouragement and support were seldom verbalised.