ABSTRACT This study investigates the multimodal construction of blame attributions in peer interaction during digital tasks in English as a Foreign Language classrooms. Drawing on multimodal conversation analysis (CA), we examine how the force of blamings is manifested in and through the variety of resources used, and the role of digital devices in the emergence and resolution of blaming sequences. The analysis shows that children’s blame attributions can be bold and involve a lamination of several multimodal resources, often without an explicit verbal formulation. Additionally, participants may build on the actions of the digital application to allocate blame, using the affordances of the technology to avoid direct verbal attributions. The study thus elaborates on the sequential structure of blamings and highlights their context-bound and multimodal nature. It contributes to research on multimodality in technology-supported classroom interactions, shedding light on the merging of the embodied and the digital in action formation.

ABSTRACT In this study, we analyse a 9-year-old child’s argumentative participation in a group discussion, from a microgenetic development angle. Specifically, we follow one child through the discussion and analyse the development process, defined as changed participation and as interactionally contingent upon the other participants and the teacher. The data consist of one video recording of the group discussion including two dilemmatic tasks for which the children are asked to come to a joint solution. A sequential analysis was performed from a sociocultural perspective on learning and communication. The findings show that the focus child’s argumentative participation develops both quantitatively and qualitatively, and that this development reflects a switch between general agreement amongst the children in the first task and general disagreement in the second task. This disagreement angle is discussed both from an argumentation and an education perspective. Two of the focus child’s argumentative resources (an imaginary space she creates and the use of the concept “data protection”) are discussed in detail.

ABSTRACT 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.

ABSTRACT School-based social practices of oral feedback present challenges for all k-12 students. Ignoring these challenges during reading assessment contributes to a deficit view of emergent bilingual students, whose struggles to participate in formative feedback on reading performance may result from general unfamiliarity with school-based practices, rather than language proficiency. Drawing impetus from the New Literacy Studies and methodological principles from conversation analysis, the current study explores the discursive organization of oral feedback during formal formative reading assessment and its relationship to issues of knowledge construction and identity. Based upon a single-case analysis, this study demonstrates how one emergent bilingual student’s struggles to participate in oral feedback emerged not from language proficiency but from unfamiliarity with the social practices of sequential organization. Furthermore, it will be argued that the teacher’s attempts at feedback sequentially constructed her student’s emergent bilingual identity and prioritized knowledge constructed about him, over knowledge constructed by him.

ABSTRACT 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.

ABSTRACT We contribute a previously unidentified way representational gestures are used to organise participation and the co-construction of knowledge in whole-class interactions in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) classrooms. Drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EMCA), we characterise students’ gestured candidate responses and how teachers respond to them. To answer teachers’ questions, students sometimes use representational gestures to provide silent, ‘off-the-record’ tentative responses that we call gestured candidate responses (GCRs). Teachers can respond to GCRs by ratifying or declining students’ responses. Teachers’ responses to GCRs include (1) ratifying the GCR by nominating students to share the response, (2) ratifying the GCR by repeating the gestured response for the class, (3) declining the GCR by not publicly pursuing the contribution, or (4) declining the GCR by publicly rejecting the contribution. Our analysis contributes to a better understanding of how students use gesture and how teachers attend and respond to students’ gestures in STEM classroom discourse.

ABSTRACT A substantial body of international research argues that the teacher-student relationship is crucial for students’ academic and social-emotional learning. However, microanalytic studies of teachers’ relational competence are rare. This article aims to contribute such a study by exploring teachers’ relational competence, drawing on Erving Goffman’s concept of face-work and focussing on how a particular teacher-student relationship is constructed in an ongoing processes of interaction. The paper presents in-depth analyses of teacher-student interaction using a video-recording of a classroom episode. In the episode, the student loses face as a result of a complex series of events. The teacher, through rapid action, helps the student repair face and manages to (re-)establish a respectful interaction ritual. Overall, the teacher’s relational competence is manifested by advanced and complex face-work. Our analyses indicate that relational competence is essentially a micro-social artistry – a lightning-quick ability to interact with students in the ‘here and now’. The article also discusses the pedagogical implications of these findings, for example, that it is crucial to include face-work in teacher education and training.

ABSTRACT This paper works on the premise that classroom talk conveys meaning about students as writers and asks how classroom talk facilitates the formation of students’ identities as writers. We present findings from an ethnographic investigation of elementary writing lessons across six participant schools in Australia. Our data analysis is informed by two theoretical constructs that of positioning and implied identity. First, we explore different ways that students are positioned as a result of classroom talk and discuss implied identities – what these positions imply about writer identities within a context. Second, using a micro-ethnographic case study approach, we highlight how participants of classroom talk orient to the acts of positioning within a classroom context. The first section of findings revealed how classroom talk positions students as either autonomous, communicative, metareflexive, or fractured writers. Furthermore, findings showed that the observed writing lessons position students as writers who are concerned with form and pay attention to function. In the second section, we share an in-depth investigation of a year six writing lesson to show how different types of positions are negotiated by teacher and students on a temporal basis. We discuss implications for research and practice related to the teaching of writing.

(Re)defining Success in Language Learning by Katie A. Bernstein explores the very important question of how student success is defined in the classroom and how perceptions of success impact languag...

ABSTRACT The growing demand for Indigenous language education in the United States often relies on community teachers with widely varying proficiencies as part of local language reclamation efforts. While these English-dominant ‘teacher-learners’ play a central role in the success of classroom-based K-12 language programs, their classroom experiences and practices have received little attention in second language acquisition research. I address this gap in the literature by examining an English-dominant Ojibwe teacher-learner’s pedagogical practices in an English-dominant tribal school. I theorise the use of colonial language and materials by relying on linguistic ethnography’s multi-scalar approach to language in use as well as a focus on sign-makers’ transformations of local resources. Findings show how the teacher-learner’s reliance on relational knowledge and colonial language framing scaffolds translingual practices and opens up discursive space for learners to experiment, play, and learn. This study highlights how one teacher-learner negotiates the ideological and material conditions that shape the learning and use of an Indigenous language within a colonial institution (school) that has long been a tool of assimilation and erasure.