ABSTRACTOnline exchanges among learners are an important form of communication in language learning contexts. This is due to the affordances this medium of communication creates for learning as well as the growing interest in internationalization of curricula. In fact, online communication can foster connections between people, including learners, across the globe. This paper is based on a qualitative analysis of online chat communication between Canadian learners of German and German learners of English. We discuss how these learners negotiate closing sequences in their chats, considering that the patterns for closing sequences may be different in different languages or be culture-specific and learners need to make choices on a spectrum between business focus (i.e. staying on task) vs. personal focus (i.e. addressing personal information). Hence, learners must negotiate interactive patterns that they may not be familiar with in creative ways that establish and maintain interpersonal relationships. Research about online communication helps to better understand learner communication, especially in an international context. In addition, it helps raise language awareness for teacher training and provides impetus for sensitizing teachers and learners to the ways in which interaction works and how relationships are maintained in communication.

This contribution outlines the problems and possibilities of three issues with regard to the teaching of L2 interactional competence (IC): (1) specifying IC, (2) standardising IC, and (3) translating conversation analytic (CA) insights into classroom practices. In particular, I argue for a shift of discussion from the conceptually treacherous notion of interactional competence to the CA-based model of interactional practices, call attention to the partial, and yet useful, nature of our understanding of such practices as pedagogical objects and of the developmental trajectories towards their mastery, and finally, make evident the daunting obstacles to implementing these understandings in the classroom, while offering illustrative and exemplary exhibits.

This article probes into the social and discursive construction of intertextualities in young ELL children’s poetry writing process. It aims to explore the role of intertextuality in promoting young ELL children’s writing and academic learning through analysing naturally occurring classroom discourses. The research participants were 19 kindergarteners from six different cultural and linguistic backgrounds and their teacher. Primary data sources included participant observation, video recording, interviews and students’ artefacts over time. Microethnographic discourse analysis is conducted to examine the teacher–student moment-to-moment classroom interactive discourses in the chosen key literacy event of writing a poem about their stapler. Data analysis showed that the ELL children’s poem writing event was a robust learning process promoted by the teacher–student dynamic social and discursive construction of different intertextualities across different times and contexts. Based on the complex learning and intertextualities constructed in their writing process, the researcher advocates intertextuality as a powerful heuristic to transform the children’s experiences into meaningful learning and actions.

Fluency plays an important and largely unreflected role as a diagnostic tool in learning interactions. In our paper, we present a case study of videographed remedial lessons in mathematics, addressing the question of how useful the concept of fluency is for a description of learning as an observable and accountable interactive process. The concept of fluency in discourse and specifically in learning interactions is discussed and elaborated on the basis of our findings. In the reconstruction of interactive learning processes, fluency proves to be a phenomenon towards which both tutors and pupils orient themselves, while relying on different aspects of fluency in their coordinated effort to establish a global schema of calculation steps. In addition, fluency can provide a window on the progressive nature of a longitudinal learning process. As the pupil’s performance of the technique to be learned becomes more and more fluent, this can serve as an indication of the planning processes involved, allowing for a more integrated realisation of the practice. This integration can be made clear by examining different aspects of interactive, multimodal and linguistic fluency.

The study in this article examines and illustrates the intertextual meanings made by a group of high school science students as they embarked on a knowledge building discourse to solve a physics problem. This study is situated in a computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environment designed to support student learning through a science inquiry unit enacted in a classroom. As the CSCL environment is intensively mediated by written texts and spoken dialogue, the environment presents a unique opportunity to investigate the relationship between intertextuality and collaborative knowledge-building. Drawing from a dialogic and semiotic perspective of intertextuality, a framework based on systemic functional linguistics was used to analyse the intertextual and multimodal relations between the written and spoken forms of language used to solve the physics problem. Results indicate that in a CSCL environment, the thematic integration of the written and spoken forms of language is critical in the progress of the collaborative inquiry. In particular, written texts provide the contextual meanings to facilitate the students’ collaborative discourse, while spoken language creates new meanings by building bridges across the written texts. The implications of these analyses and findings for classroom discourse as well as potential for future research are discussed.

Teachers often assume that personal experience is a rich resource for classroom chat and a gold standard for meaningful exchange of information. But in this paper, we first present three kinds of reasons for suspecting that primary intersubjectivity—the ‘me and you’ relationship in which personal experiences are directly exchanged between interlocutors—may be highly circumscribed in affordances for second or foreign language learners and, in contrast, secondary intersubjectivity—with more third-person reference and more imagined experiences—may offer higher levels of grammatical creativity. Firstly, and most theoretically, Vygotsky’s work on the development of imagination suggests that one of the more important steps is freeing word meanings from recalled perceptual experience. Secondly, research from both teaching young learners a second language and from first language acquisition confirms that one way this happens is that interactions based on primary intersubjectivity give way to those based on secondary intersubjectivity, where children develop joint attention to some object or person external to the dyad. Thirdly, we present some data from Korean elementary school classrooms showing that children are markedly more ‘constructive’—that is, much freer from the influence of fixed expressions—when they are talking about textbook characters than when they are talking about themselves.

Using the first language (L1) to solve problems in understanding the second language (L2) may be beneficial for L2 learning. However, the overuse of L1 may deprive L2 learners of exposure to the L2. It appears that the question is not whether to use L1 or L2; it is when and how each language can be used to support L2 learning. This study focuses on situations in L2 education in which L1 is not used in an attempt to solve the L2 learner’s problems of understanding the L2 and the current assignment. The aim is to investigate what role participants’ management of each other’s L2 knowledge plays in maintaining intersubjectivity and doing L2 learning in these situations. The results show that participants may act on diverse L2 knowledge and diverse possible understandings regarding the assignments and that the use of L2 risks expanding these epistemic discrepancies. Using L2 also appears to restrict doing L2 learning on conceptual knowledge, for example, word-meanings. The participants agree on a minimally required epistemic balance as a way to move on. The use of L1 as needed in these situations, as a resource for meaning-making, may be beneficial for doing L2 learning.

Recent years have witnessed increasing attention to the role of interaction in the classroom. Regarding the dynamic nature of language classrooms, teacher talk is assumed to promote interaction. Based on this assumption, this paper aims at investigating EFL teachers’ perceptions of their use of teacher talk and how analysis of language use contributes to their professional development. For this purpose, a total of 23 pre-service teachers from ELT departments of two universities in Turkey participated in the study. They received training on analysis of their own talk by using a specific instrument (SETT) designed to assess relationship between language use and pedagogic purpose. The pre-service teachers recorded snapshots of their teaching to analyse different interactional features of their talk, organised peer sessions to discuss each other’s language use and wrote three reflective diaries. Two raters coded qualitative data using the Constant Comparison Method. Results indicated that the SETT experience helped them to increase awareness of what they did, how they did it and how they used language in the classroom environment. The findings offer valuable insights about teachers’ language use and its effects on the development of classroom interaction.

Recent literature on language teaching has questioned the established view that a language is most effectively taught monolingually, arguing instead that the student’s own language has an important role to play, and this view is now widely accepted. While this literature draws attention to the extremism of some monolingual approaches, and advocates a judicious use of the own language, it often neglects the many educational contexts in which a very high proportion of teaching is conducted in the students’ own language. This article addresses this issue and adds to the growing literature on classroom own-language use and its pedagogic functions by examining an instance of such large-quantity use of the own language in an ‘intensive reading’ tertiary English-language course in China. Through analysis of lesson transcripts and interviews with participants, it documents the uses and functions of Chinese, and teacher and student attitudes to it. It also discusses speculatively how the large-scale use of Chinese relates to the aims of the Chinese curriculum, western influences, the textbooks, and teaching style: all matters which merit further research.