Learning takes place in a particular social context and in interaction with others. One of the tools of mediation between the learner and the subject to be learned is talk. In a teacher training context, it is through the use of particular talk that trainers can guide and scaffold their trainees towards learning, and the basic premise is that thinking and higher cognitive development occur through social interaction. At the same time, the talk must be studied in its very specific educational and cultural context. It is challenging to describe and evaluate scaffolding since there are many dimensions of the teaching and learning context which influence the success of the scaffolding process. This research paper reports on a study which analysed the talk between trainer and trainee in a post-observation feedback conference. Using Maybin, Mercer, and Stierer’s six features of scaffolding as a basic framework, the author describes two excerpts from two feedback sessions. The talk is deconstructed with reference to the context in order to describe what scaffolding looks like in a particular pre-service teacher training context.

This study examined how two experienced instructors of EFL (English as a Foreign Language) literature treated questions posed by students during classroom discussions. Data came from two semester-long college-level classes in Turkey. Video recordings of the classes in one semester, field notes taken during the observations, and interviews with both instructors and six students from each class provided the data for this study. We identified the categories of student questions and analysed how each instructor treated them. This was an important step as the later analysis demonstrated that teachers’ treatment of student questions, such as providing a direct answer or using a counter-question, had some relationship with the question type. Findings of the study revealed that generally, both instructors preferred to give direct answers to most of the student questions. However, they utilised a balanced approach of supplying direct answers and asking counter-questions proportionately to respond to some specific question types. Our study concludes with practical educational implications.

This article examines how an online scholarly journal, Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, Pedagogy, mentors authors to revise their webtexts (interactive, digital media scholarship) for publication. Using an editorial pedagogy in which multimodal and rhetorical genre theories are merged with revision techniques found in process-based composition studies, the author describes how webtexts are collaboratively peer-reviewed in Kairos and authors are provided macro- and micro-level revision suggestions for their scholarly multimedia.

‘One-to-one’ computing projects in which learners work with individual laptops or tablets across subjects are rapidly increasing in number. One aspect of this is that as the laptops give access to the Internet; digital images and texts – potentially from all over the globe – move into the classroom in an unprecedented manner. The paper presents an analysis of specific classroom practices involving seven- to eight-year-olds: the collecting of digital images and their use as semiotic resources in the creation of multimodal texts. The aim is to describe the children’s digital image collections as more or less mode-like – that is, as a more or less systematically organised set of resources for making meaning. The methodology is described as social semiotic ethnography, combining semiotic analysis of images and texts with ethnographic understandings of the personal histories and interests of participants. The paper concludes that there are obvious practices in the classroom in which the children use their image collections in a mode-like way, such as categorising images according to semantic criteria, using them for display of identities in the classroom and systematically using them when designing multimodal texts, expressing both simple denotational meanings and more complex connotational semiotic potentials. Another conclusion is that the children’s image collections have untapped learning potentials, for example regarding critical reflections on how images create meaning, which could form the foundation for concrete learning activities in the classroom.

Discussing two preferences associated with question–answer sequences, this study examines student responses to teacher questions in primary school English-as-a-foreign-language classes. The paper starts out with a reconsideration of institutional context, with a focus on classroom context from a conversation analysis perspective. We then introduce two generic preferences related to question–answer sequences: the preference for progressivity and the preference for a selected recipient to speak. Turning to our analyses of 22 primary school English classes in Japan, we found that unlike mundane conversation and some other contexts of institutional interaction, the participants prioritised the preference for a selected student to respond over the preference for progressivity, although the co-existence of the two preferences appeared to be context-free.

In formal assessments of second-language speakers’ fluency, the criteria used frequently fail to differentiate between real disfluency and interactionally effective practices, while superficially disfluent, that help with communication and are used by first language speakers. In this study, we focused on pausing, silences and self-repairs in the speech samples in two data sets: the classroom talk of two L1 teachers of English, and mock IELTS interviews of i-Kiribati students. We found that these features and their frequency and distribution were often very similar in the two data sets suggesting that a superficial observance of disfluency markers in the case of L2 speakers hides practices that may in fact display a high level of competence. We highlight the caution that needs to be exercised when making fluency judgements.

The current paper examines the discursive practices of one novice English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher ‘dealing with’ learners’ unexpected contributions in whole group classroom interactions during teacher- and learner-initiated sequences-of-talk. The study draws from two fields of research: classroom discourse studies investigating teachers addressing learner contributions in classroom interaction, and language teacher education research showing teacher expertise as a factor in the construction of classroom communication. Using conversation analytic methods, two initial practices emerged from the novice teacher’s video-recorded data: glossing over learner contributions and assuming the role of information provider. These practices are presented with a focus on the sequential environments in which they occur and the various interactional resources used to construct them. The paper concludes with a discussion of how these findings contribute to both the classroom discourse and language teacher education literatures.

Teacher-fronted interaction is generally seen to place limitations on the contributions that learners can make to classroom discourse and the conclusion is that learners are unable to experiment with, for example, turn-taking mechanisms. This article looks at teacher-fronted interaction in the language classroom from the perspective of learner talk by examining how learners might take the initiative during this apparently more rigid form of interaction. Detailed microanalysis of classroom episodes, using a conversation analysis institutional discourse approach, shows how learners orient to the institutional context to make sophisticated and effective use of turn-taking mechanisms to take the initiative and direct the interaction, even in the controlled environment of teacher-fronted talk. The article describes some of the functions of such learner initiative, examines how learners and teachers co-construct interaction and how learners can create learning opportunities for themselves. It also briefly looks at teacher reactions to such initiative. The article concludes that learner initiative in teacher-fronted interaction may constitute a significant opportunity for learning and that teachers should find ways of encouraging such interaction patterns.

In this article I investigate how Japanese students manage interaction together in a task-based English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom. Using methods from conversation analysis and focusing on the contextual dimensions of language, I analyse data from a real classroom task with a view to understanding the ways in which social processes and the wider cultural context are connected to the production of classroom language. Through my analysis I suggest that differing cultural beliefs and expectations regarding classroom practice, as well as pedagogic action, affect communicative behaviour in the classroom. I also suggest that students are as much attending to interpersonal and social goals during task performance as they are to the institutional requirements of the task. While my interpretation is subjective in nature and particular to this context, I hope that the discussion will provoke any practitioner reading this article to reflect critically upon the language produced in their own classroom context.