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…

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…

Preliminaries are prefatory turns and sequences that are used to alert co-participants to the incipient social actions in talk-in-interaction. Using multimodal conversation analysis, this study examines the videorecordings of paired role play interactions in an L2 interactional competence (L2IC) assessment setting. We describe how the participants…

The focus of this article is on topic management and student initiation in the context of an advanced university-level Chinese-as-a-foreign-language class. Drawing on a corpus of 17.5 h of video-recorded classroom interactions, we focus on the ways in which students initiate topic expansions, thereby disrupting the IRF structure of discourse and…

Adopting the methods of multimodal conversation analysis, this study demonstrates that adult second language (L2) users with emergent literacy formulate requests as 'complex multimodal Gestalts' consisting prototypically of deictic or depictive gestures combined with gaze, situationally relevant material, and vocal or linguistic resources. The…

Based on interaction recorded in EFL classrooms, this study uses Conversation Analysis to document the post-first deployment of an absurd candidate formulation (ACF) to pursue recipient response at points of interactional delay. ACFs are a form of correction-invitation device in which the question initiator proffers a candidate response that is…

Teachers' interactional practices shape children's displays of knowledge. Teachers often rely on direct interactional devices, such as questions, to call for knowledge displays from children. However, case examples suggest that interactional strategies that downgrade teachers' expert status, such as 'I wonder…' formulations may enhance child…

The background of this article is an interest in analysing how assessment of professional skills is conducted in higher education contexts, drawing on video data from a course on maritime navigation. The empirical study focuses on a) how students working in a bridge simulator are able to display their knowledge about how to calculate the relation…

During teacher-centred classroom interaction, teachers often fail to solicit volunteer turn-takers. Even if students display their unwillingness to take a turn at the moment, teachers sometimes have no choice but to allocate them the turn, to move forward with the ongoing pedagogical activity. In such a moment, there can be a conflict between the…

This study applies multimodal conversation analysis to examine how pupils of L2 English in Sweden make use of online translation tools (OTTs), i.e. bilingual dictionaries and Google Translate, in a range of digital collaborative writing tasks. The collection of sequences where pupils use OTTs comes from 31 hours of video-recorded data from four…

There is an urgent need for more ethical and equitable approaches to reading instruction for young emergent bilingual children in English medium classrooms. Translanguaging pedagogies are one approach that may address this issue as they encourage emergent bilinguals to use all of their linguistic and semiotic resources during reading. This study…

Previous studies of clarification requests in conversations involving second language users typically view such requests as important to obtain 'comprehensible input' or as a form of repair resulting in a sidetrack from the ongoing conversation. This article argues that clarification requests potentially have a much deeper influence on the course…

With the growing centrality of digital recording technologies to conversation analysis (CA) research, an emerging array of publications has begun to provide useful methodological insights on how to capture multimodal and temporal complexities of social interaction in video footages. By and large, however, they have been written as general…

This paper shows how a language teacher and her students observably recalibrate their interactional behaviour over time. With respect to the students, this recalibration can be interpreted as increased L2 interactional competence. The participants' turn designs indicate that they are contingent upon: 1) the local interactional context; 2) the…

Drawing on videotaped recordings from an Adult ESL class, this conversation-analytic paper examines how an experienced teacher responds to learner-initiated tellings of personal experiences while addressing the institutional goals of the language classroom. Specifically, I show three practices which enable the teacher to address institutional…