The current special issue is dedicated to studies exploring social interaction in second language educational environments that feature technology. In this introduction article, we contextualize the empirical studies included here with respect to the changing role of technology in education and situate them in the research tradition of multimodal…

Research continues to reveal the pervasive racial disparities among students in schools throughout the United States. Just as concerning, research persistently portrays teachers' self-perceptions as not knowing how to talk and teach about race nor do they feel comfortable doing so. This research sought to understand eight preservice teachers'…

This study investigates how shared understanding is established during a rarely researched instructional and interactional context, namely teacher-student interactions during between-desk instructions (BDIs). Specifically, the authors focus on instructional interactions initiated by students during project-based language teaching in an…

In conversation, "uptake" happens when a speaker builds on the contribution of their interlocutor by, for example, acknowledging, repeating or reformulating what they have said. In education, teachers' uptake of student contributions has been linked to higher student achievement. Yet measuring and improving teachers' uptake at scale is…

Even though small talk has been investigated in a variety of business contexts and service encounters, it is understudied in instructional settings. This paper explores the occurrence of small talk in a university chemistry lab between a Chinese international teaching assistant (ITA) and American students. Drawing on naturally occurring…

This article is an inquiry into how talking is used for learning. The focus is on utterances of significance where participants say something which brings some sense of surprise and cognitive dissonance, and the purpose is to develop an understanding of how such 'shaking utterances' contribute to learning. The study is conducted from a social…

According to research in pragmatics, gender represents an important factor in individuals' turn-taking behaviour, with results indicating overall male-dominated conversational patterns. Despite the significance of gender in the students' conversational styles in an academic setting, gender and turn-taking has yet to be investigated in the foreign…

In this article, we use grounded practical theory to develop a practical theory for using "difficult data" in Language and Social Interaction university classes. "Difficult data" are transcribed, audio/video-recorded data that contain language and ideologies that could be offensive, bigoted, or otherwise disturbing. We provide…

In this study, we introduce new insights into prosodic analyses as an emerging method to study what happens in classrooms interactions. We claim that the prosodic aspects (features of speech such as intonation, volume and pace) of talk are important, but under-represented in the learning sciences. These prosodic aspects may be used to complement,…

This edited volume brings together 10 cutting-edge empirical studies on the realities of English language learning, teaching and testing in a wide range of global contexts where English is an additional language. It covers three themes: learners' development of interactional competence, the organization of teaching and testing practices, and…

Leveraging is often described as the process of using the home and community languages of children and youth as a tool to access the "academic" or "standard" varieties of languages valued in schools. In this vein, researchers have called on practitioners to leverage the stigmatized language practices of children and youth in…

Interaction Analysis has been explored for the initiating topics, turn taking, and asking and answering questions in face-to-face learning environments during the last decades. This study investigated the form and sequence of the questions and answers in an asynchronous environment from a non-interventionist point of view. To conduct the research,…

Univocal discourse, characterized by its function of conveying information from one person to another, is common in mathematics classrooms but dialogic teaching aims at students coming to participate in dialogic discourse, that is, discourse functioning to generate new meaning within a community. Many mathematical practices are directed at the…

Speakers in conversation typically repeat and modify earlier comments. In mathematics conversations, these repetitions, or poetic structures, can facilitate the collaborative discovery of mathematical relationships. A close analysis of 90 turns of an algebraic problem-solving conversation reveals eight types of poetic structures. This report…

In classroom settings, students' competence is regularly evaluated through a default practice named Initiation-Response-Feedback (IRF) or Initiation-Response-Evaluation (IRE). In the feedback or evaluation turn, the teacher normally uses acknowledgement tokens (such as uhm, yeah, okay). These tokens perform an active role of maintaining…