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…

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…

Providing feedback on student work is a vital part of pedagogy. However, instructors may inadvertently create a distance between themselves and students by asserting authority when evaluating students' work. This may conflict with maintaining a positive atmosphere in the classroom and developing interpersonal solidarity with students, which is…

The Swedish gender-neutral pronoun (GNP) "hen" has been in popular use since its (re)introduction to the public in 2012. Earlier research, analysing newspapers, academic papers and blogs, shows two uses of "hen": when gender is unknown and when gender is irrelevant. However, there is a lack of studies of verbal, situated, uses…

This article concerns students' help-seeking in one particular educational setting in Sweden, namely mathematical homework support. It presents in-depth analyses of video-recorded instances of interactions using multimodal conversation analysis. By exploring how tutors and students with no prior interactional history collaboratively establish an…

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…

For the socially conscious teacher working in diverse classrooms, conversation can surface and productively engage the politics of difference. Poststructuralist discourse analysis and/or positioning theory have provided insights into the students' subject positions and discourses in such conversations. However, studies are often limited by the use…

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…

Research has demonstrated the important role of co-teacher communication and planning, but relatively little is understood about co-teacher interactions during the act of teaching itself and how these interactions relate to educators' positionings and ongoing identity development. This paper presents a case study of interaction between two…

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…

Few studies have investigated epistemic positioning in online postgraduate courses. Such courses in US contexts rely heavily on asynchronous online discussion forums. This study investigates how postgraduate students' patterned use of personal experience tellings functioned in the construction of their epistemic positioning (as 'expert' or…

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…

Through detailed multimodal analyses, this article shows how participants of an English language course create and manage sites of attention for achieving collaboration across multiple spaces. The ethnographic data for the study comes from an English language course 'Academic reading' offered for university students majoring in Finnish Sign…

This paper provides a micro-analytical investigation into the action formation and ascription of interrogatives as reproaches and the interactional exigencies and functions that motivate this reproach design choice for classroom management. It is shown how the participants draw on an interplay of turn-design, epistemic territories and features of…