In Western societies, school pedagogies tend to be biased in favour of talk and emphasise the links between talking, thinking and learning. Thus talk is often privileged over silence as the basis for learning activities in classrooms, sustained by theories of learning which afford priority to talk. Such cultural bias towards talk means that by…

Although enlivened by its recent recontextualization as a feminist rhetorical practice, listening in rhetoric scholarship is often equated with silence and its metaphorical and material dimensions rendered indistinct, even as instructors require better tools to interpret students' classroom behaviors. This article fills a gap in the ability to…

In this paper, we introduce a new interpretive framework, which we call Bodymarking, to aid in describing and interpreting activity (e.g., individuals' gestures, gaze, and interaction with materials in the environment) in the classroom. We apply the framework to video recordings of mathematics lessons to explain how it can be used and offer some…

Background: Science teaching and learning, as discursive practices, occur through the utilization of various semiotic modes. Gestures play a pivotal role as an embodied mode that acts in conjunction with speech in oral communication settings, such as classrooms. Previous research on gestures in chemistry and science education has illuminated how…

Background: Verbal participation in the classroom is generally considered to contribute to positive student engagement and learning outcomes. Students are often required to demonstrate their learning in class by, for example, raising their hands and answering questions. However, there are students who remain quiet in the classroom, and are not…

Purpose: The aim of this research note is to introduce a new appraisal form, the Classroom Communication and Collaboration (C3) Appraisal, designed to evaluate communication and collaboration within classroom settings. Method: A comprehensive synthesis of the key skills from a broad range of publications on successful communication and…

This classroom-based action research explored the influence of creative engagement strategies-- a combination of Participation Squares and Spin-the-Wheel--on enhancing student engagement in a middle school classroom. The study was motivated by a recurring issue of poor student engagement. The intervention, used as a class starter to boost student…

The interactional roles of smile and laughter have been widely explored in both institutional settings and mundane talk (e.g. Holt 2016; Potter and Hepburn 2010). However, the role of one specific kind of smile, what we call a 'squeezed-mouth smile' (SMS), remains unexamined. Using CA, this study explores one teacher's use of SMS in response to…

This study incorporates communication accommodation theory to investigate how student perceptions of instructor nonaccommodation influence affective and cognitive classroom outcomes. A series of two-level hierarchical linear models (students nested within instructors) revealed significant, negative associations between specific modes of instructor…

This research reports on the teacher language and gesture that contributed to shifts in thinking about the equal sign and equations observed in twenty kindergarteners who took part in an early algebra intervention. Our analysis revealed ways in which the teacher used language and gesture to support students in moving from describing and working…

We contribute a preiously unidentified way representational gestures are used to organise participation and the co-construction of knowledge in whole-class interactions in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) classrooms. Drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EMCA), we characterise students' "gestured…

Using multimodal conversation analysis, this study closely examines moments when an instructor's embodied explanations elicit laughter from his students -- which we refer to as laughing moments -- in an English as a second language classroom. Such laughing moments can exhibit students' attention to the teacher's explanation and also illuminate…

Little is known about the integration of social-emotional learning (SEL) with science instruction. We used a sequential mixed-methods design to examine (1) how fourth graders use argumentation practices and social gestures in science class and (2) how argumentation practices and social gestures differ between intervention and comparison…

Little is known about the integration of social-emotional learning (SEL) with science instruction. We used a sequential mixed-methods design to examine (1) how fourth graders use argumentation practices and social gestures in science class and (2) how argumentation practices and social gestures differ between intervention and comparison…

This paper shows how one mathematics teacher, in a government secondary school in rural Rwanda, re-contextualises learner centred education (LCE) and English medium instruction (EMI) policies in classroom practice. Data are drawn from an ethnographic, critical case study and include lesson transcripts and teacher and student perspectives. The…