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…

Managing student participation is a key interactional and instructional task in any classroom. This is even more relevant in language classrooms, as students need to demonstrate understanding, knowledge and proficiency through the production of lexical, phrasal, clausal or sentential elements. Question-Answer-sequences have been the focus within…

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…

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…

Technology development allows new ways of communication, learning and collaboration. This is reflected in the professional scenarios of language teaching. Modern curricula value participants' interest and meaningful (inter)action as a basis for learning. Sensitivity is important in anticipating participants' changing needs in modern learning…

In pre-service language teacher education contexts, it is challenging to provide hands-on training on task design for technology-mediated settings. This study presents insights from language teacher education activities that aim to tackle this challenge with a multi-step approach consisting of (1) pre-service teachers' collaborative task design…

The use of group-based, task-oriented, peer interaction formats in classroom and public L2 speaking tests has grown in recent years. However, these assessments have received comparatively little attention when compared to other formats such as the oral proficiency interview (OPI). In order to better understand the local exigencies of this…

This study is concerned with repair practices that a teacher and students employ to restore intersubjectivity when faced with interactional problems in a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) classroom. Adopting a conversation analytic (CA) approach, it examines the interactional treatment of students' verbal and embodied trouble…

While there has been long-standing interest in identifying teacher practices for facilitating participation, less attention has been paid to what might be termed the 'participation paradox', or the necessity of "engaging in" and "disengaging from" interactions with individual students to create opportunities for both…