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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Classroom discourse is an interdisciplinary area of study that contributes to multiple domains of knowledge, including pedagogy, teacher training, second language acquisition, and communities of practice, to name a few. As classroom discourse continues to grow and evolve, so too have the approaches used by scholars to investigate the discourse in…

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…

The contemporary literature regarding dialogic classroom interaction has primarily focused on the meaning-making attributes of dialogue while acknowledging but otherwise providing less emphasis to the social dimensions of the learning community and the dialogic resources that students bring to the classroom. As a result, this paper explores the…

This coda begins by briefly discussing the constructs at the heart of this special issue -- materials use, classroom discourse, materiality, and materials -- highlighting how the compilation contributes to the expanding definition of language learning and teaching materials. I then discuss two interrelated guiding questions of this compilation --…

This paper investigates the use of laughter and smiling to manage (dis)affiliation during two types of disturbances in the interactional unfolding of classrooms: delayed and disaligning responses. The analysis reveals that the sequential position and embodied turn design are integral to understanding the (dis)affiliative work laughter and smiling…

Conversation analysis (CA) has been used for interventionist purposes in different fields, such as medicine, mediation services, and speech and language therapy, but it has yet to be fully utilised in teacher education. In this report, I describe how CA is used in teacher supervision to intervene with the development of a student-teacher (ST) in a…

In this conversation analytic study, we investigate requests for assistance in the third-age (65+) language classroom. Seven Dutch seniors participated in a one-month course of English as a foreign language. We found that these seniors asked many language-related questions which fell into one of three categories: (1) production-oriented questions,…

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…