Using conversation analysis in the second language classroom to teach interactional competence

2011 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 479-507 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne-Marie Barraja-Rohan
2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 594-623 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niina Lilja ◽  
Arja Piirainen-Marsh

Abstract Using multimodal conversation analysis, this article analyses language learning as an in situ process during a teacher-assigned, experientially based pedagogical activity. The activity involved a three-part pedagogical structure, where learners first prepared for and then participated in real-life service encounters, and later reflected on their experiences back in the classroom. The analysis details how the co-constructed telling sequences through which novice second language users re-enact their experiences create an occasion for language-focused activity. We argue that the actions through which the participants display and sustain an orientation to an interactional practice as an object of learning make visible a learning project. The findings illuminate the practices through which language-focused activity is initiated, sustained, and managed to enable in situ learning. They also show how re-enactments function in storytelling and display a novice learner’s interactional competence. Finally, the findings illustrate how experiences gained in everyday social activities can be ‘harvested and reflected upon’ (Wagner 2015: 77) in the classroom and contribute to recent initiatives to develop teaching practices that support learning in-the-wild.


2017 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 45-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asta Cekaite

ABSTRACTThe research presented here is an examination of how child language novices (zero beginners) develop interactional competences and repertoires in a Swedish as a second language classroom. Two 7-year-old girls’ learning trajectories are the focus in a yearlong study of their second language (L2) development. The girls’ transition from highly repetitious and formulaic production to formally and semantically more diverse discourse is documented, along with a broadening of the girls’ classroom interactional repertoires. They initiated and took part in interactions with teachers and peers and participated in a growing range of classroom discursive activities. The longitudinal analysis also documents the differences in their two learning trajectories, particularly in terms of their L2 resources and pragmatic skills, as well as their identities as successful or unsuccessful language learners (as ascribed to them by the teachers). The study illustrates an intricate and synergistic, rather than unidirectional, relationship between these two child novice learners’ competences, L2 features, and identities.


2021 ◽  
Vol 79 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-103
Author(s):  
Ricardo Moutinho ◽  
Andrew P. Carlin

Learning is an omnipresent feature of social life. However, in educational fields, learning is often studied through indirect instruments, such as surveys, interviews and coding schemes. In this paper, a praxiological approach to observe learning moments is proposed. This means that learning moments are not explored here through schematic reporting or statistical evaluations, but as accountable and inspectable phenomena as they became available in the corpus explored. Using a video-recorded fragment of interaction that occurred during a second language (L2) class in a primary school in Macau (China), the practical, collaborative instructed experiences of participants (teacher and students) in a lesson are analysed. It was observed that classroom participants attend to the categorial and sequential features of learning environments, which provide the contextual details that afford members’ realization of phenomena as learning moments. Stated differently, learning moments should not be confused with the successful accomplishment of a lesson plan just to satisfy programmatic (and disciplinary) requirements, but as something produced and accountable by participants as learning in and through their very practices of concerted interaction. As learning moments are ubiquitous characteristics of educational environments, the discussion of the results has pedagogical implications for teacher training, and for the assessment of teaching. Keywords: conversation analysis, ethnomethodology, learning moments, membership categorization, social competence, turn-allocated categories


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 581-606
Author(s):  
Marco Octavio Cancino Avila

The language choices that teachers make in the language classroom have been found to influence the opportunities for learning given to learners (Seedhouse, 2004; Walsh, 2012; Waring, 2009, 2011). The present study expands on research addressing learner-initiated contributions (Garton, 2012; Jacknick, 2011; Waring, Reddington, & Tadic, 2016; Yataganbaba & Yıldırım, 2016) by demonstrating that opportunities for participation and learning can be promoted when teachers allow learners to expand and finish their overlapped turns. Audio recordings of lessons portraying language classroom interaction from three teachers in an adult foreign language classroom (EFL) setting were analyzed and discussed through conversation analysis (CA) methodology. Findings suggest that when teachers are able to navigate overlapping talk in such a way that provides interactional space for learners to complete their contributions, they demonstrate classroom interactional competence (Sert, 2015; Walsh, 2006). The present study contributes to the literature by addressing interactional features that increase interactional space, and an approach to teacher and learner talk that highlights CA’s methodological advantages in capturing the interactional nuances of classroom discourse.


2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-250
Author(s):  
Laura Acosta Ortega

AbstractBased on the concept of interactional competence (Hellermann, 2008; Seedhouse, 2004; Walsh, 2011; Young, 2008), our study analyzes how learners of Spanish as a foreign language in a B2 level manage repair in oral interaction in language classrooms. We understand repair as “the treatment of trouble in talk-in-interaction” (Young, 2008, p. 49). A corpus of eleven interactions between students in the classroom is analyzed through the perspective of Conversation Analysis. The interactions were collected in different kinds of tasks in the language classroom. In our analysis we compare interactions produced in practice activities and interactions collected during assessment. The findings in this study show a tendency to manage repair in classroom oral interaction as it would be done in normal conversation. Regarding the different contexts of our corpus, we observe that, in interactions produced in assessment contexts, speakers try to protect their interlocutor’s face and their own face by avoiding to make repairs.


Author(s):  
Ziyang Gao ◽  

Conversation analysis is a significant approach on research of the second language teaching and learning, among which repair has attracted more and more attention from scholars. This study investigates peer repair sequences between three nonnative speakers of English while they engaged in free talk in the second language classroom. 40 minutes of naturally occurring talk between nonnative speakers were collected and analyzed. The present study reports on the data shows two types of peer repair: first, self-initiated and other-corrected; second, other-initiated and other-corrected. The analysis of the peer repair sequences shows that the self-initiated and other-corrected repair sequences follow a pattern of asking for confirmation on the production of a language item and receiving a correction, while the other-initiated repair do not follow the rules of preference for self-correction described in conversation analysis.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 76-90
Author(s):  
Marco Cancino

The idea that interaction shapes learning in the second language classroom by increasing opportunities for participation, and that teachers can achieve this by adequately eliciting language from learners has been discussed in the literature. However, research specifying interactional resources deployed by teachers when eliciting language from their learners has been scarce. To this end, the present study used conversation analysis to examine the interactional resources produced in the elicitation of questions belonging to a specific lesson stage, namely, the ‘classroom context mode’ (CCM). In the CCM, fluency and meaningful exchanges are encouraged, and learners are prompted to talk about their feelings, emotions, and experiences, which represent a fruitful interactional juncture for eliciting learner language. The data collected in the present study come from four teachers and their students in an adult English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom at a language institute in Chile. The participants were audio-recorded over a total of six lessons that were delivered as part of a 10-week course. From the analysis, two novel elicitation resources, namely the ‘effective management of closed questions’ and the ‘use of open referential questions as initiators of CCM’, were found to promote a facilitator-oriented approach to teaching. The pedagogical value of these resources is discussed in terms of their potential for initiating and sustaining a CCM, and their inclusion in a framework that seeks to develop teachers’ classroom interactional competence.


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