Design and content of classroom activities are crucial to foreign/second (L2) language learners' motivation, be they children or adults. Lifeworld relevance and learner autonomy are two important aspects in building motivational L2 curricula for adults (e.g.), but such considerations rarely filter through to primary school learners due to…

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…

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…

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…

As digital technologies proliferate throughout classrooms in the United States, iPads and other mobile tablets have been heralded as tools for enhanced peer collaboration. However, little research has examined exactly how students interact with and around iPads during collaborative learning tasks. This study employs multimodal interaction analysis…

This article, a case study of a single instance of collaborative translation in the classroom, explores the role of material mediation and embodied activity in the linguistic problem solving work of emergent multilinguals. We describe one teacher's lesson with a small group of Spanish speaking students in her 7th grade ESL classroom. Collaborative…

In this paper, I offer a reconsideration of "interactional competence" as an object of L2 learning. I argue that the field's uptake of the concept displays a misunderstanding of, or at least a lack of attention to, its related but distinct intellectual roots in linguistic anthropology and conversation analysis. This has resulted in…

This article focuses on the use of display questions to construct positive identities in post observation feedback talk between in-service English language teachers and a supervisor. Using a linguistic ethnographic framework, microanalysis of dyadic feedback interaction is supplemented with ethnographic data gathered from participant perspective…

Using longitudinal conversation analysis as a methodological framework, this study documents the development of second language (L2) interactional competence by focusing on a recurrent interactional practice observed in an English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom. Through observing a novice L2 learner's developing methods of participation in…

While much research on writing tutorial interactions with second language (L2) writers has focused on the tutor's instructional practices, little attention has been given to the ways in which the tutee responds to them. Based on 6 h of video-recordings from 8 tutoring sessions between 6 tutors (L1 users of English) and 8 tutees (L2 users of…

This study employs longitudinal Conversation Analysis (CA) to examine one TA's follow-up contributions in a series of EFL group discussion tests. By tracking the TA's interactional practices across 18 groups, we observe how she adapts her turn design by increasingly aligning towards that of the novice English speakers. The TA initially attempts to…

This article explores the notion of "active reception" during small-group collaborative interaction in the foreign language classroom, focusing on the embodied participation of a secondary (nonspeaking) interactant, Diane. Drawing on Vygotskian sociocultural theory, we argue that within small-group work, a Zone of Proximal Development…

While disagreements are often considered dispreferred choices and potentially face-threatening acts due to their oppositional nature, this perception does not adequately reflect the importance of disagreeing for many types of interaction, such as problem-solving and decision-making. Developing ability in performing this speech act therefore…