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…

This study explored the language practices of a small group of international Chinese students in an anglophone Higher Education context where English was the medium of instruction. The context was the first year of an early childhood education course at an Australian university. Building on findings from research in conversation analysis on…

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 aim of this study is to better understand how teachers use various embodied semiotic modes -- speech, gestures, gaze, and proxemics -- when they present scientific content to the entire class. To analyse the multimodal practices of these teachers, we integrated the social semiotic theory of multimodality and the joint action theory in…

Studies on Second Language (L2) classroom interaction have placed a great deal of emphasis on the value of teacher third-turn feedback practices. However, the roles that seemingly minor aspects of interaction like minimal response tokens (e.g. 'Mm', 'Mm hm', 'Uh huh', 'Okay', 'Yeah') play as a feature of these practices have not been investigated…

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…

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…

How do language instructors fulfill institutional mandates while also nurturing students' interest? What becomes of this process when it unfolds not in one class meeting but in a series of pedagogical events? Classroom research has suggested the importance of integrating authentic, conversational, and rapport-building talk with instructional…

In this article, we examine the ways in which an ESL instructor constructs contextually relevant meanings through the synchronization of speech and gesture during unplanned vocabulary explanations. Video recorded data are analysed, with focus on an in-class homework review in which students demonstrated difficulty in comprehending several key…

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…

In primary-level German writing instruction, spelling discussions (German: "Rechtschreibgespräche") have become a well-established interactional method of teaching orthography, prompting the children to exchange their hypotheses about orthographic features of written words. Focusing on spellings of ambisyllabic consonants, this…

Research on humour in second language classrooms has widely focused on the roles, social functions and markers of humour in interaction; however, little attention has been paid to the sequential mechanisms of humour and the relationship between repair and humour. Therefore, drawing on a conversation analytic approach, this study investigates…

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…

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…