Eliciting student participation in synchronous online L2 lessons: The use of oral and written DIUs

Abstract

This study examines the teacher's use of verbal and written designedly incomplete utterances (DIUs) within the initiation-response-feedback (IRF) sequence by analyzing data collected from synchronous online language learning classrooms conducted via Zoom. Multimodal conversation analysis was employed to demonstrate that both the teacher and the students paid close attention to the construction and completion of DIUs through both written and spoken modes. This practice was primarily deployed by the teacher to elicit talk from students by offering the initial part of the response turn. The 121 sequences containing DIUs solicited participation from students through collaborative writing of their answers on the shared screen. This study may contribute to recent CA research on the embodied work of teaching (Hall & Looney, 2019) and situated learning activities (Goodwin, 2013; Kyratzis & Johnson, 2017) by describing a pedagogic practice that may have been adopted to help students participate in online discourses. The results may also offer a much-needed description of the actual occurrences of DIUs in online L2 classrooms.