Eliciting student participation in video-mediated EFL classroom interactions: focus on teacher response-pursuit practices

Abstract

As active student participation in classroom interaction is widely accepted as a central component of foreign language learning, prompting student contributions becomes consequential in L2 educational settings including synchronous remote classrooms. When there is a lack of response following teacher questions, teachers resort to a variety of practices to elicit a response from students. Teachers’ response-pursuit moves are vital both to ensure interactional and pedagogical progressivity and secure student engagement. This study deals with the absence of student response to teacher questions in a largely unexplored interactional setting, namely large group, remote, synchronous, video-mediated L2 classrooms. Using multimodal conversation analysis for the examination of screen-recorded higher education English as a foreign language classroom interactions, this single case analysis documents interactional resources that an EFL teacher employs for pursuing a response and eliciting student participation. We show that in the focal context, when the teacher’s question is left unanswered and no one bids for the turn in the response slot, the teacher draws on diverse interactional practices as well as a range of screen-based multimodal resources to ensure the progressivity of the ongoing activity. Revealing how these resources maximize the interactional space, this study contributes to the understanding of the interactional organization of teacher response-pursuits and provides insights into video-mediated L2 classroom discourse.