First-order sense-making in L2 academic discussions: A distributed view of teacher languaging dynamics in embodied and situated learning context

Abstract

The study explores teacher's situated and embodied interactions with students in second language (L2) academic discussions and how the teacher languaging dynamics facilitate students' learning when they are engaged in an academic discussion outside the classroom. The situated learning enables learning to take place in contexts other than classroom that affords the environment for embodied interaction and legitimizes the learning community with shared communicative purposes. The first-order teacher languaging dynamics are recontextualized in the situated learning contexts that encourage knowledge exchange as social learning engagements to enable students to bodily experience learning and develop the process of knowing. With a distributed view to language, a multi-scalar approach to multimodal interaction analysis is employed to investigate how the teacher dynamically interacts with students through embodied semiosis in the situated learning context and how academic knowledge is bodily enacted by the teacher languaging behaviours in the dynamic embodied environment. The findings show different embodied strategies are deployed by the teacher to bodily ground the academic knowledge in both vocal tract gesturing and hand movements where the meanings are generalized, visualized, objectified, concretized and symbolized in first-order languaging dynamics to facilitate and afford student sense-making and learning in academic discussions.