From noticing to initiating correction: Students’ epistemic displays in instructional interaction

Abstract

By drawing on conversation analysis and the analysis of embodiment-in-interaction, this article describes students’ locally situated, interactional practices of demonstrating knowledge in teacher-led instructional interaction in the English lessons of a Content-and-Language-Integrated-Learning (CLIL) class. It focuses on students’ correction initiations that are preceded by embodied noticings – interactional events that are performed through different kinds of visibly intensified embodied and material practices. The analysis demonstrates how the embodied noticings serve as a preamble to the ensuing correction initiation and help project participant's stance toward the noticed feature. The article also analyzes the temporal and sequential position where the correction initiations are incorporated into the sequential unfolding of the ongoing classroom activity as well as the design and function of the initiations. The analysis highlights that the ways in which participants negotiate their epistemic positions in the asymmetrical hierarchy of classroom interaction are result of a conglomeration of divergent interactional phenomena. For these reasons, the article provides both novel ways of examining the role of embodiment in doing noticings and adds to the emerging body of research on participants’ displays of knowledge in classroom interaction, with a focus on the kind of correction work students can perform in teacher-led instructional interaction.