Pursuing a ‘writeable’ response in L2 oral placement tests: examiners’ recipient design practices on the same topic with multiple test takers

This chapter introduces multimodal Conversation Analysis (CA) as a research framework for CLIL classroom interaction. We begin by presenting key methodological principles of CA and discussing how CA has recently broadened its analytical focus to examine how modalities such as gestures and texts are used as resources for interaction. Following this, we review recent (multimodal) CA work that has investigated teaching and learning practices in classrooms involving second language users, such as in CLIL and immersion settings. To illustrate the described methodological orientation, we briefly analyse one video-recorded interaction and conclude by suggesting research areas related to CLIL classrooms that could benefit from a multimodal CA perspective.

This article demonstrates a methodology for studying the translation process from the perspective of multimodal social interaction and applies this methodology to a case analysis of collaborative audio description. The methodology is multimodal conversation analysis, which aims to uncover the way in which multimodal communication resources (e.g., talk, gaze, gestures) are used holistically and situatedly in building human action. Being empirical and data-driven, multimodal conversation analysis observes human conduct in its natural setting. This article analyses video data from an authentic audio-description process and presents the multimodal constitution of problem-solving sequences during translating. In addition, the article discusses issues regarding the methodological choices facing researchers who are interested in human interaction in translation. The article shows that applying multimodal conversation analysis opens new avenues for research into the translation process and collaborative translation.

{en} This study presents insights into L2 interactional competence (IC) development in an English language teaching (ELT) classroom. The study context is an Oral Communication Skills course restructured to deliver L2 IC instruction through (i) lectures on conversation analysis (CA) findings on L2 IC; (ii) video‐recorded conversational tasks; (iii) students’ self‐evaluation of their own recordings; and (iv) end‐of‐semester L2 IC assessment tasks. Given the continuum of the activities throughout the semester, the CA‐informed L2 IC instruction also constituted a longitudinal tracking mechanism convenient for the use of longitudinal and multimodal CA as a research methodology. The findings show that a semester‐long conversation analysis (CA)‐informed L2 IC instruction created opportunities for L2 development. Based on the examination of the video‐recorded and textual datasets, the study reports on one L2 learner's self‐identification of his improvable turn‐taking (i.e., intrusive overlaps) and sequencing (lack of closings) practices after examining his own video recordings. Following the learner's self‐identification, the interactional troubles that were negatively evaluated by the learner were also closely examined using multimodal CA, and the findings aligned with the learner's own analysis. While this alignment is framed as evidence for the learner's emergent understanding of the course content, the longitudinal tracking across the semester further helped document the L2 IC development, particularly of the previously negatively evaluated practices. The findings provide implications for L2 IC teaching and development in ELT classrooms and bring news insights into the teachability and learnability of CA research on L2 IC.

This article examines how second language (L2) interactional competence is manifested in students’ use of “and”‐prefaced turns when doing meaning‐focused oral tasks in pairs and small groups. Drawing on video recordings from English‐as‐a‐foreign‐language upper‐secondary classes recorded in Czechia and Finland, 86 sequences involving “and”‐prefaced turns were scrutinized using multimodal conversation analysis, focusing on language, gaze, and material resources. The findings suggest that by producing “and”‐prefaced turns, students orient to task progression. These turns have two functions: task managerial and contribution to the emerging task answer. By using task‐managerial “and”‐prefaced turns, the current speaker invites another student to participate, while in “and”‐prefaced contributions to the task answer, a participant adds to, generalizes, or modifies the previous task answer. The analysis shows that students mobilized their L2 interactional competence in producing “and”‐prefaced turns in close coordination with embodied resources and with respect to the spatio‐material surroundings and the nature of the task. These findings contribute to the multimodal reconceptualization of the grammar–body interface and research on turn‐initial particles within L2 interactional competence.

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 jointly manage to enter the task by deploying diverse preliminaries through pre-pre sequences, pre-question sequences and pre-telling sequences as sequential practices, and story-prefaces as turn design features. In so doing, they project the main actions in mutually recognisable ways and collaboratively accomplish the instructed actions in the complementary role cards. We argue that preliminaries used for entering the task talk mark the primary point for the participants to display their L2 ICs in the focal task-based assessment context. The findings bring conversation analytic insights into L2 IC and provide implications for assessment interactions.

This chapter provides a background of classroom discourse research with particular focus on research into the interactional organization of classroom interaction. Walsh’s (200, 2011) modes are introduced as a key framework for this volume. Prior research on student participation is summarized here, including the concepts of (un)willingness to participate and classroom interactional competence. Finally, multimodal conversation analysis, the methodological framework for this volume, is presented, including brief summaries of research on gaze, gesture, body movement, artifacts, and complex multimodal Gestalts. Notes on transcription practices are presented here, as well as descriptions of the data corpora drawn upon for this study.

Telecollaboration in pre‐service teacher education promotes intercultural communicative competence and bridges knowledge and practice. Although a growing body of studies has addressed the affordances of telecollaboration for developing student‐teachers' (STs') competencies, research focusing on their knowledge of classroom interaction—and on multimodal aspects of classroom interaction in particular—is scarce. Using multimodal conversation analysis (MCA), we address this research gap by investigating the affordances of telecollaboration between STs in Sweden and Japan to notice multimodal aspects of language classroom interaction. The study comes from a “parallel‐course project” that aimed to design and conduct telecollaborative tasks within the context of two pre‐service English language teacher education courses in Sweden and Japan. The participants ( N = 12) met online and worked on video‐based tasks using authentic classroom videos. They were grouped to conduct four online sessions (202 min of screen recordings) for analyzing classroom videos and transcriptions. Using MCA, a collection of 51 cases where STs notice and discuss multimodal aspects of teaching was compiled. The findings show that this telecollaboration allowed the STs to notice multimodal aspects of language classroom interaction, including teachers' gestures, gaze, and facial expressions in Japanese and European contexts. We demonstrate that the tasks facilitate collaborative noticing, enactment, and functional description of pedagogical gestures. The tasks also allowed the STs to discuss similarities and differences between the pedagogical cultures, contributing to their awareness of classroom interactional competence. Our study addresses a methodological gap in telecollaboration research by employing MCA. Implications for telecollaboration and curricula in language teacher education, as well as for using conversation analysis as a research methodology, will be given.

Virtual exchange refers to technology-enabled online communication between people who are geographically separated from each other. It has been increasingly adopted in education in the past two decades, especially since early 2020 when teachers and students were forced to move to an online mode of teaching and international exchange owing to the most recent pandemic. The current study is based on a nine-week virtual exchange project that took place between 22 students learning Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) from a British university and their partners from a Chinese university. The subjects conversed online with each other on self-directed topics on a weekly basis, and they completed their collaboration project for showcasing in the final week. From a translanguaging perspective, naturally occurring online conversations between intercultural interlocutors were investigated through the method of multimodal conversation analysis (MCA). The students leveraged a range of linguistic, semiotic and multimodal resources to navigate through communication with their partners. It is hoped that this study will contribute to the understanding of how translanguaging is embodied in virtual exchange interaction and how MCA can be applied to reveal the details present at the micro level of intercultural exchanges in the CFL context.

There is a growing interest in the field of translanguaging in EMI classrooms and the majority of the studies tend to employ functional discourse analysis and ethnographic observations to understand the nature of translanguaging practices in EMI classrooms. However, there is a lack of studies which explicate the detailed processes of how translanguaging practices are realised in EMI classrooms for promoting content and language learning. This chapter explores the possibility of combining Multimodal Conversation Analysis (MCA) and an ethnographic approach in order to better understand how translanguaging practices are realised in EMI classrooms and how translanguaging can facilitate content and language learning in an EMI context. Preliminary analysis from my feasibility trial, which is carried out in Hong Kong EMI secondary mathematics lessons, will be employed to illustrate the arguments. This chapter will argue that MCA can be used to discover the complex multilingual and multimodal resources employed by the interactants in co-constructing meanings through translanguaging in EMI classroom interactions. Moreover, using an ethnographic approach to complement the MCA analysis can potentially allow translanguaging researchers to understand how the wider sociocultural contexts and the identities of the participants play a role in affecting the participants’ own translanguaging practices.

Since the turn of the century, the field of language assessment has increasingly turned its eye towards the assessment of Interactional Competence (IC) (Galaczi & Taylor, 2018; Plough et al., 2018; Roever & Kasper, 2018). This study is premised on the argument that a key function of IC is to achieve and maintain intersubjectivity, as made publicly viewable through the practices that participants employ to display that they understand each other, and how they understand each other. The paper thus suggests that IC assessment can and should consider intersubjectivity as a ratable construct. Using Multimodal Conversation Analysis (Goodwin, 2018; Mondada, 2011), the paper examines two paired-speaking assessment tasks conducted by learners of German at the end of their fourth semester of study, focusing on how and when the learners display understanding of prior talk, examining how they receipt turns and display epistemic and affective stances in a publicly viewable way. The study suggests that the same practices the participants employ to display their understandings to each other can be used in a heuristic fashion by language testers to assess IC and concludes by considering the practical implications these have for classroom assessment.

Although L2 learners are often encouraged to provide feedback on each other's performance of paired/group interaction tasks in collaboration and interaction, how they jointly engage in feedback talk in ways that are conducive to establishing shared understanding of the institutionally preferred actions is largely unknown. Using multimodal conversation analysis, this study examines real‐time peer feedback interactions in a synchronous video‐mediated study group and uncovers the ways L2 learners expand on each other's feedback contributions for collaboratively accomplishing peer feedback in and through interaction. The analysis will explicate (a) accounting as a justifying device and (b) depersonalizing as a mitigating device. The findings show that the participants, in follow‐up feedback turns, attend to the local interactional circumstances created by peer response, tailor their feedback to the institutional goals of the focal setting, contribute to intersubjectivity, and pursue feedback recipient's agreement and strong display of uptake. The analysis brings insights into the construct of L2 Interactional Competence (IC) necessary for following up on peer feedback turns. The study discusses the practical implications of the focal phenomenon for oral assessment preparation classes.

Topic management is under-explored in language learning, teaching and testing settings. It may pose particular challenges in online intercultural exchanges (OIE) or virtual exchange (VE) because of differences in frames of time, space and culture. We investigate how language teacher trainees manage topic transitions in an OIE via videoconferencing where they design and test their own tasks. Using multimodal conversation analysis, we explore parallel cases of 30-minute exchanges by two trainee teachers with the same interlocutor (expert speaker of English). Findings indicate three essential features of a successful topic transition: timing of transition (mutual agreement on timing), signalling the transition (via verbal, nonverbal and material resources) and formulating work-thus-far, work-at-hand, and work-to-come. Trainee teachers employ multiple interactional resources including the task sheet as a transition-relevant object. We note differences in teacher trainees’ approach to time and task accomplishment, and how this enables or restricts intercultural dialogue. Results contribute to our understanding of topic management and VE interactional competence (VE-IC), and provide practical guidance for VE participants on how to manage topic transitions. The study also has implications for expert speakers’/teachers’ skills in leading instructional conversations in language learning settings.

This entry examines key approaches to the analysis of multimodality in interaction, foregrounding the view that human communication is inherently multimodal, embodied, and situated. It begins with Multimodal Conversation Analysis, an extension of the conversation analytic tradition, which integrates gesture, gaze, posture, and artefacts into sequential analysis of talk‐in‐interaction. This approach, developed through the work of scholars such as Goodwin, Kendon, and Mondada, provides fine‐grained accounts of how actions are coordinated through multimodal resources while maintaining emic sensitivity to participants' orientations. The second approach, Multimodal (Inter)action Analysis, originates from mediated discourse theory and advances action as the primary unit of analysis. Building on Scollon and Norris, this framework examines how actions are mediated by semiotic and material means, and introduces concepts such as modal intensity and configuration to account for the dynamic layering of multimodal resources. Applications of this approach in education and workplace communication illustrate its capacity to link micro‐interactional detail to broader cycles of social practice. The third approach, the social semiotic tradition, extends Halliday's systemic functional linguistics and emphasizes meaning‐making as design. Associated with the work of Kress, van Leeuwen, and colleagues, this perspective theorizes modes as socially shaped resources with distinct affordances and ideological dimensions. It highlights multimodality as both analytical and critical, connecting sign‐making practices to wider cultural and institutional contexts. Taken together, these approaches provide complementary insights into the study of multimodal communication and offer robust methodological and theoretical resources for advancing research, pedagogy, and practice in an increasingly complex communicative landscape.

Leader identity has traditionally been associated with hierarchical position (formal leadership). Yet, while there is an increasing tendency to regard leadership as a collective and distributed process, very little is known about the interplay of formal and informal leadership as in situ social practice within a hierarchical context. Using video-recordings of naturally occurring workplace interaction as data and arguing that insights from applied linguistics can be profitably employed to address such a lacuna, we use multimodal conversation analysis (CA) to show how ‘doing’ leadership is not limited to the formal leader. Rather, through talk, gaze, the use of space, artefacts and so on, it is negotiated in subtle ways which allow informal leadership to emerge in conjunction, and in this case in conflict, with formal leadership. We conclude this article by discussing the wider implications of these findings to both leadership theory and methodologies used to investigate the ‘just whatness’ of leadership.

Recent research has examined how teachers utilize translanguaging to tap into students’ out-of-school knowledge and students’ prior learnt content knowledge to scaffold students’ learning of new content knowledge. This study addresses a research gap by examining how teachers can maximize the utilization of mutually shared knowledge, which is not accessible to individuals outside the classroom community, through translanguaging to consolidate students’ content learning. The data is derived from a larger project conducted in Hong Kong secondary English-Medium-Instruction mathematics classrooms. Multimodal Conversation Analysis (MCA) is employed to analyse classroom interactions, triangulated by video-stimulated-recall interviews analysed with Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). I argue that establishing a translanguaging space allows teachers to capitalize on the shared sociocultural knowledge intrinsic to classroom communities, which shapes content instruction and forges meaningful relationships with students. I also highlight the significance of combining MCA with IPA to gain a deeper understanding of specific translanguaging moments and the reasoning behind incorporating mutually shared sociocultural knowledge into classroom interactions, which cannot be attained solely through the description of interactional sequences.