Pursuing student response through incomplete syntax, prosody, bodily- and visuo-orthographical resources in Chinese-as-a-second-language classrooms

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study investigates how teachers use designedly incomplete utterances (DIUs) and other multimodal resources to pursue student responses to their questions to accomplish particular pedagogical tasks in Chinese as a second language (CSL) classrooms. Adopting interactional linguistics and conversation analysis, we examined 18.5 hours of CSL classroom interactions. We identified two different types of DIUs based on their syntactic projectability: DIU with a local projection and DIU with a global projection. Both types of DIUs are used after a lack of student answers to teachers’ prior questions. However, DIUs with a local projection are used after teachers’ identification or characterisation questions, whereas DIUs with a global projection are used to pursue student answers to teachers’ telling questions. These two types of DIUs are produced with the prosodic feature of final lengthening, bodily movements such as torso lean and eyebrow raise, and visuo-orthographical resources such as Chinese characters on blackboards and screens. The findings contribute to our understanding of the multimodal resources that teachers use to pursue responses in L2 classrooms.