ABSTRACT How do people use objects and gestures to shape scientific argumentation? This paper engages the concept of “entanglement” as a heuristic for considering the potentials and constraints that gestures and materials create for interactants. Drawing on video recorded data from an academic-year-long linguistic ethnography of a high school science classroom in southern Arizona, USA, I examine the entanglement of discourse, bodies, and objects in one act sequence to reveal differences in the situated practices of high school students as opposed to professional scientists. The analysis reveals that objects and gestures allow scientific novices to engage in collaborative sense-making as they transform discourse and are transformed in discourse. At the same time, the flexibility and contingency of objects and gestures can be problematic for novices dealing with ambiguous understandings of natural phenomena, leading to interpretations that may or may not correspond to expert understandings. Reckoning with materiality in science argumentation must account for the limitations of objects and bodies as forms of evidence as well as their potential to afford forms of agency.

ABSTRACT While existing research into L2 classroom discourse has highlighted how knowledge and knowledge positions are negotiated, no attention seems to have been paid to what might be called conceptual epistemic domains. Drawing on 22 hours of video-recorded data from Iranian EFL classrooms, our conversation analytic study illustrates how invoking conceptually accessible epistemic domains creates interactional space for teachers to introduce conditionally relevant vocabulary. We define conceptual epistemic domains as areas of world knowledge to which learners have ostensible access. The bottom-up analysis of our data showcases that such practices serve two pivotal pedagogical functions: (1) providing contingent assistance; (2) initiating and maintaining warm-up activities. In the former, the teachers invoke the conceptually accessible epistemic domain facing learners’ claims of insufficient knowledge to elicit relevant further talk. In the latter, the teachers sequentially build up a shared conceptual access to conduct a warm-up activity. Both cases unfold interactional space where relevant vocabulary items emerge as learnables. We argue that by bringing to the fore what is conceptually accessible to the learners, teachers orient to relevant vocabulary items as teachable objects. Our findings thus shine light on an interactional resource through which the need for vocabulary teaching is talked into being.

ABSTRACT Using the framework of conversation analysis, this paper examines aided-speaking students’ unsolicited speech-generating device (SGD)-mediated questions in teacher-fronted classroom talk. The analysis draws on a corpus of 18 h of video-recorded classroom interactions including 23 aided-speaking students using SGDs or picture-based communication boards. In all, 5% of the students’ contributions were unsolicited questions, produced by three students. The students were found to orient to turn transition relevance places, but due to prolonged production time their questions risked sequential and topical misplacement in the ongoing classroom talk and were vulnerable to misunderstandings. To address this problem, students activated the synthetic voice before finalising the question, claiming the interactional floor while securing time to complete their utterance. They also refrained from activating the synthetic voice and instead made the question visually available for the teacher to read, thereby transferring the responsibility for answering the question to the teacher when sequentially and topically relevant. The study demonstrates the complex interactional process of formulating SGD-mediated questions, sometimes requiring that the teacher, assistants, and students engage in repair work and scaffolding to establish the meaning of a student’s utterance. The findings imply that the treatment of non-speaking students’ contributions as questions requires designated teacher work.

ABSTRACT We present doing language testing sequences; L2 learners decide for themselves to test themselves or each other explicitly on new linguistic items, outside the official task cycle with no professional present, investing extra time and energy. We examine how and why pairs of learners do this, and its impact on their learning. They use an App to learn Chinese language and culture whilst cooking in their university dormitory kitchens, receiving multimedia instructions and help from a tablet. Using a mixed-methods research design, we asked: How is the practice of doing language testing organised in interactional terms? Using multimodal CA we found: learners organised the interaction themselves and introduced their own learning interests. Some self-tested and some peer-tested; some consulted the system and some did not. To ascertain the reasons why the learners decided to do language testing, we used post-hoc interviews and found their major motivation was to have an improved learning experience. We then compared their vocabulary post-test score gains with those who did not do language testing and found they made significantly higher gains with a learning advantage. The study shows that some students are motivated to do language testing in order to enhance their task performance and learning experience, in which they succeed.

ABSTRACT Collaborative writing (CW) tasks require heightened Engagement with Language (EWL), as their learning potential has been shown to be mediated by the number of language-related episodes (LREs) or learners’ patterns of interaction. Recent research on CW with young populations has investigated different dimensions of EWL, but a holistic view of the three main aspects of EWL – social, cognitive and affective – is inexistent. This study tries to fill this gap and explores EWL in a group of 69 young Spanish EFL learners (ages 11–12) who completed a picture narration writing task in pairs. The three dimensions of EWL were analysed qualitatively and quantitatively by means of number of turns and LREs, patterns of interaction, and a semi-structured post-task interview. The results indicated that these learners were capable of correctly resolving different linguistic issues, but the extent to which they elaborated on these discussions was low, regardless of their pattern of interaction, which was either cooperative or collaborative most times. A collaborative pattern seemed to lead to more affective engagement and LREs, indicating certain interrelation between these three dimensions, although encouragement and support were seldom verbalised.

ABSTRACT The study of participation from a socio-interactional perspective relates to the exploration of the interactional practices displayed by interactants and the close examination of the multimodal resources they employ. Here we observe the language choices made by 2 teachers and 10 students who participate in a WhatsApp chat over the summer break. Since language choice is a social category-bound activity linked to social forms of participation, our analysis focuses on the negotiation participants engage in to determine their practiced language policy and to select their medium of interaction. Our analysis reveals that language choices reshape and construct what we would refer to as an ‘in-between learning scenario’. This scenario creates tensions between the teachers’ and the students’ agenda, observed through their alignment with other interactants and their interpretation of the task at hand. Language selection is not a strict, personal choice. Instead, it is socially situated and depends on how speakers co-construct the communicative event they participate in and who holds the control of topic selection.

ABSTRACT The interactional roles of smile and laughter have been widely explored in both institutional settings and mundane talk (e.g. Holt 2016; Potter and Hepburn 2010). However, the role of one specific kind of smile, what we call a ‘squeezed-mouth smile’ (SMS), remains unexamined. Using CA, this study explores one teacher’s use of SMS in response to student turns, and how it is used to mitigate disaffiliation when treating a student response as inappropriate or transgressive. Four sample extracts out of 15-case collection are presented and analysed. The use of SMS enables her to manage a potentially delicate interactional moment by treating the student turn as inappropriate but without admonishment or discouraging further participation. Analysis also suggests, however, that SMS may be insufficient in enabling her to elicit the target response and realign interactional trajectory, allowing students to continue transgressive responses. Thus, SMS works in conjunction with verbal responses, which together identify (1) that, and why, the turn is considered inappropriate and (2) the form of the desired response. Overall, this study contributes to research on practices available to teachers in managing alignment and affiliation in classrooms.

ABSTRACT This study investigates the multimodal construction of blame attributions in peer interaction during digital tasks in English as a Foreign Language classrooms. Drawing on multimodal conversation analysis (CA), we examine how the force of blamings is manifested in and through the variety of resources used, and the role of digital devices in the emergence and resolution of blaming sequences. The analysis shows that children’s blame attributions can be bold and involve a lamination of several multimodal resources, often without an explicit verbal formulation. Additionally, participants may build on the actions of the digital application to allocate blame, using the affordances of the technology to avoid direct verbal attributions. The study thus elaborates on the sequential structure of blamings and highlights their context-bound and multimodal nature. It contributes to research on multimodality in technology-supported classroom interactions, shedding light on the merging of the embodied and the digital in action formation.

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the accomplishment of highlighting in multiparty video-mediated learning activities. The focus is on moments of screen sharing and the verbal, embodied, and digital resources participants deploy to draw joint attention to a referent on screen. Drawing on screen recorded data (90 h) from an adult education setting (i.e. online crisis management course) and using multimodal conversation analysis (CA), the paper illustrates that highlighting consists of carefully coordinated conduct, including the mobilisation of the cursor and the selection of parts of text in concert with talk and bodily-visual practices. The analysis shows highlighting as a referential and collaborative practice used: 1) to establish and maintain co-participants’ attention to specific topics and items (e.g. words) during multi-unit turns, and 2) to initiate negotiations of written content. The study contributes to a better understanding of screens and digital objects as collaborative and structuring resources and of how they can be meaningfully deployed in task-based online teaching and learning.

ABSTRACT In this study, we analyse a 9-year-old child’s argumentative participation in a group discussion, from a microgenetic development angle. Specifically, we follow one child through the discussion and analyse the development process, defined as changed participation and as interactionally contingent upon the other participants and the teacher. The data consist of one video recording of the group discussion including two dilemmatic tasks for which the children are asked to come to a joint solution. A sequential analysis was performed from a sociocultural perspective on learning and communication. The findings show that the focus child’s argumentative participation develops both quantitatively and qualitatively, and that this development reflects a switch between general agreement amongst the children in the first task and general disagreement in the second task. This disagreement angle is discussed both from an argumentation and an education perspective. Two of the focus child’s argumentative resources (an imaginary space she creates and the use of the concept “data protection”) are discussed in detail.