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To what extent do teachers of EFL hinder or facilitate learner contributions by their use of language? How can teachers enhance the quantity and quality of learner output by more careful language use? In what ways do teachers deny learning opportunities by ‘filling in the gaps’ or ‘smoothing over’ learner contributions? Adopting the position that maximizing learner involvement is conducive to second language acquisition, this paper examines the ways in which teachers, through their choice of language, construct or obstruct learner participation in face-to-face classroom communication. From the lesson extracts emerge a number of ways in which teachers can improve their teacher talk to facilitate and optimize learner contributions. The conclusion, that teachers’ ability to control their use of language is at least as important as their ability to select appropriate methodologies, has implications for both teacher education and classroom practices.

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This paper primarily investigates the interactional unfolding and management of 'claims of insufficient knowledge' (Beach and Metzger 1997) in two English language classrooms from a multi-modal, conversation-analytic perspective. The analyses draw on a close, micro-analytic account of sequential organisation of talk as well as on various multi-semiotic resources the participants enact including gaze, gestures, body movements and orientations to classroom artefacts. The research utilises transcriptions of 16 (classroom) hours of video recordings, which were collected over a six-week period in 2010 in a public school in Luxembourg. The findings show that establishing recipiency through mutual gaze and turn allocation practices have interactional and pedagogical consequences that may lead to claims of insufficient knowledge. Furthermore, the findings illustrate various multi-modal resources the students use (e.g. gaze movements, facial gestures and headshakes) to initiate embodied claims of no knowledge and to show specific exchange structures. Finally, we suggest that certain interactional resources, including embodied vocabulary explanations and Designedly Incomplete Utterances (Koshik 2002), deployed by the teacher after a student's claim of insufficient knowledge may lead to student engagement, which is a desirable pedagogical goal. Our findings have implications for the analysis of insufficient knowledge, for teaching, teacher education and in particular for L2 Classroom Interactional Competence (Walsh 2006).