Epistemics in interaction refers to how participants display, manage and orient to their own and others' states of knowledge. This article applies recent conversation analytical work on epistemics to classrooms where language and content instruction are combined. It focuses on Epistemic Search Sequences (ESSs) through which students in peer interaction collectively resolve emerging knowledge gaps while working on pedagogic tasks. ESSs are initiated when a speaker displays an 'unknowing' epistemic stance by making an information request (IR) about some aspect of language or the content being worked on. We examine three different types of ESS: those in which a 'knowing' response is accepted by the init iator of the sequence; those in which there is an 'unknowing' response; and those where 'knowing' responses are contested. The findings have implications for understanding peer interaction in content-based classrooms in three areas: the affordances of peer interaction for learning in contrast with teacher-led 'knownanswer' sequences; how learners manage rights and responsibilities around knowing or not knowing; and how learners discover and work on their own learning objects.
Integrating concepts and techniques from ethnomethodology and sociomaterialism, this article investigates the observable material processes involving human action and place‐based contexts of language use enabled by locative media. The focal pedagogical intervention utilized mobile augmented reality (AR) activities, the development of which was inspired by research on learning ‘in the wild.’ Applying the principle of reverse engineering, we introduce a pedagogical approach termed ‘rewilding’ for its emphasis on designing supportive conditions for goal‐directed interaction outside of classrooms. Three instances of AR materials use are presented from an out‐of‐class activity associated with university‐level language courses involving a quest‐type AR game called ChronoOps. Video data of 3‐player groups were transcribed using conventions from multimodal conversation analysis. The empirical investigation illustrates meaning making through visible embodied displays, the performance of new actions through incorporation of public semiotic resources, and the contributions of the material surround as actants in the flow of interaction. Analysis illustrates that mobile AR activities enable languaging events among assemblages of environments, mobile devices, and embodied experience. We conclude by outlining the affordances of mobile AR activities as one example of rewilding approaches to creating material conditions for language use and learning.
This article explores the temporal nature of language learning in classroom settings through the lens of Conversation Analysis (CA) by drawing on video‐recorded interactions from Content and Language Integrated (CLIL) classrooms. It outlines some methodological challenges that the task of documenting language learning in and as observable social interaction poses for CA studies of second language (L2) learning and proposes that learning has typically been described as either a situated activity (in cross‐sectional studies) or a series of intermediate achievements (in longitudinal studies). The empirical analysis focuses on interactional instances in which students observably invoke and describe their earlier learning activities or achievements as part of some ongoing classroom activity, either in whole‐class or peer interaction. It is argued that such instances of a retrospective orientation to learning offer empirical materials for examining learning trajectories from a participant's perspective, how connections between moments and social domains separated by time and space are forged, and how resources are accumulated, recalibrated, and put to use. The focal interactions also raise conceptual implications for the ways in which learning is both situated and transferable, as well as methodological implications for how retrospection can best be rendered analytically accessible by way of a CA approach.
Videoconferencing is increasingly used in education as a way to support distance learning. This article contributes to the emerging interactional literature on video-mediated educational interaction by exploring how a telepresence robot is used to facilitate remote participation in university-level foreign language teaching. A telepresence robot differs from commonly used videoconferencing set-ups in that it allows mobility and remote camera control. A remote student can thus move a classroom-based robot from a distance in order to shift attention between people, objects and environmental structures during classroom activities. Using multimodal conversation analysis, we focus on how participants manage telepresent remote students' visual access to classroom learning materials. In particular, we show how visibility checks are accomplished as a sequential and embodied practice in interaction between physically dispersed participants. Moreover, we demonstrate how participants conduct interactional work to make learning materials visible to the remote student by showing them and guiding the 'seeing' of materials. The findings portray some ways in which participants in video-mediated interaction display sensitivity to the possibility of intersubjective trouble and the recipient's visual perspective. Besides increasing understanding of visual and interactional practices in technology-rich learning environments, the findings can be applied in the pedagogical design of such environments.
Previous studies of educational translanguaging have described it as an instructional and inclusive practice supporting the active classroom participation of students from diverse linguistic backgrounds. This chapter demonstrates how in monolingually-oriented educational contexts, translanguaging can also constitute a form of subversive language play targeting the local monolingual norm. The data are video-recorded lessons from secondary-level CLIL (Content-and-Language-Integrated-Learning) classrooms in Finland. In CLIL classrooms L2 is often upheld as a normatively assigned medium of interaction, particularly in whole-class talk, and students use their shared L1 in peer interaction. This chapter offers a case study investigating how one student's translanguaging, which takes place as a reaction to the teacher's enforcement of the L2-only norm, is treated as a 'language mix' by other participants in the classroom. Drawing on conversation analytic (CA) methodology, we describe the sequential unfolding and the normative context of the focal student's translanguaging, as well as practices of categorisation with which other students respond to him. We suggest that these kinds of situations can help to empirically tease apart some differences between translanguaging and code-switching. Further, we argue that the 'meaning' of translanguaging to participants cannot be established without considering its relation to locally upheld norms around language choice, which in the present case are employed as resources for the construction of language play and subversive identities.
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