Eye gaze as a resource in handling trouble around mobile devices in EFL classroom interactions

Abstract

This article offers an insight into how interaction is multimodally built during task-accomplishment around mobile devices in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms. More specifically, it investigates eye gaze as a resource in recruiting help and pursuing response during interactional or task-related trouble sequences. The data come from videorecorded EFL lessons at Finnish comprehensive schools where mobile devices are used for learning tasks. Through multimodal conversation analysis, the article demonstrates that gaze is employed as one of the first resources to address trouble. Although tasks often require gaze to be directed at devices, it can be flexibly reoriented to peers when needed. The findings therefore highlight the need to study not only the use of technology but also the interaction around it. An emic perspective to applied linguistics is especially called for to understand how participants manage interaction in today’s technology-rich educational contexts.

L2 grammar‐for‐interaction: Functions of “and”‐prefaced turns in L2 students’ collaborative talk

“…More relevantly, the embodied participation framework of the situation shows that students treat the EFL textbooks as resources that mediate their task talk, visible in the way they visually attend to and scrutinize the book and its semiotic resources. In other words, students’ gaze orientation is predominantly to the books (see also Tůma, 2022; Vänttinen, 2022). In addition, the students treat the task question as an agenda that sets a particular order of topics for their talk, which is revealed in the way “and”‐prefaced turns are used to make progress with the activity.…”

“…Using some of these “and”‐prefaced turns, speakers may express disagreement with the prior speaker's contributions. In such turns, for the most part, the students’ gaze orientation is toward the materials during tasks that involve books or instruction sheets, and when gaze shifts toward co‐participants occur, they are produced for specific purposes (see also Tůma, 2022; Vänttinen, 2022), such as allocating the turn to the next speaker.…”

“…More relevantly, the "å sen" precedes the pointing gesture, thus serving mainly the linking function, while the embodied resource is employed as an interactional cue, for example, to draw participants' attention to the next item to be talked about and to signal turn completion. Important for our focus is the understanding that in object-based interaction, such as speaking about various pictures as in Rönnqvist and Lindström's (2021) study, participants orient predominantly to the task-relevant objects during the task activity, while directing their gaze to other participants at interactionally meaningful moments (e.g., Tuncer et al, 2019;Vänttinen, 2022). However, and as we will show in this study, the grammar-body interface is not limited to the kinds of recurrent and grammaticalized multimodal action packages exemplified by Rönnqvist and Lindström's (2021) study but instead encompasses a broader range of ad hoc combinations of various verbal, embodied, and material interactional resources, which are not necessarily routinized by the participants nor grammaticalized in any language community (see also Stukenbrock, 2021).…”