Learning English Through Social Interaction: The Case ofBig Brother 2006,Finland

In line with recent Conversation Analytic work on language learning as situated practice, this article investigates how interactants can create language learning opportunities for themselves and others in and through social interaction. The study shows how the participants of BigBrother Finland, a reality TV show, whose main communication is in Finnish, take up resources provided by English and use them for learning in their interaction. This interaction is characterized by an orientation to both the local context and the television audience, a mixture of activity types and translanguaging. It focuses on one of the participants who explicitly evaluates his own proficiency in English as limi…

Teachers' embodied allocations in instructional interaction

This paper describes how teachers employ gaze, head nods and pointing gestures in allocating response turns to students in whole-class instructional interaction. Specifically, it focuses on examining teachers’ embodied allocations – that is, turn-allocations produced (mostly) by embodied means – and the sequential positions in which they are performed within the tripartite instructional sequence of IRE. While prior studies have noted their use in classroom interaction, the way in which they are drawn on by teachers has not been examined in detail. By using conversation analysis in conjunction with the study of embodied interaction, this article aims to show how these ephemeral embodied reso…

Vuorovaikutusta vauvasta vaariin

Clarification requests as a method of pursuing understanding in CLIL physics lectures

AbstractUsing multimodal conversation analysis, this article examines how students strive to resolve non-understandings through requests for clarification during teacher-fronted physics lectures ta...

Kansallinen kyselytutkimus englannin kielestä Suomessa : käyttö, merkitys ja asenteet

Kieli koulussa: kohti kokonaisvaltaista kielikäsitystä [pääkirjoitus]

In search of proper pronunciation: students’ practices of soliciting help during read-aloud


 
 
 This ar cle examines Finnish L2 learners’ interactional practices of flagging trouble in pronouncing words when reading aloud texts in English. Using conversation analysis, it describes how students employ three repair initiaon techniques – direct requests, trying out, and aborting the reading – as methods through which they mobilize teachers’ help in the form of a model pronunciation of the target word. By describing the sequential and temporal unfolding of read-aloud, the article presents an empirical way of tracing those classroom practices that students employ to develop their pronunciation skills of English in Finland. CA-based methodology that focuses on the inter…

Teacher turn-allocation and repair practices in classroom interaction : a multisemiotic perspective

This study describes teacher turn-allocation and repair practices in classroom interaction. The primary aim is to investigate what kinds of embodied actions and other semiotic resources teachers draw on when allocating turns to next speakers and when projecting repair actions in activities structured according to the tripartite instructional sequence of Initiation-Response-Evaluation. The study combines the theoretical and methodological framework of Conversation Analysis and a Goodwinian view of interaction as dynamically and reflexively created through a myriad of semiotic resources. The data base consists of 24 video-recorded lessons, from which 376 turn-allocations and 34 repair sequenc…

Explaining Hooke’s Law : Definitional Practices in a CLIL Physics Classroom

This article examines how a teacher in a Content-and-Language-Integrated-Learning (CLIL) program engages in various definitional practices during a plenary episode in a physics class taught in English in Finland. The episode focuses on explaining Hooke’s law, which involves defining its key concepts and their relations as instructable matters. Using multimodal conversation analysis, the article shows how the teacher accomplishes definitions and definition-related actions through talk and a range of embodied and material resources. The different configurations of resources are coordinated to elucidate the key concepts, to contextualize them in relation to the larger activity, and to situate …

No need necessarily to show off! : directives as situated activity in L2 classroom interaction

From noticing to initiating correction: Students’ epistemic displays in instructional interaction

Abstract By drawing on conversation analysis and the analysis of embodiment-in-interaction, this article describes students’ locally situated, interactional practices of demonstrating knowledge in teacher-led instructional interaction in the English lessons of a Content-and-Language-Integrated-Learning (CLIL) class. It focuses on students’ correction initiations that are preceded by embodied noticings – interactional events that are performed through different kinds of visibly intensified embodied and material practices. The analysis demonstrates how the embodied noticings serve as a preamble to the ensuing correction initiation and help project participant's stance toward the noticed featu…

In search of proper pronunciation : students’ practices of soliciting help during read-aloud

Manual Guiding in Peer Group Interaction: A Resource for Organizing a Practical Classroom Task

How might someone carry out an educational task by moving an object or by guiding another person in doing so? This article describes the practical work of a group of school students as they work through an object-based physics task. It analyzes a recurrent practice whereby one student influences another's embodied conduct, either by manually guiding an object (a weight, a moveable plank, and so on) or by guiding the hand of another student as they manipulate an object. We show how the practices of manual guiding involve a range of embodied and contextual resources. They serve to maintain and restore the progressivity of the task in two environments: corrective sequences and local projects i…

Sosiaalinen vuorovaikutusnäkökulma oppimiseen ja opettamiseen

Kirja-arvio Hua, Zhu & Seedhouse, Paul & Wei, Li & Cook, Vivian (toim.): Language learning and teaching as social inter-action nonPeerReviewed

Multimodal Perspective into Teachers’ Definitional Practices: Comparing Subject-Specific Language in Physics and History Lessons

This chapter compares two teachers’ definitional practices in two Content-and-Language-Integrated-Learning (CLIL) lessons, i.e. physics and history, which are taught in English in Finland. It adopts Dalton-Puffer’s (Eur J Appl Linguistics 1(2):216–253, 2013; Cognitive discourse functions: specifying an integrative interdisciplinary construct. In: Nikula T, Dafouz E, Moore P, Smit U (eds) Conceptualising integration in CLIL and multilingual education. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, pp. 29–54, 2016) theoretical construct of cognitive discourse functions (CDF) and showcases how it can be operationalized with empirical grounding. Multimodal conversation analysis (CA) is used to trace and observ…