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…
Mediated learning materials: visibility checks in telepresence robot mediated classroom interaction
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 partici…
Assessments and the social construction of expertise in political TV interviews
AbstractThis paper investigates how rights to knowledge and opinion are negotiated through assessments embedded in questioning sequences in political news interviews. The focus is on describing how assessments index epistemic positions and evaluative stances embedded in the turns through which the institutional goals of the interview are achieved. The analysis shows how assessments combine with other turn-constructional resources to build a critical or opposing position toward the interviewee's actions, deeds, status, views, or attitudes. It also sheds light on the strategies through which interviewees (IE) engage with and resist the positions displayed by interviewers (IR). Findings show t…