Conversation analysis (CA) is a finely tuned qualitative method for analyzing how people use language to carry out their myriad everyday interactions both in leisurely conversations and in more specialized—often work—settings. Through interactive tasks based on authentic dialogs, this lesson is designed to help students discover and label some fundamental and regular features of talk-in-interaction while adopting CA’s action-based view of language.

This chapter presents the collaborative research project ‘From monologues to dialogues’. The project included several small-scale classroom studies conducted by a research team of teachers and researchers. The collaboration encompassed all stages of the project (design, implementation and analysis), which combined theory and practice to produce findings relevant for the teaching profession. The project was grounded in a practice-based problem: How do we get the pupils to talk to each other in the target language in the classroom? The research team hypothesized that the issue might lie with oral classroom activities and that the problem could be solved by designing meaningful tasks aimed at promoting co-constructed interaction. Our findings related to task design indicate that problem-based tasks with brief instructions and artefacts can elicit ‘good interaction’, which–with the analytical affordances of conversation analysis–we empirically defined as co-constructed interaction where pupils attend to each other’s turns-at-talk and formulate fitting turns that foster the progressivity of the activity. Challenges in our collaboration included negotiating different expectations and perspectives; we argue, however, that the benefits outweigh the challenges. Most importantly, by working side by side in the research process our research team has produced findings that are both actionable and sustainable for the teaching profession.

Ethnomethodological, conversation analytic (CA) research has highlighted the nature of instructions as inherently underspecified plans (Lindwall et al., 2015); yet students orient to instructions as repositories of what it means to accomplish the target task in the “right” way. This paper illustrates such orientation by exploring how a laminated card with printed task instructions is used as a material, pedagogical artifact. The data consist of 6 video-recorded task-based interactions between pairs of upper-secondary school students in Sweden who engaged in an open-ended problem-based task in the English-as-a-foreign-language classroom. All pairs read the instructions at the beginning of their task-based interaction and interpreted the task as entailing the co-construction of narratives. However, they also oriented to the task instructions during their engagement with the task by talking the instructions into relevance while pointing or looking at the instructions card. These instances have been collected and examined with a multimodal CA lens. Our analysis shows that the students oriented to the instructions card to: (a) check their interpretation of the task to determine what to do next; (b) get back on task after extended side sequences; (c) verify their understanding of the scenario described in the instructions; and (d) check their emergent narratives against such scenario. These findings illustrate the students’ emic concern for fostering task progressivity and for doing the task correctly as they oriented to the instructions card as a publicly accessible locus of epistemic authority which embodied a tangible focus of joint attention.

References

Lindwall, O., Lymer, G. and Greiffenhagen, C. (2015). The Sequential Analysis of Instruction. In N. Markee (Ed.), The Handbook of Classroom Discourse and Interaction (pp.142-157). John Wiley and Sons. 

This chapter reports on a mixed methods study that investigates the effect of the interlocutor’s native/nonnative-speakerness on the test takers’ production of repair practices. The study was conducted with 28 second-semester learners of Chinese participating in two classroom-based speaking tests with different student interlocutors, a peer and a native speaker, both of which were students. Using a conversation analytic approach, we identified nine practices of other-initiated repair (i.e., nine different ways of indicating non-understanding and asking for help) and five types of other-directed word searches (i.e., five ways of recruiting the coparticipant’s help in the face of a speaking problem). While we found that the students employed both other-directed word searches and other-initiated repair more frequently in the conversations with the native speaker, the analysis also showed a lot of individual variability in the production of repair across the two speaking tests. Even though not all test takers and native speakers react in the same way, the findings of the study indicate that a linguistically asymmetric test setting by including a native speaker as interlocutor may be most fruitful if the testing objective is to elicit repair practices from the test taker.

This study deals with turn-taking in human-robot interactions (HRI). Based on 15 sessions of video-recorded interactions between pairs of human participants and a social robot called Furhat, we explore how human participants orient to violations of the normative order of turn-taking in social interaction and how they handle those violations. As a case in point, we present sequences of HRI to show particular features of turn-taking with the robot and also how the robot may fail to respond to the human participants’ bid to take a turn. In these sequences, the participants either complete the turn in progress and ignore the overlap caused by the robot’s continuation of its turn, or they cut short their own turn and restart in the next possible turn-transition place. In all cases in our data, the overlaps and failed smooth turn-transitions are oriented to as accountable and in some sense interactionally problematic. The results of the study point not only to improvables in robot engineering, but also to routine practices of projection and the ways in which human subjects orient toward normative expectations of ordinary social interactions, even when conversing with a robot.

This conversation-analytic (CA) paper contributes to the line of research focusing on the materiality of pedagogical settings (Guerrettaz et al. 2021) and its impact on classroom discourse (Mathieu et al. 2021). Specifically, we explore the affordances provided by cutout pictures that were oriented to as visually ambiguous by students engaged in an open-ended problem-based task. This kind of task was designed to promote students’ collaborative interaction in the English-as-a-foreign-language classroom. The data consist of six video-recorded interactions between pairs of upper secondary school students. The students were given six cutouts illustrating various items (i.e., boomerang, sunglasses) and an instruction card that read: “At an excavation of a cave a person was found together with these items. How did this person end up in the cave?” Our multimodal CA analysis shows that all students co-constructed imaginative narratives revolving around the cutouts and that they oriented to the visual ambiguity of the cutouts when they (a) named the items on the pictures and (b) discussed potential storylines. In particular, the students solved impasses concerning the emerging narrative by suggesting different identifications for the relevant cutouts, which allowed them to develop alternative storylines. Overall, we argue that by interpreting the cutouts as visually ambiguous the students engaged in collaborative interaction as they accomplished a variety of actions such as agreements, challenges, and disagreements. In conclusion, our findings suggest that the selection of material objects such as cutouts has an impact on task-based interaction and is a crucial aspect of task design.

References

Guerrettaz, A.M., Engman, M.M., & Graves, K. (Eds.) (2021). Material Use Across Diverse Contexts of Language Learning and Teaching [Special Issue]. The Modern Language Journal, 105 (S1), 1-185.

Mathieu, C.S., Marcos Miguel, N., & Jakonen, T. (2021) Introduction: classroom discourse at the intersection of language education and materiality. Classroom Discourse, 12 (1-2), 1-14.

This paper focuses on the role that material artifacts play on students’ task-based interactions in the EFL classroom. While conversation-analytic research has focused on students’ implementation of tasks as observable activities (e.g., Balaman & Sert, 2017; Kunitz & Skogmyr Marian, 2017; Lee & Burch, 2017), the role of artifacts on the ongoing task- oriented interactions has just started to be explored (Burch, 2019; Kunitz et al., 2022). Our conversation-analytic study aims to fill this gap by investigating the interactional consequences that the use of specific artifacts might have in six videorecorded task-based interactions between pairs of first-year EFL students. The students were presented with the scenario of a person found during an excavation with various items (illustrated by cut-out pictures). Our fine-grained analyses suggest that artifacts play an important role in: (i) the broader sequential organization of their task-based interaction; and (ii) the actions-in- interaction accomplished in order to complete the task. After an initial artifact-manipulation phase, the students co-constructed emergent narratives based on the scenarios suggested by the artifacts. The discussion over the visual ambiguity and the role of different artifacts on the story behind the excavation involved students in actions-in-interaction such as formulating hypotheses, agreeing, and disagreeing. The findings of this study therefore illustrate the importance of artifacts in task accomplishment and suggest that the selection of artifacts is a crucial aspect of task design that aims to elicit co-constructed, collaborative interaction. 

References

Balaman, U., & Sert, O. (2017). Local contingencies in L2 tasks: A comparison of context-sensitive interactional achievements across two different task types. Bellaterra Journal of Teaching & Learning Language & Literature 10(3). 9-27.

Burch, A.R. (2019) Pedagogical Documents and Language Partner Interaction: The Co-accomplishment of how a Handout Constrains an L2 Interaction. Paper presented at International PragmaticsAssociation (IPrA): Hong Kong

Kunitz, S., Berggren, J., Haglind, M., & Löfquist, A. (2022). Getting students to talk: A practice-based study on the design and implementation of problem-solving tasks in the EFL classroom. Languages. 

Kunitz, S., & Skogmyr Marian, K. (2017). Tracking immanent language learning behavior over time in task-based classroom work. TESOL Quarterly 51(3). 507-535. 

Lee, J., & Burch, A.R. (2017). Collaborative planning in process: An ethnomethodological perspective. TESOL Quarterly 51. 536-570.

This paper focuses on the role that material artifacts and artifact features play on students’ task-based interactions in the EFL classroom. While conversation-analytic research has focused on students’ implementation of tasks as observable activities (e.g., Balaman & Sert, 2017; Kunitz & Skogmyr Marian, 2017; Lee & Burch, 2017), the role of artifacts on the ongoing task-oriented interactions has just started to be explored (Burch, 2019; Kunitz et al., 2022). Our conversation-analytic study aims to fill this gap by investigating the interactional consequences that the use of specific artifacts might have in six video-recorded task-based interactions between pairs of first-year EFL students enrolled in two upper secondary schools in Sweden. The students were presented with the scenario of a person found during an excavation with various items (illustrated by cut-out pictures) and were instructed to answer the question: “How did this person end up in the cave?”. Our fine-grained analyses of the ongoing interactions suggest that artifacts play an important role in: (i) the broader sequential organization of their task-based interaction; and (ii) the actions-in-interaction accomplished in order to complete the task; and (iii) the affordances for topical talk that they provide. After an initial artifact-manipulation phase, the students co-constructed emergent narratives based on the scenarios suggested by the artifacts. The discussion over the visual ambiguity of some artifacts and over the role of different artifacts on the story behind the excavation involved students in actions-in-interaction such as formulating hypotheses, agreeing, and disagreeing. The findings of this study therefore illustrate the importance of artifacts in task accomplishment and suggest that the selection of artifacts is a crucial aspect of task design that aims to elicit co-constructed, collaborative interaction. Overall, the study contributes to the literature on task-based instruction and provides relevant insights for both researchers and practitioners.

References

Balaman, U., & Sert, O. (2017). Local contingencies in L2 tasks: A comparison of context-sensitive interactional achievements across two different task types. Bellaterra Journal of Teaching & Learning Language & Literature 10(3). 9-27.

Burch, A.R. (2019) Pedagogical Documents and Language Partner Interaction: The Co-accomplishment of how a Handout Constrains an L2 Interaction. Paper presented at International PragmaticsAssociation (IPrA): Hong Kong

Kunitz, S., Berggren, J., Haglind, M., & Löfquist, A. (2022). Getting students to talk: A practice-based study on the design and implementation of problem-solving tasks in the EFL classroom. Languages. 

Kunitz, S., & Skogmyr Marian, K. (2017). Tracking immanent language learning behavior over time in task-based classroom work. TESOL Quarterly 51(3). 507-535. 

Lee, J., & Burch, A.R. (2017). Collaborative planning in process: An ethnomethodological perspective. TESOL Quarterly 51. 536-570.

This chapter reviews qualitative research on language and culture learning in migration contexts. More specifically, the chapter focuses on initiatives organized by the civil society to aid language practice and culture learning as well as experiences of language support on the workplace. Exploring these informal learning environments is crucial in order to gather insights on the immigrants’ integration process as they accomplish everyday activities and seek language and culture support from the receiving community. Research in this area typically relies on extensive fieldwork, through which the researcher collects a variety of data, such as interviews with key participants and recordings of their participation in target activities. Findings suggest that direct involvement with members of the receiving community enhances opportunities to use the language for meaningful communicative purposes and to learn more about the local culture. At the same time, interaction between migrants and members of the receiving community fosters the creation of social bonds and community building and thereby helps to achieve integration as a co-constructed process of mutual accommodation.

This study addresses a pedagogical practice-based issue, that is, difficulties with eliciting student–student co-constructed oral interaction in the EFL classroom. The study was conducted with a bottom-up approach to pedagogical research through the close collaboration of teachers and researchers who were equal partners in the research team. It was observed that students often engage in parallel monologues or unauthentic question–response sequences when accomplishing oral activities; thus, the research team aimed to design tasks providing opportunities for meaningful, co-constructed talk. The research design involved an iteration of task design and classroom testing in three cycles, and the student–student interaction was analyzed using conversation analysis. Findings show that the divergent problem-based task designed in this process did elicit purposeful and collaborative oral interaction, as the students engaged in co-constructed talk by visibly attending to each other’s turns-at-talk and by formulating fitting turns that fostered the progressivity of the activity. The task also included artifacts (i.e., material objects), the manipulation of which played an important role in the emerging collaborative interaction. These findings suggest that the implementation of open-ended problem-based tasks can develop students’ interactional competence, while the use of artifacts can help students make their reasoning tangible and visually accessible.