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.