Data collection considerations for classroom interaction research: a conversation analytic perspective

ABSTRACT

With the growing centrality of digital recording technologies to conversation analysis (CA) research, an emerging array of publications has begun to provide useful methodological insights on how to capture multimodal and temporal complexities of social interaction in video footages. By and large, however, they have been written as general guidelines, without much regard to specificities of institutional settings. To address this gap, this article discusses specific considerations for the production of audio-visual data for CA research on classroom interaction. We argue that a set of heuristic considerations is needed to prevent researchers from overlooking details that participants orient to as constitutive of their institutional activities. To this end, we offer a brief overview of common characteristics of classroom interaction. These include its multiple spatial arrangements within and across lessons and pedagogical projects which are accomplished through local actions and action sequences. Building on these characteristics, we provide a set of guiding questions to facilitate pre- and online decision-making processes that are undertaken by individual researchers in the data collection phase. Yielding unprecedented opportunities for research, careful and disciplined attention to the production of video data is indispensable as we continue to study and theorise classroom interaction in diverse contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Classroom interaction
• conversation analysis
• video
• data collection
• methodological considerations

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the annual conference of American Association for Applied Linguistics and the research symposium on The Study of the Interactional Competencies for L2 Teaching-and-Learning at Pennsylvania State University. We acknowledge the helpful comments we received from the audience.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

Audio-visual data for Excerpts 1 and 2 are available on Talkbank.org: https://talkbank.org/access/ClassBank/Curtis.html

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daisuke Kimura

Daisuke Kimura is a Project Assistant Professor at the University of Tokyo. Trained primarily in Conversation Analysis, he studies L2 and lingua franca interactions in diverse contexts and configurations. His research interests include English as a lingua franca, multilingualism, multimodality, academic discourse socialisation and study abroad.

Taiane Malabarba

Taiane Malabarba is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages at Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (Brazil). Her principal theoretical orientation is Conversation Analysis, through which she has investigated classroom interaction mainly in the EFL context. Her research interests include classroom interaction, teaching and learning English in EFL contexts, language policy and multimodality.

Joan Kelly Hall

Joan Kelly Hall is Professor of Applied Linguistics and Director of the Center for Research on English Language Learning and Teaching at the Pennsylvania State University. Her research is based on conversation analysis and centres on documenting the specialised interactional practices and actions of teaching-and-learning found in instructional settings.