Establishing understanding during student-initiated between-desk instructions in project work

ABSTRACT

This study investigates how shared understanding is established during a rarely researched instructional and interactional context, namely teacher–student interactions during between-desk instructions (BDIs). Specifically, the authors focus on instructional interactions initiated by students during project-based language teaching in an upper-secondary Swedish classroom and probe into how students’ formulations of understanding of a teacher’s prior responses shape the subsequent interactional trajectories. Their conversation analytic investigation reveals that the teacher produces either confirming or disconfirming actions following students’ formulations of understanding. These response types accomplish two distinct forms of interactional work: (a) when the teacher confirms the students’ formulations, she expands the sequence with instruction-related elaborations; and (b) when the teacher does not confirm the formulations, she accounts for that, prompting students to reformulate their understanding. Overall, this study contributes to the body of research on BDIs as a recurring yet under-investigated lesson practice during project work.

KEYWORDS:

• Student-initiated sequences
• between-desk instructions
• formulations
• classroom interaction
• conversation analysis

1. Introduction

One of the common classroom teaching approaches in Sweden is project work. This educational approach engages learners in a theme or topic through a series of interconnected tasks over extended periods within a semester for the aim of realising a final product that can be ‘in the form of posters, presentations, reports, videos, webpages, blogs and so on’ (British Council, 2013, para 13). Project work encompasses teacher-fronted whole-class instruction and group work between students, as well as encounters known as between-desk instructions (BDIs), whereby teachers who move from desk to desk stop ‘to monitor students’ progress or to provide students with guidance’ (Kaur, 2009, p. 340) or to answer students’ enquiries. Therefore, BDIs are either initiated by teachers to attend to various tasks (e.g. following and guiding their progression on the work) or by students themselves to enquire about instructional matters (e.g. task procedures or instructional issues). Since student-initiated BDIs are primarily based on solving instructional matters and attending to instructional procedures, establishing shared understanding becomes the object of a joint activity between teachers and students.

Although there is a growing body of research on BDIs in instructional settings (e.g. Åberg, 2015; Greiffenhagen, 2012; Koole, 2012), more research is needed to document the interactional unfolding of these sequences, especially in terms of how shared understanding between students and teachers (i.e. intersubjectivity, Raymond, 2019) is co-constructed and established. Using the methodological framework of conversation analysis (CA, Goodwin, 2000; Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974) and based on data collected from an upper-secondary school in Sweden, we show that students’ initiatives (e.g. student-initiated questions, Waring, 2011; Duran & Sert 2021) are followed by a response in the form of, for example, clarification or explanation by the teacher, to which students display a level of understanding through what Heritage and Watson (1979) call formulations. Heritage (1985) defines formulations as utterances that are ‘summarising, glossing or developing the gist of an informant’s earlier statements’ (p. 100). Our findings reveal two reactions from the teacher (i.e. confirming and disconfirming) to the students’ formulations and show how the teacher moves the interaction forward and enables students’ understanding of instructional matters.

The overall aim of this study is, therefore, to describe the sequential environment of these formulations as displays of understanding and document their pedagogical relevance as a routine practice during between-desk instructional interactions. In the following section, we define and review the interactional event in which formulations are deployed, namely BDIs. We then (in 1.2) focus on how participants co-manage understanding through formulations.

1.1. Between-desk instructions in classrooms

Instruction giving is a regular pedagogical action that occurs in all classrooms in the world (Markee, 2017). However, classroom-based empirical research into instructional sequences has primarily focused on whole-class interactions (Aldrup, 2019; Badem-Korkmaz & Balaman, 2020; Kunitz, 2021; Markee, 2015; Skarbø Solem, 2016; Somuncu & Sert, 2019; St. John & Cromdal, 2016). Yet, a small but growing body of conversation analytic research focuses on teacher–student interactions that occur while a teacher walks around the classroom¹ and attends to instructional matters, referred to as between-desk instructions.² BDIs, unlike traditional teacher-fronted whole-class instructions, can be initiated by students who summon the teacher to enquire about instructional matters. As shown in section 3, this has repeatedly been the case in the dataset we analyse in this article.

In Sweden, BDIs are a recurring practice in classrooms where project work is used as a pedagogical arrangement to organise learning activities (Åberg, 2015; Carlgren, Klette, Mýrdal, Schnack, & Simola, 2006). It is one of the outcomes of the change from a traditional teacher-fronted classroom to a more student-centred one where students’ achievement and self-regulated learning are enhanced (Carlgren et al., 2006; Giota, Bergh, & Emanuelsson, 2019; Giota & Emanuelsson, 2018). Despite its pervasiveness in Swedish schools, a small body of research examines interactions during BDIs. For instance, Åberg (2017) investigated student-initiated sequences during BDIs in the context of a writing task and identified three positions where students summon the teacher for help: at the beginning of the task, in the middle of the writing process, and upon completing their texts. Åberg (2017) found that interactions in these three different encounters help ‘shape the ways that the sequences progress’ (p. 635). Åberg’s study is thus a good example of the sequential unfolding of BDIs, documenting when they occur during a lesson. Still, we need more research into how shared understanding is established within these sequences and what interactional resources have been used to turn non-understanding into understanding.

In another study conducted in the Netherlands, Koole (2012) examined the sequential organisation of student-initiated instructional sequences in a mathematics classroom and delineated three parts of these sequences: localisation, explanation; and acknowledgement. Koole (2012) demonstrated how students initiate interaction by specifically localising a problem with the instructions or signalling a knowledge gap. The teacher then follows up with an explanation that the student acknowledges either by producing confirmation tokens or demonstrating understanding. The context Koole investigated included one-to-one interactions (i.e. between a teacher and a student) in mathematics lessons. In contrast, our study focuses on BDIs between the teacher and groups of students in an English language classroom, with a particular interactional focus on the role of formulations in establishing shared understanding.

In a recent study on embodied movements during between-desk encounters in secondary-level classrooms in Finland, Jakonen (2020) examined instances when students mobilise bodily resources to display their need for help when the teacher is present at their desks. The coordination of body movements, according to Jakonen (2020), helps to ‘enable and configure the provision of instruction during task work’ (p. 20). This study shows that we need to document micro-level details of interaction, including gestures and body positioning, to reveal the sense-making practices between teachers and students during BDIs.

Based on findings from these studies, instructions can be viewed as the product of a ‘distributed coordination of instructional coherence’ (St. John & Cromdal, 2016, p. 255). When students ask questions about certain instructional matters, they formulate their enquiries by specifically localising their problem, which the teacher must address in subsequent turns for the progressivity and completion of the pedagogical activities (Åberg, 2017; Koole, 2012). Students’ enquiries make sequentially relevant a response from the teacher in the form of clarifications or explanations, and their uptake of the teacher’s response determines the next course of action.

Although interactional descriptions of BDIs that earlier research has revealed have contributed to the ongoing research on classroom interaction very positively, we do need to understand how shared understanding is negotiated and established during BDIs. In our data, we found a recurring interactional pattern in student-initiated BDIs where students display their understanding through formulations. Formulations become thus the focal interactional resource through which shared understanding between the teacher and students (i.e. intersubjectivity) is established.

1.2. Establishing shared understanding: formulations in (instructed) interactions

Shared understanding (i.e. intersubjectivity) is a primary concern for speakers and listeners in any given interaction (Raymond, 2019). The approach to understanding as a social, situated, shared and publicly accountable achievement rather than a cognitive and individual phenomenon (Mondada, 2011) has its roots in ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approaches to social interaction. These approaches have increasingly been applied to educational research during the last decade with an attempt to link the ways understanding is established to student learning. As Lindwall and Lymer (2011) argued, educational activities are ‘designed for students to learn, and to do this, they must in some sense understand what they are doing’ (p. 473). In order to investigate interactional practices and resources that teachers and students deploy to establish shared understanding, researchers have resorted to the methodological tools of CA. With its analytical approach that shows how participants in interaction display their understanding of the previous speakers’ utterances, CA has been used to document the ways students claim and demonstrate understanding in classroom interaction. These claims and demonstrations become the access points for analysts to observe shared understanding in pedagogical interaction, bringing empirical evidence to how teaching and learning emerge in daily classroom interaction practices.

Macbeth (2011) analysed how understanding emerges in institutional contexts and argues that ‘understanding owns an actionable basis’ (p. 440). Thus, if a speaker overtly displays an understanding of some preceding talk, this display is manifested through specialised interactional resources, such as formulations. Heritage and Watson (1979) stressed that formulations are the participants’ activity to demonstrate their understanding of a previous discussion and establish shared comprehension of the interaction in toto or of some parts of it. Thus, formulations offer candidate understandings of the addressee’s previous talk for inspection, making a decision in the form of confirmation or disconfirmation conditionally relevant (Heritage & Watson, 1979). For instance, when a teacher provides an explanation in response to a student’s question, the student may follow up with a formulation as a candidate understanding whose adequacy and implication are to be negotiated in the next stretch of talk. Therefore, students use formulations as interactional resources to secure a confirmed understanding of the instructions.

Barnes (2007) described formulations as ‘types of repeat utterances that display a characterisation of prior talk for confirmation or disconfirmation’ (p. 275). The claim that formulations project confirmation or disconfirmation is relevant to our research because our bottom-up analysis of between-desk instructional interaction has revealed the same pattern: the teacher in our data mainly produces confirming or disconfirming reactions following students’ formulations of understanding. The teacher’s reactions and elaborations on the formulations are part of her efforts to establish shared understanding of the instructions as a major concern intrinsic to BDIs.

Several CA studies have investigated formulations as interactional resources used to achieve institutionally specific goals, such as in news interviews (Heritage, 1985), meetings (Barnes, 2007), therapeutic communications (Antaki, 2008; Antaki, Barnes, & Leudar, 2007; Hutchby, 2005; Knol et al., 2020; Landmark, Svennevig, & Gulbrandsen, 2016; Vehviläinen, 2003) and workplace encounters (Svennevig, 2003). However, interest in the study of formulations from a CA perspective has been slowly developing in instructed settings (Baraldi, 2014; Kapellidi, 2015; Skarbø Solem & Skovholt, 2017). For instance, Skarbø Solem and Skovholt (2017) investigated classroom interactions in Norway and found that teachers use three different types of formulations – transforming, challenging and summarising – which serve ‘to highlight something adequate, coherent, appropriate, correct, or relevant, something that should be a shared pedagogic focus’ (Skarbø Solem & Skovholt, 2017, p. 17). Kapellidi (2015) also examined teachers’ formulations in whole-class interactions and identified two categories: formulations of matters to which the teacher has direct epistemic access; and formulations of matters to which the teacher has no epistemic access.

The studies reviewed thus far have primarily focused on teachers’ formulations in either whole-class or one-to-one teacher–student encounters; therefore, there is a gap in the literature on how students’ formulations are linked to the co-construction of shared understanding. In a recent study, Pulles, Berenst, Koole, and Glopper (2021) examined formulations produced by students in peer interaction in a primary school during a dialogic reading task. They found that students can either formulate the gist of some segments in the text to give a candidate interpretation of their literal content or formulate an upshot to address the implications of the overall text, a finding also voiced by Heritage and Watson (1979). Pulles et al. (2021) concluded that these two types of formulations generate more talk on what the students find relevant in the text. Since this study is based on peer interaction without an attendant teacher, more research is needed to see if the same interactional pattern would emerge in teacher–student interactions in BDIs.

Our bottom-up analysis based on recorded observations revealed that, in BDIs where the teacher answers student-initiated questions related to the previously delivered instructions, it is the student who owns the sequential right to the formulations. Thus, the initiation of these formulations has become a starting point for us to understand how teachers and students establish shared understanding and resolve instructional matters during project work. Understanding the interactional dynamics of BDIs from a shared-understanding perspective is crucial for documenting the progressivity of pedagogical practices in project work since through the resolution of instructional problems, learning can occur.

2. Data and method

This study draws on a corpus of approximately 10 hours of video-recorded classroom interactions collected over four consecutive lessons at an upper secondary school in Sweden. The data comes from an English 7 class, which corresponds to the B2 level on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (Skolverket [The Swedish National Agency for Education], 2021). The classroom was made up of one teacher and 25 students split into five different groups to facilitate collaborative work. The students’ ages ranged from 17 to 18 years.

Data was collected using three high-definition cameras and five-voice recorders placed on the students’ desks. We followed the ethical guidelines provided by the Swedish Research Council for research in humanities and social sciences (Vetenskapsrådet [Swedish Research Council], 2017) and the recent General Data Protection Regulations³ in the collection and storage of the data. All participants signed consent forms and pseudonyms are used in this study. The images incorporated into the transcripts have been turned into line drawings to preserve anonymity.

In this classroom, the students were engaged in project work about sports (Sert & Amri, 2021). As defined by the teacher earlier in the first lesson, the objective of the investigated project work was to gather information from different audio-visual sources about aspects of the central theme and then present them at the end of the project work in the form of formal discussions.

Since project work is characterised by a great deal of individual and group work where students, over an extended period of time, engage in gathering materials, answering questions and solving problems (Knoll, 1997), much of the talk happens during between-desk encounters. As our larger collection of cases depicts, these instruction-based encounters are either initiated by the teacher or the students. In the first subcollection, the teacher primarily initiated BDIs to check the students’ understanding of the instructions or their progress on the tasks at hand. The second subcollection documents student-initiated BDIs when students summoned the teacher to enquire about instructional matters related to their work-in-progress. Our initial analysis of the data showed that students systematically used formulations in the second subcollection of BDIs (i.e. in student-initiated sequences) to present a candidate understanding of the teacher’s preceding talk. The teacher assessed these candidate understandings by either confirming or disconfirming them and used them as a topic for further actions. Formulating an understanding became thus a moment in the interaction where a joint activity of negotiating and establishing understanding occurred.

Our interest in the present study is to focus on these instances in which the management and achievement of shared understanding become a joint concern for both the students and the teacher. Therefore, we specifically focus on how the students demonstrate their (non)understanding of the teacher’s responses through formulations and probe how they frame the subsequent interactional trajectories. As an initial step, all student-initiated between-desk encounters (n = 26) were transcribed using the Jeffersonian transcription system (2004, see Appendix), and we focused on those containing formulations (n = 20). Five representative excerpts have been chosen for the article.

To analyse these sequences, we use CA’s theoretical and methodological framework (e.g. Deppermann, 2013; Goodwin, 2003; Hutchby & Wooffitt, 2008; ten Have, 2007). CA enables us to understand how formulations are used by students to demonstrate their understanding of the teacher’s prior response and to analyse the course of action enacted by them (i.e. the next-turn proof procedure as empirical evidence, ten Have, 2007). The methodological approach of CA is built on the premise that each turn in interaction ‘is treated as both displaying an understanding of prior and projecting subsequent conversational actions’ (Goodwin & Heritage, 1990, p. 288). Therefore, each turn is understood in relation to its sequential environment in the unfolding interactions as providing a response on the prior action and projecting future actions.

3. Data analysis and findings

The following analysis presents a conversation-analytic account of how formulations are used as interactional resources by the students to display their understanding of the teacher’s responses. Firstly, the teacher follows up on the students’ enquiries with a response in the form of clarifications or explanations to which students demonstrate understanding through formulations. Subsequently, the teacher either confirms the candidate understanding and provides an elaboration or does not confirm it, thereby opening interactional space for subsequent reformulations.

Our analysis is divided into two sections. The first section will examine sequences where the teacher confirms the candidate understanding, mainly through delivering confirmation tokens. What is analytically interesting is how the teacher extends these sequences to perform instruction-related elaborations generated by the students’ formulations. The second section will investigate the sequences where the teacher does not confirm the students’ formulations, thereby treating them as problematic. With these excerpts, we will argue that when the teacher does not confirm the formulations, she accounts for her disconfirmation, prompting students to reformulate their understanding.

3.1 Formulations of understanding followed by the teacher’s confirmation

This section will present three excerpts in which students provide a candidate understanding of the teacher’s response through formulations. When analysing the sequential unfolding of formulations in our collection of BDIs, we found that students can produce a formulation when the teacher has just finished her response to their queries (excerpt 1) or while the teacher’s response is still in progress (excerpts 2 and 3). The selected excerpts also show how students’ formulations function as a bridge between the teacher’s responses and her subsequent elaborations, bringing evidence on how formulations allow students to shape the next courses of action.

Excerpt 1 is from the third lesson during the project work, where students prepare the materials and organise the structure of their final discussions in the fourth lesson. In this sequence, ANA provides a candidate understanding using a so-prefaced formulation immediately after the teacher has delivered her response. Before this sequence, the teacher answered a question from another student in the same group about the possibility of using other sources in the presentation part of the final assignment. At the start of this sequence, ANA flags a transition to the second part of the task through the temporal marker ‘then’ in line 1 and uses an appended question in line 3 (‘°then wha:[t°]’) to enquire about the structure of the second part of the final assignment.

Excerpt 1. Then what, 21_10_19_BC_1_V1_36–22.

In lines 5 through 12, the teacher constructs a list of the steps that students should follow to achieve the task. She organises her responsive turns in the form of a narrative through temporal clues: ‘when’ (line 5), ‘then’ (line 6) and ‘so then’ (line 10). In her multi-unit turn, the teacher first describes the structure of the final assignment, stating that the presentation should be followed by two questions (line 7). Before she lists the third part of the task, the teacher checks comprehension in line 7 (‘right?’), which receives an affirmation token by ANA (‘uh huh’) in the subsequent turn. After one beat of silence, the teacher pursues her response by referring to the discussion part where students are supposed to use sources (lines 10–12). After another short silence, ANA produces a so-prefaced formulation (lines 14–15) as a candidate understanding of the teacher’s prior response. ANA’s formulation operates retrospectively by expressing an understanding that they need to read articles from all the different areas, which the teacher confirms through a prosodically marked confirmation token (‘↑yes:::’) in line 16. The teacher then proceeds in line 20 to state that they can also use the materials they have been working with before. In this sequence expansion, the teacher first tries to downgrade the students’ workload through producing an assessment (‘then it’s easier’) in line 24. She then brings to the discussion the various audio-visual and written materials they have worked with throughout the project work as possible sources to be used during the final discussions. Interestingly, there is an explicit connection between the teacher’s elaboration and the formulation itself, in the sense that the teacher tries to justify the demands of the task (i.e. why students must read other articles as well) that ANA invoked in her formulation, and, at the same time, she attempts to reduce the workload on students.

ANA’s formulation, in lines 14 through 15, presents her as an engaged listener (Hutchby, 2010; also Sert, 2019 on active listenership in L2 English) because the teacher did not explicitly state that they are supposed to read other articles as well, but this is something she has picked up from the teacher’s response. Thus, by deploying a so-prefaced formulation, ANA does not only present, in other words, some parts of what the teacher has been saying, but she also sets a new course of action to be acted upon by the teacher in the subsequent talk.

Excerpt 2 presents another instance when the teacher confirms a student’s formulation. In contrast with the previous excerpt, the so-prefaced formulation comes while the teacher’s response is still in progress. VIC initiates this sequence by asking an alternative question (lines 1 through 5). This alternative question invites as an answer ‘one of the two alternatives in the question’ (Koshik, 2005, p. 194), which are: (a) to read the same articles as a group; or (b) to read different articles in preparation for their final group discussions.

Excerpt 2. Disagree, 14_10_19_BC_7_09–10_V3_1–40–38.

FRA responds to VIC’s question first in line 4 and then in line 7 and states that they should read all the articles. VIC calls for a clarification (‘what do [you mean all of them]’) in line 9, which suggests that FRA’s answer is problematic or troublesome. In a partial overlap with VIC’s clarification question (line 10), the teacher attempts an account for FRA’s response with a turn-initial conjunction (‘because’). Then, after a 0.2-second pause, the teacher seeks a new course of action, depicting an exemplification (‘let’s say ↑tha:t’). Yet, it is suspended as VIC intervenes in the discussion and enquires about the date of the final lesson (lines omitted for space). The teacher resumes her attempted exemplification in line 27 after repeating what she said in lines 10 and 11. With her exemplification, the teacher invokes a theme of disagreement in a discussion and enacts a hypothetical scenario to illustrate how two parties in a discussion can disagree (lines 29–32). Before the hypothetical scenario is brought to an end, VIC produces a so-prefaced formulation, a candidate understanding, from line 35 to line 42 (‘so you’re supposed to refer to something when you disagree’). VIC draws a conclusion based on the teacher’s hypothetical scenario, displaying his understanding that they need to refer to a source if they disagree with each other. The teacher confirms this formulation prosodically through an elongated agreement token (‘↑ye::s’) and gesturally through a head nod. In the subsequent expansion of the sequence (lines 43 through 49), the teacher provides a model of doing disagreement, including a formulaic expression ‘I don’t agree’ followed by a causal conjunction ‘because’ (line 44). Yet, the teacher does not specify the object of disagreement, but she encapsulates it in the conversational extender (‘b↑la >bla bla< b↑la’) in line 49. She further expands the topic of her talk with a justification of the importance of reading all articles as this will help the students acquire prior knowledge about their topics (lines 51–52) and equip them with facts to support their ideas (lines 57–58).

Excerpt 3 is the last example in this section. It comes from the first lesson, in which the focus was to get acquainted with three areas of sports. In the whole-class instructions, the teacher introduced the three areas with their sub-related topics. Then, she instructed the students to think about those areas and topics and choose the ones that interested them. Similar to excerpt 2, this excerpt demonstrates another example of how formulations can occur while the teacher’s response is still in progress. However, it differs from the previous sequence by showing how students develop formulations at different junctures of the ongoing interaction, which resonates with Heritage and Watson’s (1979) finding that ‘formulations involve members in the collaborative redemonstration’ (p. 137) of the sense of a conversation with the aim to establish shared understanding. Before this excerpt, ARO summoned the teacher and enquired about the number of articles they had to choose in each area. This excerpt immediately starts after the teacher’s response. LAI initiates this sequence by an alternative question (lines 1–3) to query whether they will discuss the articles today or at the final lesson.

Excerpt 3. Why, 07_10_19_BC_5_5–45_V4_59–50.

Following a 1.0-second pause, in line 5, the teacher’s response is prefaced with ‘well’, which conveys a sense of a previous problematic turn (Heritage, 2015). Her emphasis on the temporal marker (‘↑now’) stresses a difference between the kind of discussion in the current task compared to the one in the final assignment, which she embeds in her description (‘a general discussion’). Following a short pause, in line 7, the teacher explains that some articles can also be used as resources in the final discussion. Her ongoing response in line 10 is overlapped by ARO’s so-prefaced formulation, through which he presents an understanding based on the teacher’s prior talk that they will be able to choose the sources by themselves. With this formulation, ARO draws out an implication of the preceding talk where the teacher affirmed the possibility of having the same articles at the final assignment (line 7). For ARO, the possibility of using the same articles now and at the final discussion means that they are allowed to choose by themselves. The teacher confirms the formulation (‘↑yeah’,) in line 14 before she extends the sequence to point out a difference between the task at hand and the final assignment (line 18). The teacher pursues her response by listing the work required in the task as they need to get acquainted (‘with the different area[s::]’) (lines 19–20), (‘the different statements’) (line 22), and (‘the different questions’) (lines 22–23). Clearly, from the teacher’s perspective, the focus of the current task is not to choose articles and discuss their content. Instead, students must skim through the articles to get familiarised with these sources.

Upon finishing her talk, after one beat of silence in line 36, the teacher takes a step backwards and starts to depart from the group (Figure 1 and Figure 2). However, she stops and physically engages with the group again when LAI initiates a so-prefaced formulation and uses an emphatic tone placed on ‘↑why’ (line 37). LAI concludes that the task is not about discussing the actual sources, but instead why some sources are interesting to choose. The teacher confirms this formulation with ‘yeah’ twice (lines 38 and 41), and upon hearing LAI’s agreement produced with a soft voice and a falling pitch, TEA turns around and starts walking away from the group (Figure 3). Once again, her attempt to disengage from the group is interrupted (Figure 4) by a follow-up so-prefaced formulation from ARO (line 45), through which he displays his understanding of the previous conversation between LAI and the teacher. With this formulation, ARO seeks confirmation from his co-participants, which LAI provides, in line 47 after a 1.0-second pause. LAI’s response matches her earlier formulation in line 37, recycling ‘why’ produced with a rising intonation. With no delay, TEA confirms LAI’s response by repeating the word ‘why’ (line 48) before she leaves the group.

The analysis of this excerpt has shown that formulations can be developed at different junctures of the conversation where it becomes explicit enough for the students to demonstrate an understanding. Although the teacher confirms the first formulation, it becomes evident from what she says in the subsequent turns that there is more at stake than what the student has extrapolated from her still-in-progress response.

3.2. Formulations of understanding followed by the teacher’s disconfirmation

This section will present two excerpts where the teacher does not confirm the students’ formulations offered as candidate understandings to the prior talk. As the analysis will show, the teacher’s disconfirmation is systematically accounted for, prompting an immediate reformulation that is later accepted. The two chosen excerpts present two ways of disconfirming the students’ formulations.

With excerpt 4, we will present an example where the student’s formulation is disconfirmed through an unmitigated negative answer. Before this excerpt, ALV summoned the teacher who was carrying out her regular classroom rounds, visiting each group to clarify the task.

Excerpt 4. The New York Times, 21_10_19_BC_3_04–25_V1_34–45.

In lines 1–3, ALV seeks confirmation concerning the method of quoting from the articles and presents a possible template, a formulaic utterance, for doing that (‘according to the article’). The teacher confirms this with a ‘yeah’ in line 5 and ‘that’s enough’ in lines 7 and 10. Then, starting from line 15, LIA reuses a so-prefaced formulation presenting another template framed in the same fashion as ALV’s. With his formulation, LIA reuses the formulaic expression ‘according to’ provided by ALV in lines 2 and 3 and transforms it into a new possible template that only includes the name of the newspaper. By doing this, LIA performs what Goodwin (2012) calls structure-preserving transformation on a public substrate (i.e. ALV’s template) as a display of understanding of how to quote using this formulaic expression. The teacher responds to this formulation with an unmitigated negative answer (‘↑no’) in line 18 embodied with a brief head shake, and then she follows up with an account, initiated with the causal conjunction ‘because’ (line 20), where she explains the consequences of using such a template (lines 22–23). The teacher argues that using the name of the newspaper alone will not enable the interlocutor to identify the article in question. This account has prompted LIA to reformulate his template (lines 24 through 28) by adding further information about the article. The teacher confirms this formulation with ‘yeah’ (line 29) and immediately adds the accepted template the students must adopt in their final discussions.

Excerpt 5 presents another instance of the teacher disconfirming a student’s formulation. As the analysis will show, the teacher does not produce a negation token as in the previous excerpt. Instead, she restates the focus of the task and then accounts for it. Immediately prior to this excerpt, FEL and another student were discussing whether they should remain neutral or advocate a position when presenting their areas. FEL took the initiative to summon the teacher for clarification.

Excerpt 5. Neutral, 21_10_19_BC_4_04–07_V2_49–27.

The excerpt starts with FEL’s information-seeking question on whether they should remain neutral when presenting their thoughts. In her response, although the teacher first provides an unmitigated negative response (‘↑no:’) in line 5, she then downgrades her response, leaving the decision up to the student (‘it’s up to ↑you’) (line 7). In line 11, the teacher reconfigures her response by flagging one specific way of doing the assignment. Then, the teacher distinguishes between the two different parts of the task, explaining that the presentation part of the assignment should be devoted to presenting facts and, therefore, neutrality must be maintained (line 16). By deploying an initial (‘but’) and the temporal clue (‘then’) (line 21), she signals a transition to a new episode in the talk (i.e. a group discussion) in which they are allowed to state their own opinions (lines 24–26) and provides them with a template that they can use in doing that (lines 27–28). Yet, it is unclear whether the teacher is addressing a transition within the first part of the task (i.e. the presentation) or a transition between the first part to the second part (i.e. the discussions). However, FEL does not call for clarification but proceeds with a so-prefaced formulation as a candidate understanding of the previous talk (lines 31 through 36). With this formulation, it is clear that FEL interprets the previous clarification as talking about the first part of the task (i.e. the presentation), which should last for no more than two minutes according to the teacher’s prior instructions on the structure of the final assignment. Latching on FEL’s turn, the teacher produces an account in which she specifies the focus of the first part of the task (lines 37–38). The teacher stipulates that the students should focus on presenting facts to establish a structure for their subsequent talk.

As previous research has shown, accounts are devices for doing disconfirming formulations and for prompting new candidate understandings (Heritage, 1985; Heritage & Watson, 1980). Our analysis conveys similar results as the teacher’s account prompts FEL to produce a second formulation with a prefatory ‘then’ that connects the teacher’s reaction to the first formulation, providing a reconfiguration of his understanding. By deploying the temporal clue (‘when::’), FEL signals a transition to the discussion part of the task (line 42) and then delineates the scope of this part with affiliation by saying (‘i can say what i think’) (line 44). The teacher first acknowledges this with a head nod (line 42) and further accepts it with an elongated affirmation token ‘yes’ (lines 43 and 45).

The analyses of the last two excerpts have shown instances when the teacher does not initially confirm the formulations, prompting the students to produce a second formulation. Heritage and Watson (1979) wrote that to disconfirm a formulation ‘may minimally terminate an ongoing stream of topical talk and initiate a search for a fresh basis on which concerted comprehension can be established’ (p. 144). In the last two excerpts, the teacher’s accounts suggest that there is some sort of failure of understanding and solicit remedies for such failure in the form of reformulations before concerted and shared understanding is eventually established.

4. Concluding discussion

In this article, we analysed how students use formulations to display their understanding of the teacher’s responses to student-initiated enquiries during BDIs. We have specifically explored how formulating understanding is a concerted practical achievement, in and through which students display their understanding of the preceding or ongoing talk. Our analysis has revealed that when formulations are confirmed (excerpts 1, 2 and 3), elaborations from the teacher that are based on elements presented to them in the formulations occur. In contrast, when the teacher disconfirms the formulations (excerpts 4 and 5), she accounts for her disconfirmation of the problematic candidate understandings, prompting students to reformulate their understanding (i.e. to present a second candidate understanding).

The analysis of the first three excerpts has shown how students can produce formulations at different positions in the conversation to present a candidate understanding of the teacher’s prior response. Students’ formulations occasion instruction-related elaborations from the teacher before the sequence closes. In excerpt 1, ANA presents a candidate understanding immediately after the teacher has delivered her response. The teacher confirms it and then elaborates on it by referring to the resources used throughout the project work. By doing this, the teacher reinforces her choice of the materials that she tailored to the overall theme covered in the project work. Not only can these materials be used during individual tasks, but they are also relevant for the final assignment in the project as they may be valuable sources to support their discussions.

In excerpt 2, the student’s formulation is delivered while the teacher’s response is still in progress. The teacher confirms the formulation on the fly, finishes her response and elaborates on her response before the sequence is closed. Here, the teacher provides the rationale for reading all the articles as a pedagogical move to explain why it is essential to do things in a certain way (Markee, 2015).

Excerpt 3 shows how students make sense of the interaction on an ongoing basis as they use a series of formulations at different junctures of the sequence (Heritage & Watson, 1979). In her response to the first formulation, the teacher called attention to the additional requirements of the task at hand. This prompted another ‘ratified participant’ (Goodwin, 1981) who was following the interaction to issue a second formulation developed over the course of the previous interaction between the teacher and another student in the same group.

Formulations are not always geared to promote a confirming response from the teacher (cf. Heritage & Watson, 1979). They can also provide a candidate understanding that the teacher may treat as problematic. In this sense, formulations may also offer occasions to pinpoint a source of disalignment and address it in subsequent turns until shared understanding is restored. While the constant interpretive work that students do on an ongoing basis proves that the prior interaction has been and is continually ‘self-explicating’ (Heritage & Watson, 1979), the presence of problematic formulations does not eliminate this inherent feature, but it proves that instructional talk is always open to multiple readings, which students invoke in their formulations. Our analysis has shown how the teacher treated some students’ formulations as ‘problematic and hence in need of repair’ (Heritage & Watson, 1979, p. 137) in the subsequent turns. The teacher attempted to account for her disconfirmation to address these problematic formulations, which prompted the students to reformulate their understanding and thus arrive at a concerted alignment.

Earlier research has investigated formulations as an interactional resource that primarily belongs to the domain of the institutional agents (cf. Pulles et al., 2021), such as interviewers (Barnes, 2007; Heritage, 1985), doctors (Antaki, 2008; Antaki et al., 2007) and teachers (Baraldi, 2014; Skarbø Solem & Skovholt, 2017). In this article, we shed light on students as the agents and the legitimate owners of formulations. We observed how students build on the teacher’s responses in a goal-oriented manner with the aim to secure a confirmed understanding of instructional matters, and thus co-construct shared understanding. Since the interpretation of the instructions is not a taken-for-granted matter, the present study shows how formulating understanding becomes a routinised practice in the students’ repertoire to establish shared understanding in the context of competing readings. It also offers students a way to take an active role in establishing this shared understanding and in guiding extended talk as a manoeuvre jointly negotiated and managed by all the participants in the interaction. In their attempts to display their understanding of the teacher’s prior talk, students present themselves as active listeners and as agents in constructing subsequent courses of action in the unfolding interactions (Goodwin, Goodwin, & Yaeger-Dror, 2002).

In this article, the analysis focused on instructional interaction in between-desk encounters afforded by the nature of project work as an educational arrangement adopted in language classrooms. We have found that this local context generates an interactive environment where students are able to initiate interaction on instructional issues, display their understanding through formulations, and use these formulations as a launching point for further talk. Furthermore, the space allocated to students to enquire about the instructions during these encounters generates a rich participation structure for establishing shared understanding and demonstrates how students present themselves as agents of their own understanding. To this end, further research is needed on BDIs to investigate how participants co-manage interactions in between-desk encounters and how they harness different interactional resources to establish shared understanding. Findings will enrich our understanding of the progressivity of interaction in different educational arrangements such as project work and local classroom practices such as BDIs.

Acknowledgements

The data for this project are part of a broader project on classroom interaction supported by Mälardalens kompetenscentrum för lärande (Mälardalen Competence Center for Learning), for which the second author is the principal investigator. The data are also part of a PhD project on ‘Project work in English classrooms’, carried out by the first author. We thank the teacher and the students for their cooperation and the editors and reviewers for their constructive feedback. We also thank Numa Markee and Nigel Musk for their feedback on earlier versions of the article and Thorsten Schröter for proofreading the final draft. All remaining errors are our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This is also known as classroom rounds (Jakonen, 2020).

2. O’Keefe, Xu, and Clarke (2006) used the Japanese term Kikan-Shido to refer to BDIs, specifically in mathematics classrooms.

3. See https://gdpr-info.eu/

Appendix

Jefferson Transcription Conventions

Adapted from Hutchby and Wooffitt (2008)

(1.8) Numbers enclosed in parentheses indicate a pause. The number represents the number of seconds of the duration of the pause to one decimal place. A pause of less than 0.2 seconds is marked by (.).

[] Brackets around portions of utterances show that those portions overlap with a portion of another speaker’s utterance.

= An equal sign is used to show that there is no time lapse between the portions connected by the equal signs. This is used where a second speaker begins their utterance just at the moment when the first speaker finishes.

: A colon after a vowel or a word is used to show that the sound is extended. The number of colons shows the length of the extension.

(hm, hh) These are onomatopoetic representations of the audible exhalation of air.

.hh This indicates an audible inhalation of air, for example, as a gasp. The more h’s, the longer the in-breath.

? A question mark indicates that there is slightly rising intonation.

. A period indicates that there is slightly falling intonation.

A comma indicates a continuation of tone.

- A dash indicates an abrupt cut-off, where the speaker stopped speaking suddenly.

↑↓ Up or down arrows are used to indicate that there is a sharply rising or falling intonation. The arrow is placed just before the syllable in which the change in intonation occurs.

Under Underlines indicate speaker emphasis on the underlined portion of the word.

CAPS Capital letters indicate that the speaker spoke the capitalised portion of the utterance at a higher volume than the speaker’s normal volume.

°This indicates an utterance that is much softer than the normal speech of the speaker. This symbol will appear at the beginning and at the end of the utterance in question.

> <, < >Greater-than and less-than signs indicate that the talk they surround was noticeably faster or slower than the surrounding talk.

(would)When a word appears in parentheses, it indicates that the transcriber has guessed as to what was said because it was indecipherable on the tape. If the transcriber was unable to guess what was said, nothing appears within the parentheses.

£C’mon£Sterling signs are used to indicate a smiley or jokey voice.

+marks the onset of an embodied action (e.g. a shift of gaze, pointing).

italicsEnglish translation.