Editorial

Welcome to volume 8, issue 3 of Classroom Discourse. This issue includes five papers and a review of Social Interaction and Teacher Cognition (Li 2017), a timely book exploring teacher cognition with discursive methodologies, reviewed by a classroom discourse expert in a comprehensive and critical manner (Fagan 2017). This is the first book review that the journal is publishing. Although we have not planned to publish book reviews on a regular basis yet, we welcome book review requests by publishers and may publish occasionally by commissioning them to experts in the field. Social Interaction and Teacher Cognition is the third book, following Jenks (2014) and Sert (2015), published in the Studies in Social Interaction series edited by Steve Walsh, Paul Seedhouse and Christopher J. Jenks. The book is very relevant to the aims of the journal and is ground-breaking in nature, as it challenges traditional methodologies that have investigated teacher cognition. The data led orientation features analyses of teachers’ voices both in pre-service and in-service teacher education, and thus, contributes to our understanding of classroom discourse and interaction using Discursive Psychology and Conversation Analysis.

Our new issue features five research articles that include data based on L2 education, special education and tutorials. The diversity of the type of data is also seen in the geographical locations that the studies come from: (1) a US higher education setting (van Compernolle and Smotrova 2017) and an undergraduate writing centre (Park 2017), (2) L2 English and L2 Danish classrooms in Luxembourg and Denmark (Hazel and Mortensen 2017), (3) Swedish secondary schools (Svahn 2017) and (4) an after-school English programme in Japan (Watanabe 2017). The topics investigated include unplanned vocabulary explanations, participation, student conflict, advice resistance and the development of L2 Interactional Competence.

In the first paper, Rémi Adam van Compernolle and Tetyana Smotrova demonstrate the ways in which an ESL teacher constructs meaning through the synchronisation of speech and gesture during unplanned vocabulary explanations. Drawing on thinking-for-teaching (Smotrova 2014) and the Growth Point Hypothesis (McNeill 2005), the authors show how the precision timing of a teacher’s gestures and their synchronisation with speech combine to make the meanings of unfamiliar words transparent to students. The implications of van Compernolle and Smotrova’s findings have potential to go beyond the use of gestures in foreign language classrooms and can inform content (Heller 2016) as well as content and language integrated learning (Morton 2015) contexts.

The second paper, by Spencer Hazel and Kristian Mortensen, focuses on classroom participation, in particular when transgression is displayed by a participant. Building on Garfinkel’s (1964) concept of moral order, the researchers consider cases of turn allocation, language choice and personal boundaries where classroom participants deal with participatory acts as moral-implicative transgressions. The paper adds to the description of classroom interaction by focusing on the moral accountability of language classroom participation. It also adds on to recent conversation analytic work that deals with participation practices including learner initiatives (Waring 2011; Kapellidi 2015; Sert 2017) and multilogue (Schwab 2011).

In the third paper, Johanna Svahn uses conversation analysis to examine student conflict in a Swedish special support classroom. The author particularly focuses on a Swedish negative imperative, bry dig inte (Eng. ‘don’t mind …; don’t bother …’), and highlights how the focused directive works in a neutralising fashion in relation to students’ affective stances, constructed through bodily displays and/or verbal acts. An important finding is the ways this directive format downplays the relevance of a conflict source, as well as orients more towards teaching students self-restraint than towards using reprimand and punishment. The paper adds on to the growing body of research in resolving peer disputes (Church 2012; Church, Mashford-Scott, and Cohrssen 2017) and conflict resolution in educational settings.

The fourth study is concerned with advice giving, a central practice in pedagogical interaction. Innhwa Park investigates advice resistance, a common phenomenon in L2 writing tutorial interactions. Based on data from six native speaker tutors and eight tutees, the researcher highlights the practice of questioning as advice resistance, and specifies two practices: (1) reversed polarity questions and (2) proposals for an alternative candidate revision. The author illustrates how the participants engage in doing pedagogy as they co-construct the advice that reflects the tutee’s knowledge and concern.

The last paper is a longitudinal study exploring the development of L2 interactional competence. Recent studies on the development of L2 interactional competence have looked into the development of a variety of interactional resources, focusing on, for instance, story openings (Pekarek Doehler and Berger 2016), epistemics and task accomplishment (Balaman and Sert 2017), and request negotiation practices (Nguyen and Nguyen 2016). In the final paper of this issue, Aya Watanabe focuses on self-selection in post-expansion sequences. By observing a five-year-old Japanese English-language learner until the child is 9 years old, Watanabe documents the learner’s increased ability to monitor the details of the ongoing talk and his appropriate use of interactional resources. Her study is also relevant considering that the forthcoming issue of Classroom Discourse will feature articles around the theme of L2 Interactional Competence, authored by pioneers of the field including John Hellermann, Simona Pekarek Doehler, J. Kelly Hall and Hansun Waring. The thematic issue will hopefully inform future research directions in the field and will contribute to our understanding of Classroom Discourse.

Olcay Sert
[email protected]
Silvia Kunitz
Numa Markee