Creating an imaginary context: teacher’s use of embodied enactments in addressing learner initiatives in a beginner-level adult ESOL classroom

ABSTRACT

Previous research has illustrated that learner initiatives have the potential to generate learning opportunities in second language (L2) classrooms. Despite a small body of recent research indicating that teachers’ responses to learner initiatives play a significant role in facilitating learning opportunities in teacher–student interactions, more work is needed to understand the resources teachers draw upon in their responses. This study contributes to this by examining how a teacher employs what we term ‘embodied enactments’ as a pedagogical tool to contingently respond to learner initiatives. Using Conversation Analysis, we examine a single case taken from a corpus of video data collected in a beginner-level adult English for Speakers of Other Languages classroom in the United States. The findings reveal that the teacher contingently and multimodally enacts imaginary contexts which help students to understand how the target vocabulary and phrases can be used in everyday life. In doing this, the teacher and students are bridging the gap between classroom discourse and language use outside of the classroom, providing interactional space for promoting L2 learning.

KEYWORDS:

• Learner initiatives
• enactments
• Conversation Analysis
• ESOL classroom interaction
• embodied conduct

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank Dr. John Hellermann from Portland State University for providing support with our use of The Multimedia Adult English Learner Corpus (MAELC). MAELC was compiled at The National Labsite for Adult ESOL (known locally as the 'Lab School') at Portland State University with support from grant [R309B6002] from the Institute for Education Science, US Department of Education. This was a partnership between Portland State University and Portland Community College. We would like to thank Ms. Miaomiao Zuo for giving us invaluable ideas and input for this paper. We are grateful for the feedback given by members of the Multimodal Analysis Research Group (MARG) at Newcastle University. Any remaining errors are our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The Portland State ESOL Lab School classes are the two lowest levels of ESOL offered through Portland Community College: Level A (beginning, student performance level 0–2) and Level B (high beginning, student performance level 2–3) (Reder 2005). The segment of data chosen for this study was collected from a Level A ESOL beginning classroom.

2. We adopt a transcription system which has been developed from the original CA Jeffersonian system (e.g. Jefferson 2004). It is now commonly used by CA researchers employing a ‘multimodal analysis’, by including descriptions of embodied conduct, as well as screengrabs of relevant actions captured in the video recordings. A ‘+’ symbol indicates when the onset of the non-verbal action coincides with the talk (see Mondada 2018 for a further discussion of multimodal transcripts).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kevin W. H. Tai

Kevin W. H. Tai is an MSc student in applied linguistics and second language acquisition in the Department of Education at the University of Oxford, UK. His research interests include second language teaching and learning, sociocultural theories, classroom interaction, content and language integrated learning and second language teacher education.

Adam Brandt

Adam Brandt is Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at Newcastle University, UK. His research focuses on interaction in international and multilingual contexts, particularly in workplace and educational settings.