Editorial

Welcome to the last issue of volume 9 of Classroom Discourse. This issue features five articles representing diverse geographical settings, including the US, the UK and Finland. Educational contexts include CLIL Physics lectures, problem-based learning (PBL) tutorials, ESOL classrooms and writing tutorials. The authors focus on a variety of phenomena to advance the ongoing scholarship in classroom discourse and interaction, including clarification requests, knowledge disagreement formulations, embodied enactments and resistance to advice.

The first article of this issue, by Kimura, Malabarba, and Hall (2018), is an excellent resource for classroom interaction researchers who use conversation analysis (CA) as their methodology. The article discusses specific considerations for the production of audio-visual data for CA research into classroom interaction. The authors present common characteristics of classroom interaction, referring to spatial arrangements and pedagogical projects. They then build on these characteristics and provide guidelines that can inform the decision-making processes of researchers in the field.

In the second article, Käänta and Kasper (2018) focus on clarification requests in CLIL Physics lectures in Finland. Earlier studies (eg Laursen and Kolstrup 2018) have shown that clarification requests potentially have a much deeper influence on the course of interaction than being just a sidetrack from the ongoing conversation. The paper by Käänta and Kasper adds on to the findings of previous studies and shows, among other things, the role of different textual objects in the formulation and resolution of the clarification requests. Their overall findings bring new insights into how students strive to resolve non-understandings through requests for clarification during teacher-fronted interaction.

Based on 30 h of video recordings from 24 chemical engineering PBL tutorials in a Scottish university, the third paper by McQuade, Wiggins, Ventura-Medina, and Anderson (2018) examines disagreements between learners. Using CA, they analyse a collection of disagreement formulations and reveal how these formulations manage epistemic responsibility through invoking expert sources. The authors argue that future research should examine disagreements within different cultural contexts and within other PBL programmes, and the findings from these diverse settings could be used as pedagogical tools within PBL training workshops.

The fourth paper in this issue (Tai and Brandt 2018) focus on a teacher’s embodied enactments in addressing learner initiatives (Waring 2011) in an ESOL classroom. Building on research into explanations in response to learner initiatives (eg Merke 2016; Sert 2017), their findings show how the teacher in focus is ‘physically creating a situational context for students to understand how the target language can be used in specific contexts, and thus bridging the gap between classroom interaction, and real-life L2 use’ (p. 262).

Drawing on the analysis of 21 one-to-one L2 writing tutorials at a British University, the final paper (Leyland 2018) of this volume explores resistance as a resource for achieving consensus. Leyland adds on to the growing body of research on writing tutorials (eg Park 2014, 2017) by revealing that international students, when resisting the tutor’s advice, display orientations towards their own level of competency. These responses have the potential to become resources for tutors to diagnose problems and come up with solutions based on the specific needs of the students.

We are happy to let you know that Classroom Discourse will be published quarterly starting from 2019. We would like to thank you for your ongoing interest in and support for our journal. In our tenth year, we look forward to receiving submissions that might be of interest to classroom discourse researchers that come from diverse methodological and theoretical camps to explore the discourse of teaching and learning at all levels and in all subjects.