Designedly incomplete elicitations: teachers’ multimodal practices to mobilise student-next action in Chilean secondary EFL classrooms

ABSTRACT

Managing student participation is a key interactional and instructional task in any classroom. This is even more relevant in language classrooms, as students need to demonstrate understanding, knowledge and proficiency through the production of lexical, phrasal, clausal or sentential elements. Question-Answer-sequences have been the focus within the Initiation-Response-Feedback pattern; however, another kind of initiation is that of turns with incomplete turn-constructional-units which students need to complete in the next sequential slot. This study explores elicitations designed as incomplete in five secondary EFL classrooms in the South of Chile. Analysis follows a multimodal Conversation Analytic approach. Results show that teachers mobilise turn-completion not only through gaze and gestures to explicitly signal to students that the floor is open, but also to project turn completion and index the relevance of the teaching materials. This study contributes to the understanding of teachers’ practices to manage participation and the progression of the pedagogical project in general, and to previous research on designedly incomplete utterances, in particular.

KEYWORDS:

• conversation analysis
• classroom interaction
• language teaching
• student participation
• Chilean EFL classooms

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the teachers and students who were part of the study and kindly provided access to their classrooms. Thanks are due also to Dr Merran Toerien and Dr Spencer Hazel for their comments as examiners of Katherina’s PhD thesis, and to the CASLC group at the University of York (UK) for their comments and guidance on data sessions, as well as to Marina Cantarutti and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on an earlier draft.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the BecasChile CONICYT scholarship for postgraduate studies: [PFCHA/Doctorado en el extranjero. Becas Chile/2014 – 72150154].

Notes on contributors

Katherina Walper

Katherina Walper is an academic at Instituto de Lingüística y Literatura, Universidad Austral de Chile. She holds a PhD in Language and Communication from the University of York, York, UK. This study was part of her PhD thesis. Her main research interest is classroom interaction and multimodality within the methodological framework of Conversation Analysis.

Darren Reed

Darren Reed is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Sociology, at the University of York, in York, UK. His research background is in the area of ethnomethodology (EM), Conversation Analysis (CA), and technology design.

Heather Marsden

Heather Marsden is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Language and Linguistic Science, at the University of York, in York, UK. Her research integrates L2 acquisition theory and language teaching practice, both at the level of collaborative research and at the level of knowledge exchange.