Drawing on recent conversation analytic research on mobility in interaction (Haddington et al. 2013), embodied practices for classroom interaction (Kääntä et al. 2016), and mobility for language learning in the wild (authors 2017, 2019) this paper investigates an understudied area of classroom discourse: student-student interaction during movement through the classroom. Research on language use while moving has shown how the temporal nature of the sequence of talk interacts with the temporal nature of changing semiotic fields made available by movement. And although some research has investigated teacher movement (Jakonen 2018), I know of no systematic research on student-student interaction as they move about the classroom. The data come from video recordings of non-elicited classroom interaction among learners of English. Classes were recorded, continuously, for four years in two classrooms each of which was equipped with six cameras and five microphones (Reder, 2005). Two of the cameras were mobile and followed focal students around the classroom when they moved. From the database (almost 4000 hours of video and 682 students), I focus on beginning learners (CEFR level A1) in activities coded independently in the database as ‘free movement’: activities when the teacher asked students to move around the classroom to complete a task. There were 93 interactions of this participation structure in the database, a total of 23.5 hours of recording. Interactions were transcribed and analyzed using methods from conversation analysis. Results show two aspects of students’ changing semiotic fields particularly relevant for language learning activity when students move through the classroom: 1) Interaction with classmates from other parts of the classroom make relevant social actions (introductions, greetings, leaving taking) that usually do occur among participants seated next to one another. 2) Print material in different parts of the classroom become usable (charts on walls, etc) to facilitate interaction and learning.
