Abstract Summary
This paper presents a comparative micro-analysis of interactional practices in two 4th grade English as a Foreign Language classrooms in Denmark. We investigate how music is used differently for teaching and learning in the two classrooms, and what consequences this has for co-constructing learnables and teachables.
Abstract :
This paper presents a comparative micro-analysis of interactional practices in two 4th grade English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms in Denmark, where the children in both classrooms have received English lessons for one year. Using Conversation Analysis, we investigate how music is used differently for teaching and learning in the two classrooms, and what consequences this has for co-constructing learnables and teachables (Eskildsen & Majlesi, 2018). In one classroom, the teacher brings the lyrics to a 1970s Christmas song as well as his guitar to class, sings, invites the pupils to sing along, and finally uses the lyrics in a line-by-line translation exercise. In the other classroom, a pupil gives a presentation about her favorite song and plays the music video, after which the class engage in a pupil-led, but teacher-scaffolded discussion about the song.
The different practices result in very different interactional trajectories, one with a high level of pupil initiative, engagement, and control, and one with a high degree of teacher control to the seeming detriment of pupil participation. In the pupil-led classroom, the teacher’s skillful use of scaffolding practices, e.g. paraphrasing, gesturing, and collaborating in pupils’ word searches, lead to meaningful, pupil-driven teaching/learning moments that do not emerge in the teacher-controlled environment. The consequences for the creation of learnables and teachables are immense, and we discuss the pedagogical implications including the advantage of pupil involvement even in early education, the benefits of using the children’s non-institutional resources pedagogically, and how limited classroom time is most profitably spent in early language education.
Our data come from an audio-video corpus of EFL classes in 6 Danish schools. The data, approximately 80 hours in total, were collected over two years as part of a project investigating the effect of starting age on English language learning (Cadierno & Eskildsen, 2017).
