Teacher Responses to Questions about Grammaticality in an ESL Classroom: Complex Multimodal Gestalts and the Moral Order of Classroom Interaction

Questions about the grammaticality of potential utterances inevitably arise in second and foreign language classrooms. Students ask if certain constructions can be used in lieu of others. For example, a student might say, “Could I use is going instead of goes?” This type of question places the teacher in the position of having to either accept or reject a candidate construction. The latter can be sensitive work for teachers who want to encourage student participation and maintain positive affect in the classroom. Taking a multimodal Conversation Analysis (CA) approach, this paper analyzes sequences in which students ask information seeking questions containing candidate constructions in the first turn, and in the second turn teachers either accept or reject the candidate construction. A search of approximately thirteen hours of transcribed video data from two university ESL courses yielded fifteen such sequences. The sequence initiating questions typically take the shape of modal + pronoun + verb + candidate construction. Teachers’ second pair parts that accept candidate constructions are relatively brief and unremarkable in terms of prosody and non-verbal resources. In contrast, second pair parts that deliver rejection are complex multimodal Gestalts composed of multiple turn constructional units during which the teacher mitigates rejection by coordinating constellations of verbal and non-verbal resources including gaze, gesture, body positioning, objects, volume, and the repetition of candidate constructions. The analysis shows that while both acceptance and rejection involve the deployment of multimodal resources, actions that accomplish sensitive work, i.e., rejecting candidate constructions proposed by students, are more complex and intense. The findings illuminate how participants attend to the moral order of classroom interaction during sensitive moments and can be instructional (Garfinkel & Liberman, 2007) for second and foreign language teachers and teachers in training who have had or will have to manage student questions about grammaticality.