Drawing on conversation analysis and its extension to classroom discourse studies, this presentation examines the ways in which topic is managed and opportunities for learning are created. The analysis show how topic is accomplished between the teacher and her students in relation to preference organization and epistemic stance.
Drawing on conversation analysis and its extension to classroom discourse studies, this presentation examines the ways in which topic is managed and opportunities for learning are created in an advanced US university-level Francophone Cultures class. Participants include 7 undergraduate students in a 3rd-year course for French majors and minors and their instructor, an assistant professor of French and Francophone Studies. The data come from a longitudinal corpus of videorecorded classroom interactions (approximately 30 hrs of data in total). In the analysis, topic is treated as an ongoing interactional achievement rather than a stable “subject” of conversation. A single-case analysis is presented to show how topic is accomplished between the teacher and her students in relation to preference organization and epistemic stance. Specifically, the analysis demonstrates how a prototypical three-turn IRF sequence is elaborated over multiple turns that expand the teacher’s explicitly announced topic to include a side sequence addressing a metalinguistic problem and a disagreement between two students that results in an expansion of the topic beyond the teacher’s agenda. In other words, the analysis reveals the co-construction of opportunities for learning through the interactive management of the topic. In the discussion, the results are synthesized in relation to how opportunities for learning emerge in the co-management of topics. Specific focus is on how research findings such as the ones presented in this paper can be translated for practical purposes, such as teacher education.
