Modern video technology allows for a holistic capture of classroom interaction and its multifaceted multimodal structures. The talk will present a videobased research project for the exploration of the foreign language classroom aiming to reconstruct everyday practices in lessons of French and Spanish.
In German foreign language teaching research a gap is visible between normative didactic developments on the one hand, and the lacking empirical research on foreign language classrooms on the other. This gap is especially visible concerning the teaching of the romance languages French and Spanish where theoretical recommendations on topics ranging from e.g. multilingualism to teaching literature contrast with little research on actual everyday classroom practices. In our talk we will present data from a videobased research project focusing on the reconstruction of everyday practices and norms in lessons of French and Spanish. The data to be presented include several French and Spanish units (each 3-4 hours) on intercultural learning. Modern video technology allows for a holistic capture of classroom interaction and its multifaceted structures: learners and teachers, languages and discourses, themes and texts, bodies and voices, things and spaces interact in complex ways. Obviously, in this multimodal interactional system, there is “order at all points” (Sacks) but depending on the epistemological perspective this order can be attributed to e.g. emergence in interaction or underlying practical logics. Drawing on the sociology of knowledge approach of the Documentary Method (based on Mannheim, Garfinkel, Bourdieu), we assume that social practice is induced by both embodied, implicit knowledge accumulated through socialization and explicit knowledge referring to social norms. While primordiality is assigned to practice, explicit knowledge and norms can in turn become part of practice and members of society like students and teachers have to implicitely negotiate between normative affordances and their actual habitualized practices. The filming allows for the rule-guided reconstruction of norms and multimodal classroom practices (as habitus of teaching, learning, and doing student). As a result, different practical logics of classroom action emerging from the tension and negotiation of norms and practices will be identified and classified.
