This paper investigates teaching-involved learning in terms of its basic interactional--that is its interaffective, interembodied, and multimodal/multisemiotic character. Drawing on sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, social semiotics, and conversation analysis, we examined data through multimodal microanalysis and investigated how teachers and students engage in basic human interaction in learning spaces.
Teaching-involved learning is "built into the organization of" basic human interaction (Goodwin, 2018, p. 102). That is, teaching and teaching-involved learning depend fundamentally on basic human interactive abilities, which have evolved over many millennia to enable human survival by working together. In this paper, we analyze teaching-involved learning in terms of its basic interactional--that is its interaffective, interembodied, and multimodal/multisemiotic character. Utilizing Goffman's (1961) focus encounters, Goodwin's (2018) co-operative action, Bezemer and Kress's (2015) social semiotics, Meyer, Streeck, and Jordan's intercorporeality (2017), and Csibra and Gergely's natural pedagogy (2009) as a theoretical framework, we investigated the learning opportunities occurring when teachers and students engage in shared social action that is public (visible, hearable, affective, proximal, and available to the other senses), and therefore able to be learned from. To this end, we convenience-sampled 21 YouTube videos of teaching-involved learning and chose one that most fully represented the interactional aspects of teaching-based learning as we conceptualize it. By situating focused encounters (Goffman, 1961) within a sociocognitive theory of SLA/T (Atkinson, 2011), this paper presents an analysis of one teaching/learning event--a videotaped church-based English language class for beginner-level Chinese students in Australia. Drawing on sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, social semiotics, and conversation analysis, we examined data through multimodal microanalysis. We first conducted several rounds of initial viewing and note-taking, and selected key episodes from the video which captured the student-teacher interaction. We then engaged with the data intensively through individual and collective transcription processes; focusing on smiles, laughter, tears, gestures, gaze, body language, movement, grammar, etc. as basic forms of human expressiveness-in-interaction. The preliminary results mirror our assumption that teaching-based learning is grounded in basic social interaction. Moreover, they move us to argue how language teaching programs and curricula, which are heavily focused on the how-tos, need to include and be explicit about basic human interaction as a tenet of successful teaching and teaching-involved learning.
