Drawing on Interactional Linguistics and Conversation Analysis, this study examines students’ responses engendered by information-seeking teacher questions and argues that students’ awareness and employment of available semiotic resources constitute their competence in engaging in interactional practices, enabling them to recognize the kinds of actions accomplished by teacher questions.
Drawing on Interactional Linguistics and Conversation Analysis, particularly the research on the linguistic design of turns and the social actions they accomplish, the current study focuses on student responses to teacher questions, specifically on the shared non-linguistic resources informing students of the types of information sought by the questions. Existing studies on teacher questions and the actions they accomplish (e.g., Hall, Khor, & Wang, 2019; Thompson, Fox & Couper-Kuhlen, 2015) found that linguistic formats alone are inadequate in determining the kinds of actions that teacher questions accomplish. In other words, the account-ability (Garfinkel, 1984) and the recognizability of the actions go beyond the linguistic formats of teacher questions to consider the larger instructional activity. Building on the above findings, the current study zooms in on the students’ responses engendered by the 399 information-seeking teacher questions from four hours of video recordings of an adult Intensive English grammar course (CEAPP, 2014). In particular, our analyses include embodied resources relevant to the interactional project and therefore available to students’ interactional repertoires in those moments. Such resources include pedagogical materials, e.g., slides and textbooks, as well as bodily movements, e.g., eye gaze and gestures. We argue that students’ awareness and employment of the collection of available semiotic resources constitute their competence in engaging in interactional practices, enabling them to recognize the kinds of actions accomplished by teacher questions. Examples will illustrate the vital roles of embodied resources in students’ recognition of and orientation to teacher actions, and their use of embodied resources in the collective achievements of pedagogical goals with the teacher. Such findings expand our understandings of learners’ interactional competence to include their capability to recognize and cooperatively accomplish social actions with meaning-making resources present in their interactional repertoire (Hall, 2019), including embodied resources relevant to the interactional projects.
