This paper analyses how multimodal resources are treated by teachers to manage and promote peer repair in Spanish as a Foreign Language classroom interaction. The analysis shows that teachers mainly manage peer repair by heading and gazing to give the floor and give the students the willingness to participate.
Multimodality has been established as one of the key features to understand the nature of participants’ conduct in interaction (e.g. Mortensen, 2012). In this vein, recent research in classroom discourse has taken into account how multimodal resources used by teachers are key features for the management of the interaction (Kääntä, 2012). Gaze, gesture or body posture are as important as linguistic resources for the classroom development and the interactional development in teacher-students interactions. Multimodal resources are commonly used by teachers in repair work: heading, gazing or signaling are used, for example, when they want to locate a trouble source or want the students to self-correct (e.g. Eskildsen & Wagner, 2013, 2015). However, multimodal resources used by teachers to prompt interactional trouble to be repaired by another student has not been yet extensively studied. This article aims to describe how multimodal resources are treated by teachers as relevant to manage peer repair when they are speaking with a student. 15 videotaped hours of Spanish as a foreign language classroom interaction will be analyzed. Particularly, our focus will be on the multimodal resources that are used by the teachers to promote peer repair work. Data analyses show that teachers manage peer repair with multimodal resources rather than with linguistic resources, most of the time by heading and gazing to give the floor and give the students the willingness to participate. However, due to the reflective relationship between pedagogy and interaction (Seedhouse, 2004), depending on the focus of the interaction, multimodal resources are joined with some specific linguistic resources. In consequence, this study evidences the importance of multimodal resources in managing classroom interaction and the necessity to take them into account as a key resource for teacher’s performance in second language learning and teaching.
