Kristian Mortensen

Establishing Recipiency in Pre-Beginning Position in the Second Language Classroom

This article describes how students in the second language classroom claim incipient speakership and establish recipiency with a co-participant before the turn is properly initiated. The resources used by the incipient speaker include in-breaths and body movements. The article shows that when the teachers turn is designed as not to pre-establish the participation roles “speaker” and “recipient” of the response turn, the next speaker orients to establishing visible recipiency as a relevant task during, or prior to, the turn beginning. In this way, the teachers instruction, and the way it is designed and enacted, provides the students with specific interactional jobs that are not only relevant, but also crucial for the production of the students turn.

The body as a resource for other-initiation of repair: cupping the hand behind the ear

ABSTRACT This article analyzes how the human body serves as a resource for other-initiation of repair. It describes how a hand gesture, a cupped hand behind the ear, is oriented to as a repair initiation in a foreign language classroom. The gesture typically occurs in the absence of speech and is treated as a hearing problem. The article argues that “hearing” does not refer to the acoustic reception but rather to the recipient’s hearing as displayed conduct and relates to the recipient’s lack of displayed orientation to the speaker during the trouble source turn. When the repair initiation is accomplished by co-occurring speech and gesture, the speech specifically marks the trouble as not a hearing problem. Data in English as a second language.

The classroom moral compass – participation, engagement and transgression in classroom interaction

Abstract This article explores the moral accountability of second language classroom participation, evidenced in sequential environments where participants display an orientation to some or other transgression in the engagement framework. Classroom participation is a sensitive issue which touches on what Garfinkel (1964, 225) has referred to as the moral order, constituted through the seen-but-unnoticed practices that pass as the natural order of things. A transgression of the particular way an engagement framework is organised is accountable, and although usually non-critical, it often results in the onward flow of the classroom activity to be momentarily suspended in order to address the transgression. When a classroom participant violates this ‘normality’, it not only attracts attention but can even invite moral and psychological evaluations, and may threaten the social status of the member responsible. Participants manage the tension for adhering to certain (negative) social categories by adopting mitigating strategies, for example by occasioning a jocular frame when attending to the transgression. Drawing attention to potentially sensitive issues points at the underlying moral order and at what is handled as normal, which in turn provides the analyst with a window on the practices into which participants have been socialised.