Leila Kääntä

Manual Guiding in Peer Group Interaction: A Resource for Organizing a Practical Classroom Task

How might someone carry out an educational task by moving an object or by guiding another person in doing so? This article describes the practical work of a group of school students as they work through an object-based physics task. It analyzes a recurrent practice whereby one student influences anothers embodied conduct, either by manually guiding an object (a weight, a moveable plank, and so on) or by guiding the hand of another student as they manipulate an object. We show how the practices of manual guiding involve a range of embodied and contextual resources. They serve to maintain and restore the progressivity of the task in two environments: corrective sequences and local projects involving interactional teams.

Teachers’ embodied allocations in instructional interaction

This paper describes how teachers employ gaze, head nods and pointing gestures in allocating response turns to students in whole-class instructional interaction. Specifically, it focuses on examining teachers’ embodied allocations – that is, turn-allocations produced (mostly) by embodied means – and the sequential positions in which they are performed within the tripartite instructional sequence of IRE. While prior studies have noted their use in classroom interaction, the way in which they are drawn on by teachers has not been examined in detail. By using conversation analysis in conjunction with the study of embodied interaction, this article aims to show how these ephemeral embodied resources become interactionally meaningful for participants in managing speaker change and negotiating participation in multi-party classroom interaction. The findings show how teachers’ embodied allocations are contingently produced and sensitively timed in relation to the unfolding interaction and the emerging participation frameworks. They also manifest how teachers occasionally produce embodied allocations simultaneously with talk so that they perform two interactional tasks at the same time, thereby showing a momentary ‘division of labour’ in operation between the two modalities.

Clarification requests as a method of pursuing understanding in CLIL physics lectures

Abstract Using multimodal conversation analysis, this article examines how students strive to resolve non-understandings through requests for clarification during teacher-fronted physics lectures taught in English in Finland. The findings provide new insights on the sequential environments in which students launch the requests (i.e. between or during teacher’s explanation turns) and how different problem categories (e.g. language, conceptual, textual) are made relevant and oriented to in the requests. Moreover, the findings show the role of different textual objects (e.g. inscriptions on the board) in the formulation and resolution of the clarification requests as well as the relevance of students’ note-taking to both their proximal and distal goals of trying to understand the instruction. Overall, the clarification requests are shown to influence in different ways the teacher’s instructional process and offer valuable feedback to the teacher about the success of his explanations, i.e. how students understand them and whether he can proceed with his instructional agenda. Finally, the findings shed new light on how the integration of language and content is oriented to and accomplished by participants during teacher-fronted lectures in content-based lessons taught in a foreign language.

The Multimodal Organisation of Teacher-Led Classroom Interaction

As a teacher, have you ever thought that when you are teaching, you are interacting with your students in various ways, some of these ways being fleetingly miniscule acts of, for example, your body to which you have not consciously paid attention but which eventually have been immensely meaningful in how interaction has progressed? For instance, have you ever wondered how a misunderstanding between you and your students came about when everything you said to each other was clearly understandable and straightforward? During that moment, did you pay attention to what you or your students were doing with your bodies? Maybe you missed something relevant that occasioned the misunderstanding? In this chapter, classroom interaction is described from the perspective of how embodied actions are employed by teachers and students to create meanings. In effect, it describes how teachers and students demonstrably orient to each other’s use of language and other semiotic resources (such as gaze, gestures, and other types of bodily actions) in their meaning-making practices and draw on these to organise classroom interaction. Also, I describe the use of pedagogical materials and teaching equipment and how they figure in the interaction as another set of semiotic meaning-making resources. The chapter offers concrete examples of how teachers and students actually interact in the classroom when the interaction is approached from a multimodal perspective. More importantly, it demonstrates how essential embodied and material actions are to what transpires in human interaction: if we do not pay heed to them, then we may miss out on relevant parts of meanings. By adopting such a perspective, the chapter illuminates the participants’ multimodal practices of doing teaching and learning that have fairly recently emerged as a focus of study in classroom research due to advances in both technology and research methodology.