Drew Fagan, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA

The role of teaching as it relates to the learning process has long been viewed as complex, with teachers doing multiple and simultaneous actions addressing the immediacy and unexpectedness of students’ needs in the moment. The TESOL field has sought to uncover how such actions occur by examining the nuanced complexity of teacher discourse as it affects language learning opportunities; such investigations include, for example, the intricacy with which teachers both elicit and respond to student contributions to classroom interactions (see Fagan, 2018, for a recent example). The majority of this work has focused on discourse in whole-class activities, where both teachers and students overtly participate in the construction of the talk. These activities, however, have been critiqued for their hindering of learner talk and learner agency in the discourse, thus potentially hindering opportunities for language learning (van Lier, 2008).

In contrast, small-group activities are viewed as student-led, student-responsible interactional spaces which promote opportunities for students to engage with the language (Hellermann & Cole, 2009). It is therefore not surprising that research examining discourse within these activities predominantly focuses on student turns-at-talk, while the interactional role of teachers in such activities remains underresearched. This article sets out to address this by beginning to uncover the intricate details of what teachers actually do when they enter small-group activity discourse. Specifically, I investigate one ESOL teacher’s entrance into this student-led, student-responsible interactional space without being solicited to do so by her students, the actions she accomplishes when entering the discourse, and the ramifications of those actions on subsequent student interaction.

To encapsulate the entirety of what teaching entails, two points are important to note. First is the concept of embodied actions. Put simply, actions accomplished through talk-in-interaction consist of a systematic and simultaneous use of word choice, paralinguistic cues (e.g., intonation, prosody, speed), nonverbal cues (e.g., body positioning, gesture, eye contact), and physical artifacts (see Goodwin, 2000, for a more detailed discussion); the entirety of a complete action, therefore, is the embodiment of these multiple factors. Second, understanding teacher actions entails also uncovering what teachers are orienting to in the prior discourse that leads them to doing those actions. In connection to the work here, I am interested in identifying (1) the actions occurring in the students’ previous turns-at-talk that the teacher orients to as necessitating her embodied actions, and (2) the teacher’s embodied actions that the students orient to when they construct their own turns-at-talk subsequent to the teacher’s unsolicited turns.

To address these, I present here one instance outlining the ESOL teacher’s actions when entering the student-led, student-responsible discourse of small-group activities. The data come from 10 hours of video-recorded small-group classroom activities in an adult ESOL community program classroom in the United States. The program, affiliated with a university TESOL program, caters to the local community wanting to improve their general English ability across the language skills. This particular course was the most advanced in the program. The teacher had more than 30 years of experience teaching ESOL in various educational contexts and being a teacher trainer. The students, 11 in total, all of whom interacted in the small-group activities to varying degrees, had varied first languages, previous English learning experiences, and reasons for being in this particular course.

To understand the embodied actions used by the teacher, all video-recordings were transcribed using an intricate transcription system, though for the purposes of readability the transcript presented here has been modified. The methodology of conversation analysis (CA) was utilized given that central to CA is examining “why a particular bit of talk is produced in that format at that particular time” (Waring, 2016, p. 46). The following brief analysis stems from a more detailed conversation analytic examination of the data found elsewhere (Fagan, 2019).

In the following extract, the teacher has assigned students to fill in the states on a blank U.S. map. They were instructed to first fill out the map on their own before being paired off to discuss their answers; the activity culminated with a whole-class discussion. Here, Student 1 (S1) and Student 2 (S2) are in the middle of the pair portion of the activity and have been focusing on the eastern part of the map for just under 1 minute. Up to this point, S2 has been the more vocal in the pair in terms of providing answers while S1 has been more vocal in terms of her uncertainty with filling out the map. The teacher currently is standing off to the side looking at the pair:

Extract: Washington, DC

(1) S1: {((makes circular motion on sheet))- and washington dc <i think> is somewhere ove:r-

(2) T: washington dc [{((forms a small hole with hand))- is like this big.}]

(3) S1: [ ((gazes from her sheet to teacher’s hand)) ]

(4) T: [{((continues forming small hole))- it’s ti::ny.} ]

(5) S2: [((looks up from S1’s sheet to teacher’s hand)) ]

(6) S1: yeah?

(7) S2: ah.

(8) T: it’s ti:ny tiny.

(9) S1: {((looks back at her sheet))- then i don’t know where is washington dc.}

(10) S2: {((points to his sheet))- maybe this is it.}

(11) S1: ((looks at S2’s sheet and nods))

(12) T: ((looks at group while walking away))

Modified Transcription Key: ((xxx))= nonverbal conduct; { } = simultaneous verbal and nonverbal conduct; < > = slow speech; : = elongated speech; [ ] = overlap speech.

To understand the teacher’s embodied actions, let us first examine the students’ actions prior to the teacher’s entrance. After having focused on the eastern portion of the map for a short time, S1 in Turn 1 does something that has not been prevalent in the previous small-group discourse: she displays some knowledge, specifically about the location of Washington, DC. Numerous cues used throughout her turn, however, demonstrate that her knowledge is not complete—she does not know where exactly Washington, DC, is. This is evident by her simultaneous use of (1) the physical artifact of the map (i.e., circling over the general vicinity of Washington, DC), (2) slow speech with “I think,” signaling uncertainty in her knowledge, and (3) sound elongation with “over,” displaying that she is searching for something while taking her turn.

As shown throughout the CA literature, when one interlocutor displays unknowingness, another interlocutor can orient to that as needing assistance in order for the discourse to proceed, thus leading the second speaker to self-select the next turn-at-talk without being nominated to do so; this is what the teacher does beginning in Turn 2. Here, her actions accomplish what I call “marking the path” (Fagan, 2019) toward overcoming the unknowingness displayed by the student in the previous turn. The teacher uses her self-selected turns in Turns 2, 4, and 8 to provide a new perspective on the search for Washington, DC, that neither student had done prior: focusing on its size. This example of the embodied action of marking the path incorporates multiple and simultaneous features: verbalization, gesture, and elongation of sounds with “tiny,” all done to emphasize smallness. Note that in overlap with the teacher’s turns, both S1 and S2 in Turns 3 and 5, respectively, change their gaze from their sheets to the teacher’s gesture, honing in on this particular component of her embodied action. At the conclusion of the teacher marking the path, both S1 and S2 display new stances of knowingness: S1 in Turn 9 changes her knowing stance from one of potential knowing to that of complete unknowing while S2 in Turn 10 utilizes the teacher’s action to guess Washington’s location on the map, to which S1 displays agreement (Turn 11). It is only at this point, where both S1 and S2 display continuation of the activity, that the teacher disengages with the group’s discourse by walking away (Turn 12).

What we see in this brief example is the intricacy with which teaching can occur in small-group activity while keeping the activity student centered. First, the teacher does not enter the small-group discourse until there is evidence from the student’s actions of potential difficulties hindering them from continuing the activity. Only by orienting to these does the teacher strategically enter the discourse. First, she uses her turns to continue with the students’ topic-at-hand as opposed to veering away from it or bypassing it to get to the final product, actions which have been shown to surface elsewhere in the classroom discourse literature (see Waring, 2018). Second, she never provides students with the answer they are seeking, hence the term “marking the path,” which keeps the activity student-responsible. Third, she keeps her turns-at-talk minimal, incorporating multiple actions simultaneously on which the students focus their attention. Finally, she only disengages with the discourse completely when there is evidence from the students of activity continuation.

In connecting these findings to general teaching practices with English learners, we see that teaching can indeed occur in small-group activities while keeping those activities student-led and student-responsible. The teacher’s entrance into the discourse should not be random or done to overtly adhere to the teacher’s preconceived expectations of the activity but rather should build off of students’ actual actions. In other words, teacher entrance into this space should not be an abrupt change to an existing discourse but rather displayed as an expansion to the discourse the students have already accomplished and established.

References

Fagan, D. S. (2018). Addressing learner hesitancy-to-respond within initiation-response-feedback sequences. TESOL Quarterly, 52, 425–435.

Fagan D. S. (2019). Teacher embodied responsiveness to student displays of trouble within small-group activities. In J. K. Hall & S. Looney (Eds.), The embodied achievement of teaching (pp. 100–121). Bristol, England: Multilingual Matters.

Goodwin, C. (2000). Action and embodiment within situated human interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 32, 1489–1522.

Hellermann, J., & Cole, E. (2009). Practices for social interaction in the language learning classroom: Disengagements from dyadic task interactions. Applied Linguistics 30, 186-215

Van Lier, L. (2008). Agency in the classroom. In J. Lantolf & M. E. Poehner (Eds.), Sociocultural theory and the teaching of second languages (pp. 163-186). London, England: Equinox.

Waring, H. Z. (2016). Theorizing pedagogical interaction. New York, NY: Routledge.

Waring, H. Z. (2018). The what and how of English language teaching: Conversation analytic perspectives. In X. Gao (Ed.), Second handbook of English language teaching. New York, NY: Springer.