The sequential organization and management of teachers' other-initiation of clarification in second language classroom contexts

Abstract

The present study investigates teachers’ other-initiation of clarification (CLA) as an action in second language (L2) classroom settings. CLA is a significant aspect of Classroom Interactional Competence and it needs to be studied thoroughly as it contributes to the understanding of the nature of L2 classroom interaction (Walsh, 2011). In the literature there is not a study which solely focuses on CLA in L2 classroom contexts from the perspective of Conversation Analysis (CA). The previous studies are mainly descriptive and quantitative in nature. Consequently, this study aims at unearthing the sequential organization and management of CLA in L2 classroom contexts in order to describe and account for the sequential organization and qualitative aspects of the action of CLA. The data of this study is taken from the Newcastle University Corpus of Academic Spoken English (NUCASE) database. It consists of 10 hours of foundation and pre-sessional English lessons from Newcastle University. The participants are international students who study English in order to proceed to their departments. The data is transcribed using CA conventions and analysed using CA by specifically looking at turn-taking procedures and sequence organization. After that, the types of initiations teachers use to other-initiate CLA are analysed and how CLA is managed through repair mechanism, when problems occur, is studied. The findings suggest that there is a pattern in CLA and this pattern is ordered and organized. CLA basically has four phases and the CLA core adjacency pair is usually a question and answer sequence. In terms of sequential organization, it is usually a post-expansion, but it may also be an insert expansion and this difference has interactional reasons. In addition, basically four types of teacher CLA-initiation are observed in the data: open class repair initiators, type specific questions, partial repetitions followed by question words and checking candidate understanding. A micro-analytic look into the data suggests that these types are linked to the epistemic gap in intersubjectivity between teachers and students. The study also suggests that teachers mainly use three resources to manage student CLA failures: using stronger forms (Schegloff et al., 1977), rephrasing and checking candidate understanding. Pauses and non-verbal behaviour are also observed to be relevant in CLA. The findings of this thesis have implications for L2 teacher training, and repair studies and intersubjectivity studies in L2 classrooms.