Let’s be for real? Student-led reconfiguration of pedagogical activities in the English as an additional language classroom

Abstract

This paper examines two occurrences of reconfiguration of instructional activities within talk-in-interaction in an English as an additional language classroom. Grounded on ethnometodological conversation analysis, we analyzed a corpus of thirteen hours of audiovisual recordings in an intermediate level group at a language center. The detailed examination of the reconfigurations of ongoing pedagogical activities shows that the phenomenon involves: (1) a disaffiliative or disaligned triggering action, carried out by students, i.e., a participant other than the one in charge of the extant institutional mandate, i.e., the teacher; (2) a new alignment among interactants, displayed by their actions and by multimodal signals; (3) changes in both the organization of talk-in-interaction and participation framework, with no turn allocation nor orchestration of the interactional flow of the pedagogical activity by the teacher; (4) the affiliation of participants with positions taken by the one who performed the triggering action and the establishment of collaborations; and (5) a complex and intense interactional work accomplished by participants, who mobilize different linguistic and interactional resources and locally renegotiate membership categories. The investigation shows that the teacher’s continuous orientation to her institutional goal may compromise the acceptance of student contributions and prevent them from performing relevant actions through the use of the additional language. We discuss the need to develop flexible teaching skills which may accommodate local and contingent interactional trajectories that may emerge during a pedagogical activity, so as to include potential language and interactional moves that promote learning objects not initially projected in the pedagogical plan.Keywords: pedagogical activity, pedagogical task, classroom talk-ininteraction, participation.