Multimodal elicitations in Chilean secondary EFL classrooms

This PhD thesis is a descriptive exploration of teachers’ interactional practices to mobilise and secure student responses in elicitation sequences in Chilean secondary English as a foreign language classrooms. It explores teachers’ verbal and embodied practices, such as hand gestures, gaze alignment and gaze shifts, body orientation and body shifts, and the manipulation of the teaching materials. The main aims are: to identify the kinds of elicitations teachers produce and their sequential development, and to identify the role of embodied practices in mobilising and pursuing student-next action. It also seeks to bridge the gap between Conversation Analysis and English Language Teaching and is therefore presented as an introduction to the kinds of elements that can be studied through a CA lens and is written with an audience of practitioners new to CA in mind.
The study, of a semi-interventionist nature, draws upon teachers’ application of a jigsaw picture-story task in 5 secondary classrooms. Lessons were recorded in Chile in August/September 2016. The task was designed with different activities and stages to elicit interactions of different kinds: teacher talk, groupwork, teacher-group feedback, groups talking to each other and teacher-student negotiations. The activity included the use of flashcards as teaching materials (only pictures, no text) that teachers and students manipulated throughout the activity.
Results show that teachers design elicitations as question-answer sequences, designedly-incomplete turns and a combination of both. Designedly-incomplete elicitations correspond to elicitations in which teachers put their current turn on hold (incomplete TCU) and mobilise a completion from students (Designedly-incomplete utterances, Koshik, 2002). Teachers’ embodied practices allow them to set up different participation frameworks and to layer their turns in different ways, which have sequential implications for student-next action. The findings are a contribution to the fields of classroom interaction studies, gestures studies and Applied CA. Finally, in particular, this thesis expands previous studies on IRF sequences in general, and on incomplete turns in classroom settings, in particular (McHoul 1978; Lerner 1995; Koshik 2002; Margutti 2010; Koshik, 2010; Hazel and Mortensen 2019).