In-service EFL Teachers’ Management of Participation during Teacher-fronted Whole-class Activities
In-service EFL Teachers’ Management of Participation during Teacher-fronted Whole-class Activities

Summary/Abstract: Within the sociolinguistic and interactional approaches to L2 acquisition, learner participation is considered a necessary prerequisite for language learning. However, recent studies (e.g. Walsh & Li, 2013) have demonstrated that simply letting learners talk is not enough, and that for any learning to emerge, a solid amount of interactional steering work must first be employed by the teacher. This conversation-analytic study focuses on in-service EFL teachers. Based on video recordings of nine lessons (387 minutes) taught by six such teachers, it explores both the resources that they use to manage the participation of multiple learners at once during teacher-fronted whole-class activities, and the ways in which the learners respond to them. The study shows that there is a large range of resources which these teachers mobilise to secure the participation of their learners: these include Yes/No questions in the third-turn position, increased wait time, designedly incomplete utterances, continuers such as “uh-um” or acknowledging learners’ turns in advance by referencing a past learning event. Furthermore, the deployment of these resources is often tied to the pedagogical goal of an activity. These findings bear some implications for future teacher education, particularly in relation to the development of their Classroom Interactional Competence (Walsh, 2006).

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