Soliciting teacher attention in an L2 classroom: Affective displays, classroom artefacts, and embodied action

• This paper explores L2 novices’ ways of soliciting teacherattention, more specifically, their summonses. The data arebased on detailed analyses of video recordings in a Swedishlanguage immersion classroom. The analyses illuminate the lexicalshape of summonses in conjunction with prosody, body posture,gestures, and classroom artefacts. As demonstrated, a simplestructure of summoning provided a handy method for solicitingand establishing the teacher's attention, and facilitated thenovices’ participation in classroom activities from earlyon. Importantly, however, the local design of the summonseswas influenced by the competitive multiparty classroom setting.The analyses illustrate how the novices upgraded their summonsesby displaying a range of affective stances. Different aspectsof the students’ embodied actions were employed as waysof indexing affective stances, for example ‘tired’,‘resigned’, or ‘playful’, that in thelocal educational order created methods that invited the teacher'sattention and conversational uptake. These locally availableresources allowed children to upgrade their summonses and toindicate their communicative projects, in spite of their limitedSwedish (L2) resources. The findings are discussed in termsof their implications for understanding participation in L2classroom interactions as being a matter of delicately calibratedcollaborative accomplishments.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Jämförande språkvetenskap och allmän lingvistik (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Language Studies and Linguistics (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

L2 novices

embodied action

L2 learning

children

affective stances

Bilingualism

Tvåspråkighet

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

art (ämneskategori)