This study sequentially analyzes moments of interactional conflict among students and instructors in multilingual writing classrooms at a U.S. university, highlighting how multilingual students employ various nonverbal interactional resources (e.g., long silence and materials) for managing interactional troubles. While numerous studies of English as a lingua franca (ELF) interactions (e.g., Seidlhofer, 2001) have exhibited that ELF interactions are often consensus-oriented and cooperative in nature, recent research (e.g., Jenks, 2012) has started to illuminate uncooperative ELF interactions, including disagreement, in diverse ELF interactional contexts. Thus, various types of ELF interactions warrant close scrutiny without generalizing the nature of ELF interactions as either cooperative or collaborative.
The sequential, multimodal analysis of video-recorded classroom interactions illustrates that students employ various nonverbal resources (in particular, long silences, body orientation, and materials) effectively in order to subtly challenge or evade the teacher’s epistemic authority while at the same time considering politeness. In fact, the analysis demonstrates that these students are efficient negotiators equipped with interactional competence and sociopragmatic knowledge, and that they can express their disagreement and manage interactional conflicts according to their emergent communicative needs.
In terms of pedagogical implications, this study suggests the need for second language teachers to better understand the interactional functions of students’ use of nonverbal resources—such as silencing and embodied actions (Sert, 2015)—for dealing with different types of trouble in the classroom. It also offers insights for effectively managing such challenging, conflicting moments while at the same time providing students space to develop their agency and interactional competence (Walsh, 2006).
References:
Jenks, C. J. (2012). Doing being reprehensive: Some interactional features of English as a lingua franca in a chat room. Applied Linguistics, 33(4), 386–405.
Kaur, J. (2011). Raising explicitness through self-repair in English as a lingua franca. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(11), 2704–2715.
Seidlhofer, B. (2001). Closing a conceptual gap: The case for a description of English as a lingua franca. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 11(2), 133–158.
Sert, O. (2015). Social interaction and L2 classroom discourse. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Walsh, S. (2006). Investigating classroom discourse. London: Routledge.
