Approaching classroom interaction dialogically. Studies of everyday encounters in a ’bilingual’ secondary school

Approaching classroom interaction dialogically. Studies of everyday encounters in a ’bilingual’ secondary school

This thesis approaches classroom interaction in association with Bakhtin and conversation analysis (CA). The four studies presented in this thesis seek to highlight different aspects of classroom interactional encounters between the students and teachers of a secondary school class. Through these studies, the thesis addresses the following challenges: How can analysts account for ‘multilingual’ communicative practices in a way which respects the views and orientations of the participants? How may dialogism be relevant for classroom interaction? How can we move beyond the representational (in)sufficiency of an oral language focus on (classroom) communication for analysis of human meaning making practices?

The studies arise from ethnographic fieldwork at an independent secondary school with a ‘bilingual’ educational profile where data of everyday instructional life was generated through participant observation and video recordings. Methodologically, the studies have been enabled by Bakhtinian concepts and conversation analytic conventions amplified for analysis of the complex range of modalities composing classroom interaction.

Study 1 examines the way participants’ use of two (or more) languages in a ‘foreign’ language classroom throw light on each other in processes of lexical orientation which challenge the privileging or the subordination of any one language in language learning. Study 2 demonstrates the consequences for understanding the participants’ sense-making efforts of making representationally (in)visible integral aspects of their multimodal cooperations. Study 3 focuses on whole-class task instructions as interactionally complex by showing some of the mutual orientations through which teacher and students coordinate each other’s stances and consequently craft instructions collaboratively. Study 4 examines the concept of languaging critically in the light of Bakhtin’s penetrating perception of the utterance and underscores that while we may be able to language when communicating, we are also languaged communicators.