Abstract
This paper adopts an ethnomethodological, conversation analytic approach to analyze the social organization of the instruction-giving sequences that were accomplished by a teacher of Italian as a foreign language during the last phase of a writing task conducted in pairs. Specifically, the paper explores the linguistic, prosodic and embodied resources mobilized by the teacher as she engages in various rounds of instruction giving to prompt each pair of students to read their texts aloud. As the analysis shows, while the first round (targeting the first pair of students) is rather lengthy and subject to repair, the last round (targeting the last pair of students) consists of a minimal summons-answer sequence. Such minimization results from the students’ increased familiarity with the task. That is, by the time the teacher is about to select the last group of students as next speakers, these students have already listened to multiple rounds of instruction-giving sequences and seen multiple implementations of the task. Overall, the paper contributes to the research concerning the mundane, yet complex, social action of doing pedagogical instructions. The implications of these empirical findings for teacher education are discussed at the end of the chapter.
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Notes
- 1.
I have chosen to translate the phrase va bene (literally ‘that’s good’ in English) as ‘okay.’ In fact, when spoken with downward intonation, va bene closes down the previous activity as a precursor to the following talk. In English, the discourse marker that prototypically achieves this function is okay (Beach 1993).
- 2.
From this moment on T is not visible on the video, until we next see her turning to Jillian in line 26.
- 3.
Unfortunately, we cannot see what the other student, Kendra, is doing.
- 4.
Remember that, in Excerpt 2e, T also produces the verbal turn in discoteca (‘at the disco’, line 18) as a way to further clarify which dialogue needs to be written and to pursue compliance from the students.
- 5.
In cognitive-interactionist second language acquisition research, familiarity has been treated as a variable that affects language learning in various ways (see Gass and Varonis 1984; Plough and Gass 1993; Winke and Gass 2013). In contrast, here familiarity is analyzed in post-cognitive (that is, behavioral) terms; specifically, the paper shows how familiarity with the task affects the emerging organization of multiple instruction-giving sequences over time on a moment-by-moment basis. I thank Numa Markee for this observation.
- 6.
For the importance of dialogic, evidence-based reflection in teacher education see: Walsh and Mann (2015).
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Kunitz, S. (2021). Instruction-Giving Sequences in Italian as a Foreign Language Classes: An Ethnomethodological Conversation Analytic Perspective. In: Kunitz, S., Markee, N., Sert, O. (eds) Classroom-based Conversation Analytic Research. Educational Linguistics, vol 46. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52193-6_7
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