The Multimodal Organisation of Teacher-Led Classroom Interaction

Abstract

As a teacher, have you ever thought that when you are teaching, you are interacting with your students in various ways, some of these ways being fleetingly miniscule acts of, for example, your body to which you have not consciously paid attention but which eventually have been immensely meaningful in how interaction has progressed? For instance, have you ever wondered how a misunderstanding between you and your students came about when everything you said to each other was clearly understandable and straightforward? During that moment, did you pay attention to what you or your students were doing with your bodies? Maybe you missed something relevant that occasioned the misunderstanding? In this chapter, classroom interaction is described from the perspective of how embodied actions are employed by teachers and students to create meanings. In effect, it describes how teachers and students demonstrably orient to each other’s use of language and other semiotic resources (such as gaze, gestures, and other types of bodily actions) in their meaning-making practices and draw on these to organise classroom interaction. Also, I describe the use of pedagogical materials and teaching equipment and how they figure in the interaction as another set of semiotic meaning-making resources. The chapter offers concrete examples of how teachers and students actually interact in the classroom when the interaction is approached from a multimodal perspective. More importantly, it demonstrates how essential embodied and material actions are to what transpires in human interaction: if we do not pay heed to them, then we may miss out on relevant parts of meanings. By adopting such a perspective, the chapter illuminates the participants’ multimodal practices of doing teaching and learning that have fairly recently emerged as a focus of study in classroom research due to advances in both technology and research methodology.