The Interactional Management of Lack of Student Participation in Video-Mediated Efl Classroom Interactions: Response Pursuit Practices

Abstract

As active student participation in classroom interaction is a central component of foreign language learning, eliciting student participation becomes consequential in L2 classrooms. Teacher-fronted classroom interaction mainly shapes around Initiation-Response-Evaluation (McHoul, 1978; Mehan, 1979) sequences in which teachers initiate interaction with questions followed by student response and teacher evaluation in the third turn. When teacher questions are left unanswered, teachers resort to diverse response pursuit practices to ensure interactional and pedagogical progressivity. Previous research has documented various interactional practices that teachers employ to pursue response in diverse face-to-face educational settings. However, in recent years, online classrooms have been getting increasingly widespread, and the dearth of research informing such settings have become more apparent than ever. Although some studies have pointed out the challenges including low student participation in online classroom activities, teachers’ actual practices in situ remains largely unexplored. Addressing this research gap, this study deals with the lack of response to teacher questions in a video-mediated L2 classroom in a higher education context. Using multimodal conversation analysis for the examination of screen-recordings of EFL classroom interactions, this study documents the response pursuit practices that an EFL teacher deploys to mobilize student response. The findings of the study show that utilizing diverse verbal and screen-based actions, the teacher restores intersubjectivity, elicits student response, hence ensures the interactional and pedagogical progressivity. Uncovering how these practices maximize interactional space, this study contributes to the understanding of the interactional organization of response pursuit practices and brings new insights to video-mediated L2 classroom discourse.