Abstract-Conversational sequences appear to be basically built around a basic pair of adjacent interactional actions; such as a question which makes an answer become relevant next. However, in contexts other than ordinary conversation, there are more complex features of sequential organization needed to be investigated especially those occurred in institutional contexts. This study applied CA to examine the interactional activities of teaching and learning in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom in Thailand. The results show that teaching and learning are not planned but contingent activities, and that the pedagogical goal of developing language knowledge is mutually achieved in a micro-context of interaction between the teacher and students mostly in a form of coherent successive and extended elicitation and response sequences rather than series of separated courses of random action sequences. Furthermore, detailed pedagogical implications which manifest itself in the developing of these sequences of talk are uncovered in a turn-by-turn basis. This empirical study provides evidence that inform the teaching practices about how classroom talk should be managed successively in order to achieve pedagogical effectiveness.

Demotivation is one of the important factors causing students’ failure in learning a language. To explore the psychological and cognitive factors causing college students’ demotivation to learn English in China’s universities and to investigate the relations among these internal factors, this study constructed a shopping cart model by applying grounded theory method and tested the model by using structural equation modeling. This study found three paths underlying students’ demotivation to learn English, originating from large discrepancy between students’ actual and required positioning of English learning, low required positioning of English learning and low value of English learning in students’ minds. Based on these findings, this study gave some pedagogical implications for English teaching.