Instructed Vision: Navigating Grammatical Rules by Using Landmarks for Linguistic Structures in Corrective Feedback Sequences

Abstract

This study aims to show how multimodality, that is, the mobilization of various communicative resources in social actions (Mondada, 2016), can be used to teach grammar. Drawing on ethnomethodological conversation analysis (Sacks, 1992), the article provides a detailed analysis of 2 corrective feedback sequences in a Swedish-as-a-second-language classroom. It shows that teaching grammar using corrective feedback sequences is a collaborative activity between teachers and students, which requires both verbal and other embodied practices. Specifically, it demonstrates how the teachers made grammatical constructs visible, noticeable, and thus learnable through the use of multiple resources such as annotating and illustrating on a whiteboard or projection screen, using concrete meta-talk (Storch, 2008), together with nonverbal actions such as gesturing. The article argues that the practice of marking a linguistic structure through multiple resources creates 'landmarks' for teaching purposes. These landmarks were used (a) for an instructed vision through which the intelligibility of abstract grammatical concepts and relations as cognitive phenomena is constituted by a concrete set of observable and reportable actions, and (b) as prompts in organizing knowledge not only for the purpose of the current activity of teaching but also for future occasions.MULTIMODALITY HAS BEEN A TOPIC OF inquiry for some time in the domain of textual analysis, quite simply because most contemporary texts are no longer just straight word-based textual artifacts but show an intricate interlacing of multimodal resources in building texts. In contrast with a textual-analytical stance, the present study adopts an explicitly pedagogical orientation from an ethnomethodological conversation analytic (EM/CA) point of view (Mondada, 2014(Mondada, , 2016. The study aims to show how multimodality, that is, the use of multiple communicative resources, such as talk, body, and available artifacts, is indispensable to action-building in human activities including language teaching, here

‘We're Learning a Lot of New Words’: Encountering New L2 Vocabulary Outside of Class

“…As discussed in Theodórsdóttir (, this issue; see also Majlesi, , this issue) the notion of ‘feedback’ is problematic because it derives from a teaching tradition where it is common that teachers evaluate their students and where the students may also expect to be corrected and evaluated. This is not usually the case in everyday interaction in the wild.…”

Collaborative Attention Work on Gender Agreement in Italian as a Foreign Language

“…The present study, instead, framed within CA research on the achievement of joint attention, (a) is agnostic as to the nature of individual (or intramental) psycholinguistic processes, which lie outside of CA's methodological scope (Burch, ; Eskildsen & Cadierno, ; Hauser, ); (b) embraces a view of cognition as socially distributed, embodied, and extended (see for example Gallagher, ; Robbins & Aydede, ; for SLA, see, in particular Markee & Kunitz, ; Eskildsen & Markee, ); and (c) develops an emic (i.e., participant‐relevant), sequential, multimodal analysis (Goodwin, 2013; Hazel, Mortensen, & Rasmussen, ; Majlesi, , this issue; Mondada, ) of the verbal and other embodied actions through which attention is observably mobilized and a shared attention focus is reached. With such an approach, which is agnostic toward any exogenous theory of learning, it is possible to describe the displays of socially distributed cognition that participants make available to each other (and thus to analysts) in and through talk‐in‐interaction.…”

Epistemological Reorientations and L2 Interactional Settings: A Postscript to the Special Issue

“…This becomes quite clear in the articles. The two articles on classroom analysis (Kunitz, , this issue; Majlesi, , this issue) show very detailed distributed and locally accomplished work of students and teachers with respect to formal aspects of the target language. Kunitz discusses student peer work and the constitution of L2 material as learning objects; Majlesi examines teacher‐led plenary interaction and L2 material as teaching objects.…”

“…Majlesi's contribution advances this work by expanding the phenomenon under analysis from talk to the full range of multisemiotic practices. For this project he builds on Goodwin's () concept of ‘professional vision,’ showing how the teacher “provides a landscape of semiotic resources for the student to understand” (Majlesi, , this issue, p. 18), turns “the grammatical exercise” into a “corrective feedback sequence,” and expands it into “definition talk” (Kääntä, Kasper, & Piirainen–Marsh, ; (Majlesi, , this issue, p. 15). Majlesi describes the visual and audible resources that teachers use in focusing on and explaining grammar in the classroom and documents the tight interplay of visual and verbal resources.…”

“…Through the activity of ‘landmarking,’ students are instructed to see the focal problem in specific ways. Landmarking transforms the grammatical item into an ‘object of knowing,’ making it “publicly available for the language learner” (Majlesi, , this issue, p. 13), by giving it a visual form that then can be handled through other actions (e.g., pointing, underlining, numbering, labeling, etc.). Majlesi's study explicates how knowledge of particular structures in Swedish grammar is ‘installed’ as the teachers’ and students’ coordinated accomplishment.…”