Whole‐Class Co‐Construction in a High School Spanish Classroom: A Conversation Analytic Perspective

Abstract

This study demonstrates how conversation analysis can illuminate the interactional practices through which the Present-Attention-Co-construction-Extension (PACE) approach to grammar instruction, which involves a guided, inductive coconstruction of grammar rules with learners, is realized in the classroom. The data consist of three whole-class Co-construction discussions that occurred in three high school Spanish lessons on the pronoun se in non-agentive constructions. We trace how the discussion unfolded and find that the key locus for the Co-construction process was the work done by the teacher in the third turns of IRE sequences, and in particular, the withholding of explicit teacher assessment. We examine how the students treated and responded to such teacher third turns and how these sequences exhibited various interactional outcomes, such as a cyclical pattern of discourse, and misalignment of teacher and student focus. We consider the implications for a guided induction approach.

Process and Product in ISLA Research: Courage, Commitment, and Tolerance for Ambiguity

“…Wagner and Park's (2022) study shines the spotlight on the teacher as she managed the co‐construction of the target grammar rules. This was the essential difference between the deductive and PACE pedagogical treatments.…”

“…Wagner and Park examined the relationship between speaker turns in the whole‐class discussions using the tools of conversation analysis (CA). This type of analysis entails the detailed observation of “the moment‐by‐moment unfolding of talk” (Wagner & Park, 2022, p. 232). Their focus was specifically on the teacher's third turn in the well‐known Initiation‐Response‐Feedback (IRF) sequence (e.g., Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975).…”

“…The process studies by Wagner and Park (2022) and by Toth and Gil‐Berrio (2022) deal with language learning as a social activity. With Mattson‐Prieto and Showstack's (2022) study of peer interaction, the analytic lens zooms out to the wider social sphere of ideology and stance‐taking.…”

“…The second implication from the studies is that co‐construction cannot be applied “off‐the‐shelf” as described in a textbook, but deductive explanations can be. Wagner and Park's (2022) CA analysis reveals some of the difficulties of the instructional conversations about Spanish se . The teacher's questions and responses to the students' answers are likely to have put great demands on her ability to monitor the unfolding discourse, address diverse learners' needs for clarification, and maintain focus on the endpoint in mind.…”

“…Although the two product-oriented studies can inform us about the relative effects of deduction vs. guided induction, the process-oriented studies (Table 1) illuminate what happened in the black box. As Table 1 shows, most of the process-oriented studies focused on the data from Walton School; two studies compared the PACE and the Deductive groups at that school (Azkarai et al, 2022;Toth & Gil-Berrio, 2022) and three focused on data from the PACE class only (Davin & Kushki, 2022;Mattson-Prieto & Showstack, 2022;Wagner & Park, 2022). The researchers also varied with regard to their use of quantitative or qualitative methods.…”