Social Interaction and L2 Classroom Discourse

Abstract

Second language (L2) classroom discourse (CD) refers to the interactional practices employed in teaching language in instructed learning contexts. Since language is both the medium and the content, the teacher plays a central role in the L2 classroom context (Walsh, 2006). Specifically, the teacher uses language to provide comprehensible input, model appropriate pragmatic competence, and effectively facilitate student participation. In his book, Olcay Sert claims it is possible to understand the pedagogical and epistemic phenomena of L2 classroom interaction by applying micro-analytic research methods; therefore, he sets out to familiarize readers with Conversation Analysis (CA) and show its usefulness in studying L2 classroom discourse. This is done by first providing an overview of the framework, followed by utilizing it to analyze his data set of 16 hours of video-recordings from two English language classrooms in Luxembourg.