The environment of a bilingual classroom as an interactional resource

Abstract

Both schoolscape studies and recent conversation analytic (CA) research on classroom interaction have demonstrated that material artefacts such as images, texts and different kinds of objects found in classrooms have a significant role in educational practice. This article turns the spotlight on social action within a bilingual classroom, exploring how participants visibly orient to the surrounding material environment during instructional interaction. The data consist of video-recorded lessons from secondary-level education. A multimodal conversation analytic investigation focuses on interactions during which participants attend to classroom texts and semiotic objects in ways that foreground language and content-related ideologies. Sequential analyses of selected data extracts aim to show the occasioned nature of classroom objects and some ways in which instructional practices both draw on and modify the already existing visual and textual environment. To conclude, the article reflects on the use of an interactional research approach in schoolscape studies.