Teacher response pursuits in whole class post-task discussions

Abstract

This paper explores teacher elicitation practices following a perceived absence of a response to an initial inquiry. Specifically, we focus on whole class post-task discussions where a teacher pursues responses in post-first position following students’ non-uptake, and thus makes her orientation toward the expectation of a response publicly available. The data for this study come from 30 h of video-recorded classroom interactions in an English as a medium of instruction university in Turkey. Using Conversation Analysis, this study demonstrates that when confronted with a non-response to her initial elicitation in whole class interaction, in addition to drawing on interactional resources (e.g., designedly incomplete utterances, increments) that have been described in earlier research on response pursuits, the teacher uses two additional strategies to secure an answer: (1) modeling a response by personalizing the task, and (2) drawing on a range of multimodal resources (i.e., pedagogical artifact, embodied behavior, vocalization) to elicit engagement. The study particularly focuses on how the teacher employs multimodal tools to promote engagement and to further the progress of the ongoing pedagogical activity (i.e., reflective discussions) when a response is due but not provided. The findings have implications for understanding the design and delivery of teacher response pursuits, and thus contribute to our understanding of turn allocation practices during the whole class sharing phase in content classrooms.