Pedagogical artifacts in teacher-initiated response pursuits: a conversation analytic study of interaction in the French foreign language classroom

Using Conversation Analysis (CA), this dissertation explores teachers' use of two pedagogical artifacts, specifically chalkboards and PowerPoint slides, in French foreign language classrooms. Based on a corpus of 29 hours of university-level French foreign language classes, the analyses provide an emic account of how teachers employ pedagogical artifacts in the course of teacher-initiated response pursuits situated in the sequential context of the triadic dialogue. The analyses investigate whether and how teachers and students orient to these artifacts as interactionally relevant resources for interaction and instruction. Chapter 1 (Introduction) discusses the aims and relevance of the present study and presents the methodological framework of CA within which the study was conducted. It also describes the CA procedures used to collect and analyze the data. Chapter 2 (Literature Review) reviews CA studies of everyday and institutional interaction with a focus on response pursuits, the sequential context of the triadic dialogue, multimodality, and pedagogical artifacts in classroom interaction. The first analytical chapter of this dissertation (Chapter 3) examines how teachers construct and manage the display of student responses to teacher questions upon chalkboards and PowerPoint slides. The analyses also illustrate how teachers invoke the relevance of these pedagogical artifacts through their embodied actions and their verbal turns-at-talk. They show how teachers' physical orientations to the chalkboard, or to the keyboard in cases of PowerPoint use, shift in response to the pedagogical fittedness of students' second turn responses. These practices contribute to the assessment of student responses and either mark their suitability, or prompt students to self-correct errors in their responses. The second analytical chapter of this dissertation (Chapter 4) examines teachers' pointing and writing gestures that, when held and retracted, invoke the relevance of pedagogical artifacts in teacher-initiated response pursuits. The analyses indicate that verbal and embodied orientations to pedagogical artifacts also constitute resources available to teachers for allocating turns to students and eliciting their production of pedagogically relevant forms. Overall, the analyses of Chapters 3 and 4 illustrate the interactional relevance of pedagogical artifacts for both teachers and students as participants of classroom interaction. Chapter 5 (Conclusion) summarizes the findings of the dissertation and discusses the resulting methodological and pedagogical implications. This chapter discusses the demonstrable importance of pedagogical artifacts for maintaining intersubjectivity, negotiating participatory roles, and accomplishing instructional objectives in teacher-initiated pursuits of student responses in the foreign language classroom. This chapter also discusses and compares the sequential environments in which chalkboards and PowerPoint slides are deployed. The chapter further provides insights into the different ways in which these pedagogical artifacts influence the unfolding of discourse, and thus student participation, in the context of foreign language classroom interaction