Paul Seedhouse: the interactional architecture of the language classroom: a conversation analysis perspective. Blackwell, 2005

This monograph brings together work from Seedhouse's doctoral thesis and various journal articles, which together constitute an original contribution to our understanding of interaction in language classrooms. In using the tools of ethnomethodological conversation analysis (CA) to analyse classroom discourse as institutional interaction, Seedhouse has been able to throw critical light on a number of issues in communicative language teaching, such as the feasibility or desirability of replicating ‘ordinary conversation’ as part of a language lesson, the quality of learner–learner task-based interaction, and the common teacher strategy of avoiding direct negative evaluation when repairing learner utterances