Breaking in is hard to do: how students negotiate classroom activity shifts

Abstract

Using conversation‐analytic methods, this paper examines teacher‐initiated activity transitions to highlight how students in the second‐language (L2) classroom systematically contest shifts. These video‐recorded interactions come from an advanced‐level adult English‐as‐a‐second‐language classroom, and multi‐modal analysis is utilised to demonstrate how L2 students and their teacher negotiate the boundaries of activities in the classroom. Shifts both between and within activities are analysed to underscore the different interactional work required of students to challenge shifts in these different sequential environments. Students were found to take strategic advantage of the incremental nature of teacher‐initiated activity shifts in order to redirect talk back to a prior topic. Students demonstrate control over talk by creating ‘wiggle room’ at activity transitions, and the teacher’s sanction of these student‐initiated turns also provides them with additional interactional space; the contributions of both students and teacher are thus argued to demonstrate the jointly negotiated nature of talk in the L2 classroom.

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