Shayan Heidari
Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz, Iran
Conversation Analysis (CA) is an approach to the study of talk-in-interaction which empirically investigates the conversationalists’ understanding of the ongoing talk evident in the design of their turns at talk. Recently, there has been a growing number of studies of second language (L2) instructional settings that employ CA to describe the resources and practices students and teachers use to accomplish L2 learning (e.g., Jakonen & Morton, 2013; Kääntä, 2014). These studies view L2 learning and teaching as social actions which are co-constructed and displayed in classroom interactions and cover a range of interactional practices such as turn-taking, correction initiation, knowledge claims, and the management of epistemic relationships. Drawing on CA perspective and the epistemics framework (Heritage, 2012), the present study investigates how L2 teachers make use of known-answer questions in the course of talk-in-interaction in L2 classrooms. The data for this study come from video recordings of eight sessions of classroom interaction in two beginner EFL classes in a language learning institute in Iran. The analysis of the data through CA revealed that asking known-answer questions by the L2 teacher represents an interactional resource through which instructional sequences are managed and L2 activities are maintained. Furthermore, the similarities and differences between the known-answer questions asked by L2 teachers of students and those asked by the adults of children were discussed. The results of the study contribute to a better understanding of the social organization of L2 classroom talk.
The above abstract is a part of the article which was accepted at The Second International Conference on Current Issues of Languages, Dialects and Linguistics (WWW.TLLL.IR), 1-2 February 2018, Ahwaz.
