Keywords

Introduction

It has been over three decades since the official foray of conversation analysis (CA) into the field of English language teaching (ELT) (e.g., Kasper 2006; Markee 2000; Wong 1984). As a theory of and approach to studying social interaction, CA was developed by sociologists Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson in the 1960s as a radical departure from traditional methods of sociological inquiry (see Clift 2016 for the latest introduction to CA). Doing conversation analysis involves (1) collecting audio- and video-recorded data from naturally occurring interaction as opposed to interviews, field notes, native intuitions, and experimental designs; (2) transcribing these recordings using notations that capture a full range of interactional details such as volume, pitch, pace, intonation, overlap, inbreath, smiley voice, the length of silence, as well as nonverbal conduct; and (3) conducting line-by-line analyses of these transcripts along with their original recordings guided by the question of why that now? (e.g., why a particular bit of talk or conduct is produced in that particular way at that particular time?) (Schegloff and Sacks 1973). The goal is to locate evidence of tacit methods of social interaction in the details of participant conduct as oriented to by the participants themselves. It is not, as Gardner (2008) explicates, to “apply ‘expert-observer’ categories on the data, nor to be driven by some model of conversation, or my past findings” (p. 230).

Given its specialty in illuminating the nature of social interaction, the relevance of CA to language teaching seems obvious. After all, helping learners develop the ability to conduct social interaction or communicate in a second language is a central goal in language teaching. Not surprisingly, the crossover between CA and applied linguistics has generated a growing body of promising scholarship, a substantial amount of which has been devoted to a reconceptualization of learning in the CA for SLA (second language acquisition) movement. Some well-rehearsed debates around whether CA can usefully contribute to answering questions of language learning can be found in a series of special issues of The Modern Language Journal (see 1997–1998, 2004, and 2007). In particular, CA work has been productive in (1) describing the local interactional process by which learning as a process is negotiated (i.e., learning opportunities) (Kim 2012) or (2) documenting learning as a product in the short term (Markee 2008) or over a longer period of time (Hellermann 2008; Waring 2013a).

The focus of this chapter, however, is on the contribution of CA to language teaching and, more specifically, the “what” and “how” of English language teaching. As such, important work on CA and language learning has been excluded from the ensuing discussion, along with analyses of ELT (English language teaching) classroom interaction without a specific focus on teacher practices (e.g., studies on learner conduct) as well as those on the teaching of languages other than English. My focus is, instead, calibrated to highlight two ways in which conversation analysis (CA) research can contribute to the field of ELT. First, as will be shown, by providing stunning specificities of a range of interactional practices in turn-taking, sequencing, overall structuring, and repair, CA research is at the forefront of delineating at least part of what is there to be taught. Second, classroom CA research in ELT has produced fine-grained portrayals of teacher practices that provide powerful answers to the question of how English language teaching is done in situ.

CA and the What of ELT

As noted above, much of language teaching involves helping learners develop their competence to interact in the second language (L2), for which understanding the nature of such competence – an important component of the “what” of ELT – is a prerequisite. As will be shown, CA scholars have played a pivotal role in (1) critiquing the “what” of ELT as represented in textbooks, (2) specifying the “what” of ELT along with teaching activities, and, finally, (3) conceptualizing the “what” of ELT as a set of interactional practices.

Critiquing the “What” of ELT

Typically, ELT textbook writers would rely on intuitions to determine what the competence to interact in a second language entails. That such intuitions are not always reliable was effectively demonstrated in Wong (2002, 2007), where she evaluates telephone conversations in ELT textbooks for their portrayals of openings and closings against the backdrop of CA findings on real-life telephone conversations (also see Grant and Starks 2001). In a similar vein, after examining some of the most widely used commercial ELT textbook at the time, Gardner (2000) notes “a widespread neglect of the kinds of things people do as responses—the second pair parts—such as acknowledging, agreeing, or disagreeing” (p. 40). Also seeking to gauge the authenticity of ELT textbook conversations based on CA findings, Bernsten (2002) finds that pre-sequences (e.g., What are you doing tonight? as a pre-invitation to the actual invitation of Wanna go to a movie? should the answer to the question turns out to be positive), the explicit teaching of which was largely absent, rarely occurred and were often inadequately represented even when they did occur as implicit models. Suffice it to say that the gap between how people supposedly communicate as captured in ELT materials and how they actually communicate based on CA findings is a noticeable one and can be detrimental to ensuring that the right learning objects are being presented in the ELT classroom. Citing CA as one of the four approaches with findings that have influenced the language descriptions in published ELT materials, however, Gilmore (2015) laments the weakness of such influence given the various practical challenges.

Specifying the “What” of ELT

Aside from using CA findings as a basis for critiquing ELT texts for failing to accurately represent the “what” of ELT, some have gone a step further by specifying the “what” with CA findings (Barraja-Rohan 2011; Huth and Taleghani-Nikazm 2006). Gardner (2000) cites Beyond Talk (Barraja-Rohan and Pritchard 1997; now available at https://eslandcateaching.wordpress.com/beyond-talk/) as an “innovative set of materials” (p. 42) based on video recordings and transcripts of unscripted natural conversations designed to teach the skills of conducting real-life conversations through an inductive approach based on CA findings. Your Turn at Talk is another CA-based booklet developed by Don Carroll (now available on the LANSI Resources page at www.tc.edu/lansi) to teach conversation skills. Also available as individual articles are discussions on the teaching of specific CA-based interactional practices such as taking turns (Carroll 2011a), doing disagreements (Carroll 2011b; Cheng 2016), making requests (Carroll 2012), conducting telephone openings and closings (Wong 2011a, b), producing responses (Carroll 2016a; Olsher 2011a, b), and angling for an answer (Carroll 2016b). Finally, Wong and Waring (2010) include suggestions of a series of awareness-raising and practicing activities aimed at teaching specific interactional practices based on classic CA findings.

To a lesser extent, CA also contributes to specifying the “what” of ELT in yet another way, i.e., by specifying what not to teach. In a revealing study of vowel-marking (adding vowels to word final consonants) among Japanese learners of English, Carroll (2005) shows how this typical Japanese “error” is in fact deployed by the participants as a resource for managing word search and multiunit turns. Indeed, viewing L2 conversations as an exhibit of achievement rather than deficiencies constitutes the theme in Gardner and Wagner’s (2004) edited volume that brings together a series of CA studies showing second language conversations as normal conversations, where errors and mistakes are rarely consequential, and where L2 users exhibit great sophistication and versatility in managing various interactional contingencies. This reconceptualized view of L2 competencies can ultimately push us to readjust the focus of our pedagogical targets. In Carroll’s (2005) words, ESL teachers “intent on ridding their Japanese students of vowel-marking” should “forget pronunciation drills and ridicule, and instead concentrate on training students to use interactionally equivalent conversational micro-practices” (p. 233). For the latest discussion on the problems and possibilities of teaching IC from a CA perspective, see Waring (2018).

Conceptualizing the “What” of ELT

Developing roughly in tandem with the various empirical attempts at shaping ELT materials and classroom practices with CA insights, the notion of interactional competence (IC) (e.g., Kramsch 1986; Hall 1999; Markee 2000; Young 2011) as a theoretical construct that conceptualizes what needs to be taught in the realm of spoken interaction in ELT has been gaining growing currency in the applied linguistics literature (Hall et al. 2011; Pekarek Doehler and Berger 2016; Salaberry and Kunitz, forthcoming; for a recent discussion on IC, see 2018 Classroom Discourse special issue). But what exactly constitutes such competence? If at the core of interactional competence is one’s ability to participate in interactions, it should not be surprising that conversation analysis is the obvious candidate to provide the needed specificities of such competence. After all, the goal of conversation analysis is to discover and describe the various practices participants deploy in interactions, and these practices have been usefully encapsulated in a model of interactional practices in Wong and Waring (2010), which synthesizes decades of accumulative and robust conversation analysis findings on the nature of ordinary conversations with regard to turn-taking, sequencing, overall structuring, and repair (see Fig. 1).

Fig. 1
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Model of interactional practices (Wong and Waring 2010)

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Turn-taking practices constitute the foundation of social interaction. In order to participate in any interaction, one must learn when and how to construct a turn, take a turn, and yield a turn. This would involve understanding, for example, that the basic unit of a turn or TCU (turn construction unit) can be as small as a lexical item rather than a full sentence, that speaker transitions occur not after someone stops talking but near the end of each TCU, and that to speak past the initial TCU would take delicate interactional work.

People take turns to get things done, or in CA terms, to perform actions, such as gloating, fishing, advising, or storytelling, or, to put simply, to engage in sequencing practices – the methods through which actions are implemented. The action of responding to a compliment in American English, for example, can be implemented through such methods as “praise downgrade” (e.g., Not very solid through, in response to Good shot!) or “reference shift” (e.g., So are you in response to You’re looking good) (Pomerantz 1978). Disagreement, on the other hand, is typically produced as a “dispreferred” action with delay, mitigation, and accounts (Pomerantz 1984). Teaching learners how to disagree with such markers, for example, would be an important component of producing an interactionally competent English language learner.

The ability to take part in conversation also requires an understanding of overall structuring practices such as opening or ending a conversation. The various elements of phone openings (e.g., summon-answer, identification-recognition, greeting), for example, may seem notoriously simple but intimidating to navigate for novice speakers. Being able to understand that a simple token such as okay may be uttered as a pre-closing can go a long way toward preempting awkward situations such as overstaying one’s welcome.

Finally, any self-organizing system will have a repair mechanism – one designed to manage the breakdown of operations within the system. In social interaction, we engage in repair practices during moments when we have trouble with speaking, hearing, or understanding. Each repair practice can involve “self” or “other” depending on whose talk is being repaired and who is doing the repairing. Space precludes any in-depth treatment of the full array of intricacies but suffice it to say that doing repair is a profoundly interactional and sequential endeavor – one that cannot be reduced to a list of “useful expressions” such as Pardon? or Could you please say that again?

In sum, CA has contributed to the “what” of ELT by examining its representation in the textbooks and offering alternatives of such representations both specifically and conceptually. If the development of interactional competence constitutes the goal of ELT at least in the realm of spoken interaction, it behooves us to place the interactional practices of turn-taking, sequencing, overall structuring, and repair at the center of our curriculum.

CA and the How of ELT

Besides contributing to understanding the what of ELT by specifying the construct of interactional competence, CA also offers revealing insights into how language teaching is done – the how of ELT through detailed portrayals of the “amazingly complex and demanding interactional and pedagogical work in the classroom” (Seedhouse 2004, p. 265). Such complex demands are in part captured in the construct of classroom interactional competence (CIC) (Walsh 2006) – the ability to use interaction as a tool to mediate and assist learning but most centrally featured in the notion of interactional competence for teaching (ICT) proposed by Hall and Johnson (2014). In a more recent iteration, Hall (in press) refers to L2 teaching as “specialized professional work” that requires “a range of complex repertoires” comprised of “a wide array of multilingual, multimodal semiotic resources … for taking action.” Such specialized professional work is demonstrated, for example, in Sert’s (2015) book-length account of how multimodal and multilingual resources are integral to a variety of interactional and pedagogical practices in ELT classrooms. It also embodies the pedagogical principles of competence, complexity, and contingency in Waring’s (2016) CA-based attempt to theorize pedagogical interaction more broadly. Roughly, ELT classroom discourse studies conducted in the CA framework have produced careful documentations of teacher practices in managing participation and building understanding. Although the two are by no means mutually exclusive, they are treated as separate categories below for ease of presentation.

Managing Participation

An important component of teacher expertise involves managing who gets to talk when and for how long. Given the sociocultural framework wherein participation becomes symbiotic with learning (Young and Miller 2004), some CA work has been devoted to describing teacher practices that promote or curtail participation. Nguyen (2007) shows how one teacher in an ESOL grammar class successfully engages students’ co-participation in creating and maintaining rapport. Kääntä (2012) describes “embodied allocation” as a teacher practice for silently (for the most part) selecting the next speaker through gaze, head nods, and pointing gestures. When such embodied allocation is occasionally produced in tandem with talk, as Kääntä notes, it momentarily renders possible a “division of labor” between talk and embodiment. In primary school English classes in Japan, Hosoda and Aline (2013) find that the preference for a selected student to respond is prioritized over that preference for progressivity. Identify shift, as shown in Richards (2006), is one resource for inspiring greater learner participation, where a great deal of unsolicited learner participation emerges when the participants move out of the situated identities of teacher and student. By examining an EFL classroom with young learners in Taiwan, Li and Seedhouse (2010) demonstrate that the story-based, as opposed to standard lessons, allows for a broader variety of interaction patterns, greater frequency of learner initiations, and a wider range of language functions. Using data from two English language classes in China, Walsh and Li (2013) show how space for learning may be created through increased wait time, extended learners turns, and increased planning time. In Waring (2014), the ESL teachers broaden participation by (1) passing the first respondent or by (2) selecting an alternative category of speakers. Finally, Khatib and Miri (2016) explore how teacher talk can cultivate multivocality in an ELT classroom and show that, after attending a critical pedagogy informed teacher education program, the teacher becomes more capable of fostering multivocality by extending wait time, delaying error correction, using referential questions, and so on.

Conversely, conversation analysis work has also showcased how certain teacher practices can curtail learner participation. Markee (1995) shows that counter-questions used by teachers during group work can turn communication-oriented tasks into teacher-fronted activities. Explicit positive assessment (EPA) such as very good and routine understanding-checking practices such as Any questions? have also be found to carry the potential of blocking participation (Waring 2008, 2012a). Waring (2009) shows that a chain of IRFs serves to suppress learner questions that could have otherwise been raised without substantial delay. By examining how a novice teacher deals with unexpected learner contributions, Fagan (2012) finds that the teacher curtails participation by glossing over learner contribution and assuming the role of information provider. In some cases, however, curtailing becomes necessary for ensuring even participation and preventing someone like “Stacy” in Waring (2013b) for negotiating for more than the fair share of the floor, where such curtailing can be implemented through sequential deletion and minimal acknowledgement+redirection. Finally, Yataganbaba and Yıldırım (2016) show how teachers’ interruptions and limited wait-time practices affect learner participation and learning opportunities in EFL young learner classrooms.

The management of participation, however, is not always amenable to such clear categorization as “promoting” or “curtailing.” Reddington (2018) calls attention to the “participation paradox,” or the necessity of engaging in and disengaging from interactions with individual students to promote extended as well as even participation. In other words, in the reality of second-by-second classroom interactions, promoting the participation of some can mean curtailing the participation of others, and striking a delicate balance between attending to the individual and the larger group is an important component of teacher expertise. Reddington (2018) shows how the teacher in an adult ELT classroom (1) engages participation through the practices of gearing up for next speakers and embodying active listenership and (2) stops participation through a combination of practices for closing and connecting contributions. Balancing the participation between the individual and the group is also a theme in Waring and Carpenter’s (forthcoming) study on an ESL teacher’s use of gaze shifts upon accepting student response to (1) call attention to what needs to be treated as important information relevant to the entire class and (2) shift back into a wider participation framework where the class as a collective becomes the addressed rather than the unaddressed recipient. Similarly, based on video recordings of 20 English, French, Science, and Social Studies lessons at an international secondary school with a bilingual educational profile in Sweden, St. John and Cromdal (2016) show how, by engaging their gaze and body, the teachers “exploit the instructional benefit” of student questions through “dual addressivity” as they respond to these question in such a way that “meet both individual and collective accountabilities” (p. 252). The challenge of managing participation in the ELT classroom also becomes salient when competing voices emerge in response to teachers’ elicitations, where whose voice gets ratified is integral to building a culture of participation. Based on 30-h videotaped data from nine adult classrooms teaching English as a second language, Waring (2013c) shows how the teachers manage the competing voices by honoring the emergent (i.e., louder vs. softer voice) or imposed (i.e., nominated vs. un-nominated) hierarchy of the responses as they are produced, using selective attending or sequential attending.

Finally, the management of participation can become particularly delicate during certain “unforeseen” or “disruptive” moments. In an unusual study on teacher self-talk based on data from upper level ESL courses, Hall and Smotrova (2013) offer a detailed analysis of how, during unplanned moments such as technical difficulties, the teachers’ self-talk succeeds in keeping students’ focus on the instructional task and receiving self-initiated empathetic responses from the students. Teachers also face the routine task of working with various kinds of student contributions that initiate a shift from the current pedagogical trajectory, and how to strike a balance between maintaining control on the one hand and encouraging student participation on the other constitutes an important pedagogical challenge. Based on videotaped data from the adult ESL classroom, Waring et al. (2016) describe two teacher practices – ironic teasing and invoking learning orientation – for responding to such student-initiated departures as initiating a side conversation, pointing out a teacher mistake, offering a response that undermines a teacher question, or volunteering responses when the teacher is seeking contributions from someone else. Engaging these practices, as the authors show, allows the teachers to efficiently restore order, further their agendas, and promote student participation and learning opportunities.

In sum, the ELT classroom CA literature to date contributes to an empirically based understanding of how participation in the ELT classroom may be solicited, maintained, promoted, or curtailed and how the various challenges inherent to this work may be dealt with.

Building Understanding

A sizable body of CA studies conducted in the ELT classroom has been devoted to teacher practices of what may be glossed as “building understanding” – understandings of how the target language works (e.g., pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, what is desirable or inappropriate). To that end, the teachers employ (1) initiating actions such as giving instructions or doing instructing of specific aspects of language (e.g., vocabulary or pronunciation) and, most notably, (2) responsive actions as they work with learner contributions.

Giving Instructions and Doing Instructing

Teachers’ initiating activities in building understanding largely consist of directing and informing – what is traditionally viewed as “teaching.” Seedhouse (2008) shows what effective and ineffective instruction looks like though a CA analysis and articulates how that understanding may be utilized in ELT teacher training. Markee (2015) analyzes two instruction-giving sequences in two ELT classrooms in the UK and the USA, respectively, and finds that experienced teachers follow a similar structure of delivery at the beginning of lessons (e.g., offering information on grouping, resources, tasks, procedures, timing, etc.) and utilizing a particular range of grammatical resources (e.g., unmodulated imperatives).

The work of building understanding becomes more central in cases where the teaching of specific aspects of language is directly engaged. Nguyen (2016) demonstrates how one teacher effectively uses talk, body, and material artifacts to teach pronunciation in an ESL class in an intensive English program. The teaching of grammar is the focus of two classrooms in another intensive English program, where the teachers used abstract deictic gestures to contrast tenses and metaphoric gestures to represent aspectual concepts (Matsumoto and Dobs 2017). Waring and Yu (2016) detail how engaging life outside the classroom becomes a resource for doing conversation and learning vocabulary in adult ESL classes. In fact, of the different aspects of language, the teaching of vocabulary seems to have received the most attention in CA studies. Lazaraton (2004) finds that an ESL teacher engages iconic, metaphoric, and kinetographic gestures during unplanned vocabulary explanation while relying more on verbal utterances during planned vocabulary explanation, demonstrating that gestures can be a helpful tool for those on-the-spot explanations that are not anticipated by the teacher. Waring et al. (2013a) explore how in the adult ESL classroom unplanned issues of vocabulary get problematized in situ either unilaterally or bilaterally. In another study that focuses on a co-taught class, the authors show how the unplanned vocabulary items may be explained with either the analytic or the animated approach (Waring et al. 2013b). While the former engages predominantly verbal and textual resources, the latter activates an ensemble of multimodal means such as gestures, environmentally couple gestures, and scene enactment. Similar findings were documented in Morton’s (2015) study based on a corpus of L2 secondary content and language integrated learning (CLIL), where vocabulary explanation tends to be done with a combination of the “animated” and “analytic” formats, and the work of contextualization is accomplished with the content of the class without recourse to external sources.

Teachers also attempt to build understanding by using, for example, a particular type of yes-no question to convey a critical stance in assessment relevant environments, where such critique-implicative questions may serve as a pedagogical resource for providing negative evidence that guides learners toward noticing what is problematic in a range of contexts, including but not limited to learner talk, teacher talk, or what is presented in the textbook (Waring 2012b). The author cautions, however, that while under certain circumstances, these questions may strike the perfect balance of offering help without any overt imposition, they do not appear to be conducive to creating an environment that promotes open meaning negotiation after all.

Finally, building understanding can become particularly challenging in cases where the teacher encounters unforeseen difficulties in explaining a certain language concept or rule. Boblett (2018) shows how such difficulties are managed by an experienced teacher in an adult ESL classroom through exploratory talk, which contains a five-stage sequential structure supported and managed by multimodal means as the teacher calls for attention, states the problem, enters a thinking zone, experiments with ideas and alternatives, and reaches resolution.

Working with Learner Contributions

Aside from giving instructions and doing instructing, an important skill of building understanding entails contingent management of learner contributions. In their study on the interactional management of claims of insufficient knowledge, Sert and Walsh (2013) describe how embodied vocabulary explanations and designedly incomplete utterances (Koshik 2002) may be deployed by the teacher to stimulate learner engagement. Sert (2017) also demonstrates how learner initiatives and emergent knowledge gaps may be successfully handled via practices such as embedded correction, embodied repair, and embodied explanations in EFL classes at a secondary school in Turkey.

Much of the work with learner contributions resides in the F slot of the IRF (initiation-response-feedback) sequence. Using data from various ELT classroom contexts, Park (2014) shows how third-turn repeats are used in meaning and fluency contexts to prompt further talk and in form-and-accuracy contexts to confirm the correctness of the response. In her study on the teacher’s deployment of “oh” in known-answer question sequences in responding to student’s answers in Japanese primary school ELT classrooms, Hosoda (2016) shows how the particle is used while reinforcing positive assessments, acting out dialogues with students, and responding to unexpected learner responses. Fagan (2014) describes three practices used by one experienced ESL teacher to systematically and contingently construct positive feedback: giving positive assessment, inviting peer assessment, and implying positive assessments. Negative assessment, on the other hand, is done by foregrounding achievement or offering personal appreciation before correction (Fagan 2015). Finally, Park (2015) focuses specifically on teacher repair for lower-literate adults, where the teacher orients her repair to the learners’ state of literacy by offering carefully tailored paralinguistic input.

Interactional work in the F slot is not restricted to giving positive or negative feedback but involves, crucially, shaping leaner contributions toward a desired outcome. Lee (2006) describes how the ESL teacher guides the students toward the correct answer through a series of contingently and purposefully developed display questions and, in particular, uses yes-no questions after learner responses to “pull into view interpretative resources that are already in the room for students to recognize” (Lee 2008, p. 237). Teachers can also engage in parsing (i.e., breaking one item into smaller pieces), intimating an answer (Lee 2007), scaffolding, paraphrasing, reiterating (Walsh and Li 2013), translating, extending, clarifying, summarizing, and so on (Can Daşkın 2015).

Such careful shaping work is often absent in actual practice. In considering a range of methods deployed by teachers in the adult ESL classroom to “promote self-discovery” when dealing with learner errors, Waring (2015) describes two issues that can compromise the efficacy of these practices: (1) not tailoring the practice to learner understandings in situ and (2) prioritizing what over why (driven by a single focus on correct answers). The author argues that language instructors need to be sensitized to the delicate balance between promoting self-discovery and providing interactionally contingent help. Cancino (2015) also shows, based on data from the Chilean EFL setting, that the success of techniques such as scaffolding and back-channel feedback depends on “whether the teacher interprets the local intricacies of the unfolding interaction in context-sensitive ways,” and “poor calibration” of these techniques “were found to hinder opportunities for learning” (p. 127).

Finally, rather than directly shaping learner contributions, teachers can repair their own “failed” questions, as shown in Okada’s (2010) study on EFL classroom in Japan, by modifying the failed question in the target language, code-switching into L1, and offering candidate response to the failed question. In the case of learner difficulty as evidenced in their embodied actions in responding to teacher elicitations, the teachers in Sert’s (2013) study on two ELT classrooms in Luxembourg employ the practice of epistemic status check (ESC) to move the activity forward.

In sum, in addition to managing participation, an important component of teacher expertise entails helping learners build new understandings of various aspects of the language. Such work, as revealed in CA studies on ELT classroom discourse, involves a complex array of professional know-hows in the giving of instructions and deployment of instructing as well as the contingent management of learner initiatives and responses (also see King (2018) on how such work may be jointly accomplished in a co-teaching context). In other words, CA’s account of English language teaching offers a fine-grained depiction of teacher conduct in the moment-by-moment unfolding of classroom reality.

Discussion and Conclusion

Clearly, CA has much to offer by way of specifying or even reconceptualizing at least partially what needs to be taught and how such teaching could be done in the ELT classroom. Various endeavors have been made since the mid-1980s to spotlight the discrepancies between textbook dialogues and real-life interactions and to experiment with utilizing CA-based materials in actual classroom teaching. These rather compelling, but largely disparate, efforts culminated in Wong and Waring’s (2010) book-length proposal that encapsulates decades of CA findings on social interaction into a model of interactional practices and offers suggestions for how such CA-based understanding of interaction may serve as a basis for actual classroom teaching through a range of awareness-raising and practicing activities.

What Wong and Waring (2010) essentially suggests is a different way of teaching speaking – one that requires large-scale curriculum innovation and pedagogical restructuring. For this radical shift to materialize in the reality of ELT classrooms is a huge undertaking that is unlikely to be accomplished in a short period of time. First, translating the systematic understanding of what needs to be taught into actual classroom teaching would require more than a few suggested activities. The textbook series that systematically transforms the model of interactional practices into teachable ELT materials for both adults and children is yet to be written. Important efforts have been made in this regard (e.g., Beyond Talk, Your Turn at Talk), but none seems to have made it into the mainstream ELT textbook market. A huge obstacle is also the lack of familiarity with CA among language teachers (Don Carroll, 17 Sept 2017, personal communication), and this obstacle will remain daunting until CA training becomes an integral component in graduate programs of TESOL and applied linguistics. Finally, key to accomplishing this radical shift is also institutional support. A successful example can be found at the Center for Language and Intercultural Communication (CLIC) at Rice University (http://clicmaterials.rice.edu/course-materials/), where teachers of various foreign languages receive systematic training in CA and are encouraged to develop innovative CA-based materials for their own classes.

It is important to note that teaching interactional practices does not mean abandoning the teaching of pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. Without these linguistic resources, turn-taking, sequencing, overall structuring, and repair would be nonexistent. In her 2017 plenary address delivered at the American Association for Applied Linguistics Annual Conference, for example, Pekarek Doehler posits that the development of interactional competence entails increasing diversification and efficiency in the deployment of methods for action (e.g., doing a request) and grammar-for-interaction (also see Pekarek Doehler and Berger 2016). Grammar, in other words, is integral to one’s development of interactional competence. Thus, how best to integrate the traditional focus of language teaching into the teaching of interactional practices constitutes an important challenge. Some recent effort in applying CA findings to the teaching and testing of interactional competence in earlier instruction to learners with limited linguistic resources can be found in Salaberry and Kunitz’s (forthcoming) edited volume.

The “how” of teaching, as revealed in CA analyses of ELT classroom interaction, consists of complex professional work that goes beyond such macro tasks as lesson planning or activity design and such micro activities as informing, questioning, or assessing. In the second-by-second unfolding of classroom interaction, the teacher allocates turns, builds rapport, maintains order, and promotes or curtails student participation while at the same time engaging a variety of verbal and visible resources to teach pronunciation, explain vocabulary, elucidate tense and aspect, sort out tricky problems of understanding, and work with emerging learner initiatives and responses. It is worth highlighting that such professional work cannot be accomplished with talk alone and requires a complex interplay of multimodal resources – a traditionally neglected aspect in teacher training. Notably, a key component of teacher expertise involves managing multiple demands such as engaging student attention while attending to technical problems, attending to the individual without neglecting the group, and striking a delicate balance between maintaining the pedagogical focus and encouraging student participation. Finally, what CA-based analysis of ELT classroom interaction reveals is the highly contingent nature of the teacher’s work – the kind of work that cannot be easily captured in simple dos and don’ts. Doing “steering” in the F position of IRF, for example, cannot be reduced to a list of useful phrases or sentence frames, and third-turn repeats do not always accomplish the same type of work regardless of sequential environments.

Recent efforts in documenting such complexities of teacher practices are represented in two edited volumes. Kunitz et al. (forthcoming) includes a collection of conversation analysis studies on classroom interaction, where pedagogical implications of the various findings are specifically addressed. Hall and Looney (forthcoming) bring together a series of studies devoted specifically to advancing understandings of the highly specialized professional work of L2 teaching, such as the embodied practice of teaching writing (Park forthcoming), the orchestration of small group activities (Fagan forthcoming), and the facilitation of storytelling (Reddington et al. forthcoming).

In closing, despite the staggering volume of conversation analysis work produced in applied linguistics over the past two decades, it remains unclear how much of this work has trickled down to the actual classroom of ELT. Although important and innovative CA-based ELT materials are scattered in various journal articles and edited volumes, as noted earlier, the textbook series that fully utilizes CA findings on spoken interaction is yet to be written and brought into the mainstream ELT market. In addition, among the increasing amount of CA-based studies of ELT classroom interaction, few carry specific, tangible, and usable pedagogical implications. This is not surprising given CA’s focus on describing and documenting member methods. For classroom CA studies to become truly useful for ELT practitioners, the pedagogical implications of our findings need to be given serious, not just passing, consideration. We need to be able to articulate how precisely our findings may be translated to teaching and teacher training. One pathway toward achieving this goal is by asking questions motivated by real pedagogical problems (e.g., how to ensure even participation) from the outset while upholding CA’s analytical stance of remaining open in finding the answers in the details of participant conduct as we investigate how expert teachers manage these problems. Pedagogically useful findings as such can ultimately form a basis for CA-based teacher training. One current project conceived in just that spirit involves synthesizing and translating a broad range of existing CA findings on pedagogical interaction into evidence-based training materials for teachers (Waring and Creider forthcoming). Based on this synthesis and translation, we propose a FAB (foster an inviting environment; attend to learner voice; balance competing demands) framework that offers a step-by-step guide to facilitate a “micro-reflection” of teacher conduct as situated in the complex realities of actual classrooms. The goal is to start what Creider (2016) calls a “micro-revolution” of teacher training, where thoughtful adjustments are to be made word-by-word, pause-by-pause, and gesture-by-gesture in the constant flow of real-time classroom interaction. With that, we are eager to witness CA making a real impact in the language classroom, and we trust that it will.

Cross-References