Abstract
Comprising 10 empirical studies of classroom or tutoring session interaction, plus an introductory chapter by both editors and a concluding chapter by one, this volume demonstrates some of the ways that embodied conduct is a fundamental part of a variety of teaching practices. The editors’ aim appears to have been to construct a volume that would be of interest to both researchers of pedagogical interaction and practicing teachers and teacher trainers. For the most part, the editors have succeeded in this, with each empirical chapter containing both detailed analysis of data and, in the concluding section, a clear statement of the pedagogical implications of the analysis.
The chapters cover a range of teaching contexts, from one-on-one tutoring sessions (Park) and teaching small groups (Tadic and DiFelice Box), to students working in groups as the teacher circulates (Fagan), and to whole-class interaction between the teacher and students (most of the chapters). Several of the chapters show how, in the context of whole-class interaction, levels of engagement among the students and the contributions of individual students are likely to vary. It is therefore insufficient to treat the students as if they formed a single, homogeneous participant. Two themes that emerge across the different chapters are how the teacher manages multiple, and possibly conflicting, contingencies and how teachers and students manage their own and others’ participation. In relation to the first theme, Tadic and DiFelice Box, for example, show how a teacher uses various embodied resources, such as gaze and bodily posture, to manage shifts between interaction framed as conversational and interaction framed as institutional, and even to simultaneously sustain both frames through a ‘division of labor’ (p. 33) between verbal and (mostly) nonverbal resources. As a second example, Looney and Kim show how, within the familiar three-part initiation-response-feedback pedagogical sequence, a teacher can respond in the third turn to a student’s humorous but disaligning response turn in a way that simultaneously affiliates with the humor while also negatively evaluating the response. This is done through the teacher’s construction of teases through the use of such things as prosody and facial expressions as well as the re-use of lexical items from the student’s disaligning response. In relation to the second theme, Waring and Carpenter show how a teacher uses gaze to ‘recalibrate the participation framework’ (p. 126) from a framework which involves the teacher and an individual student as the primary participants to one in which the teacher is addressing the class as a whole, so that the other students change from being overhearers to being addressed recipients. In contrast, but also focusing on gaze, Sert shows how an individual student can maintain rights to the floor through a shift of gaze to the teacher, so that they establish mutual gaze, and thereby receive an embodied go-ahead response from the teacher, thus maintaining a participation framework in which the teacher and an individual student are the primary participants. As a third example, Dobs looks at how collective translations from English to Chinese, in a Chinese as a foreign language classroom, are coordinated. For her part, the teacher uses a variety of resources including gaze, mouth shape and gesture to coordinate both the start of a collective translation and, especially for longer translations, different segments of a collective translation. Dobs refers to these translations as collective rather than choral, as the analysis of individual students’ contributions shows different levels of engagement among the students, with some students using the collective translation as a cover for their own production of nonsense syllables or for engagement in an unrelated activity, such as checking their phone.
As is common with edited collections, the quality of the different chapters is somewhat variable. One shortcoming of the volume as whole, though, is with how embodied conduct is displayed in the transcripts. As Looney notes in his concluding chapter, analysis of embodied and multimodal conduct requires a transcription system which captures and displays the relevant details of this conduct, that is, of participants’ gaze, gestural and facial expressions, bodily posture and movement, use of material objects and so on. A variety of transcription systems have been developed to meet the challenge of producing adequate transcripts, such as that described in Mondada (2018). And yet, even though this volume focuses on embodied conduct in pedagogical contexts, the various chapters share what strikes me as an over-simplified transcription system which often fails to adequately display the relevant details. For example, if the transcript of excerpt 6 in the chapter by Hall, Malabarba and Kimura is compared with the transcript of excerpt 1 in Kimura et al. (2018), both of which appear to involve the same stretch of interaction, the latter, which is similar to the sort of transcript promoted by Mondada (2018), provides much more access to the participants’ embodied conduct. It is not clear why all the chapters use this simplified transcription system, especially as several of the author’s use a more detailed system in some of their other work. Perhaps this was done to increase the book’s appeal to teachers and teacher trainers, who may be unfamiliar with detailed transcription of multimodal embodied conduct.
This drawback aside, the book as a whole is a valuable contribution to research on interaction in classrooms and similar pedagogical contexts. In particular, it shows how teaching and learning involve a multiplicity of participation frameworks and contingencies for both teachers and students to manage as they cooperate, or disengage and do not cooperate, or at least limit their cooperation, in the co-construction of the multimodal interaction through which teaching and learning are accomplished.