When the teacher sets a task and provides detailed instructions about how it is to be carried out, the process can be masked in the final product. In other words, the teacher’s task-as-workplan may not correspond to the task-in-process (Seedhouse 2004: 264). However, when the teacher circulates, s/he may discover such discrepancies and be faced with having to deal with them on the fly. This study of secondary school pupils’ collaborative information literacy practices for gathering and synthesising information in English project work examines specifically how pupils consistently resist and contest the teacher’s workplan.

Using multimodal conversation analysis (Broth & Keevallik 2020) of video recordings from different stages of the project work, this paper shows empirically how the task-as-workplan is transformed by pupils (and teacher) on a moment-by-moment basis during the emergent task-in-process. The data come from over 30 hours of video recordings of project work, but here the focus will be on one pair, who consistently display their resistance (cf. Humă et al. 2023). In doing so, the pupils contest the teacher’s workplan, for example, by launching attempted long turns prefaced with “but” and they collaborate in producing objections by endorsing or completing each other’s turns. The pupils either continue to meet some of the requirements to appease the teacher’s repeated efforts to get them to implement the workplan or they simply say they will do as asked. However, in both cases they eventually revert to their own way of carrying out the task.

Task-based interactions show the students’ interpretation of the task instructions and the emic criteria they orient to during task accomplishment. In this EMCA paper we explore in particular L2 learners’ orientation to the accountability of their task-based work. The dataset consists of 9 video-recorded interactions (total 1.7 hrs) by 6 pairs and 3 triads of 9th grade students from three English-as-a-foreign-language classrooms in Sweden. The students were assigned an open-ended problem-based task revolving around River, a fictitious character who reportedly disappeared and was later found with no recollection of the day’s events. As task input (Ellis, 2003), the students received 8 cut-out pictures representing items in a paper bag found next to River. In their interactions, the students work to find a solution to the task problem by collaboratively imagining what might have happened to River. As they do so, they accomplish social actions such as proposals, agreements, and disagreements concerning the interpretation of the pictures, their role in the emerging narrative, and the scenario that led to River’s disappearance. Our analysis focuses on the accounts and the account requests that accompany these social actions and illustrates how, through their accounting work, the students orient to finding a logical and reasonable solution to the task problem. While discussing their ideas, the students orient to the accountability (Robinson, 2016) of their task-based work, thereby showing a normative orientation to the task as a classroom assignment and to their talk as institutional. Overall, the study contributes to the CA-SLA literature on tasks-in-process.

This paper examines how English-as-a-foreign-language students implement a speaking task and how they display a normative approach to doing the task “right” by invoking the instructions. The data comprise 5 hours of video recordings of 20 dyadic task-based interactions between EFL students working with an open-ended problem-based task in Swedish upper secondary schools. The task revolved around the excavation of a cave where a person had been found together with six items. The task input (Ellis, 2003) consisted of an instruction card and one set of items. The items were presented either as i) pictures, ii) actual material objects, or iii) in a word list. The sequential analysis of the students’ task-based interactions shows how they make sense of the task instructions during the task-in-process (Breen, 1987) by collaboratively imagining and co-constructing storylines around the task input as a way to solve the task problem of how the person ended up in the cave. In some cases, the students reorient specifically to the task question formulated in the instructions by reading it aloud. This orientation occasions further talk where the students create new storylines to solve the task problem or account for what they have done in relation to the instructions. With this conduct, the students observably treat prior talk as not (adequately) solving the problem, thereby displaying an emic concern for task progressivity and a normative orientation to what represents an acceptable solution. This study contributes to the CA-SLA research on task-based interactions.

Students’ presentations of their task outputs are a common feature of project-based EFL classrooms (Böök & Berggren-Darnell, 2024). These presentations and their follow-up discussions constitute an interactional space where the presenters retrospectively make visible the outcome of their task-as-process for the audience members. This study examines students’ normative orientations to their project task during the presentations and follow-up discussions. The task requires the students to design propaganda posters based on the fable Animal Farm, showcasing different propaganda techniques. Drawing on multimodal conversation analysis (e.g., Mondada, 2008) in analyzing video recordings of 10 students’ presentations and their follow-up discussions, this study provides an in-depth examination of how the presenters and the audience members display retrospective orientations to the task requirements during these moments. The findings show that the presenters explicitly orient to accountability in their choices through the display of authorship of their outputs and then giving accounts for these choices by invoking the fable. The audience members embody orientation toward holding the presenter accountable for their posters. This is achieved, for example, through producing multi-unit questions, first pointing at a component of the poster before posing a question on its relevance to the fable and the task or through using the fable to establish criteria for evaluating the poster. All in all, this study contributes to the body of knowledge on students’ orientation to the task-as-workplan, not in terms of how they carry out the task but in how they retrospectively and normatively justify and negotiate their work.

References:
Böök, I. & Darnell-Berggren, H. (2004). Engelska – ett ämne för kommunikation [English – a subject for communication]. In L. Jonsson & N. Månsson (Eds.), De gymnasiegemensamma ämnenas didaktik – för kunskap och bildning [The didactics of the upper secondary school subjects – for knowledge and education].
Mondada, L. (2008). Using video for a sequential and multimodal analysis of social interaction: Video-taping institutional telephone calls. Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 9. http://doi.org/10.17169/fqs-9.3.1161

Student engagement refers to not only individual active student involvement but also orientations to each other’s contributions to collaborative meaning-making. While previous research has examined engagement in terms of meaning-making in whole-class interaction (e.g., Jacknick, 2021), less is known about how students engage one another by responding to, expanding on, or reinterpreting each other’s contributions. We address this research gap by examining how student engagement unfolds in small-group settings after one group member topicalizes the assigned task through students´ emerging interpretations. The data consists of 24 hours of video recordings from two undergraduate courses in the Language and Communication program at a Swedish university, where students (in groups of 3–6) discuss open-ended topics (e.g., AI as a friend). Using Multimodal Conversation Analysis (CA), the study investigates how students engage and topicalize tasks by sharing personal stories, experiences, and familiar examples that resonate with all group members. In light of our findings, student engagement in group discussions emerges through evolving interpretations of the task, which may align with or subtly diverge from the expected work plan. The findings also offer insights into how students navigate and negotiate classroom assignments in ways that reflect both adherence to and reinterpretation of instructional guidelines, showing the institutional fingerprint of group discussion tasks.

Keywords: Student Engagement, Personalization, Group Discussion Tasks, Collaborative Meaning-Making

References
Jacknick, C. M. (2021). Multimodal participation and engagement: Social interaction in the classroom. Edinburgh University Press.

This study investigates students’ explicit orientations to task questions during Transcription and Video Based Guided Discovery Tasks (TV-GDTs, Sert forthcoming), which were designed to teach aspects of classroom interaction to student-teachers (STs) enrolled in a teacher education course at a Swedish University. TV-GDTs required STs to watch videos based on recorded lessons, go through transcriptions, and share their analyses based on questions that were designed to guide them to find and discuss certain aspects of language classroom interaction. The data consist of video recordings of five 2.5-hour teaching sessions in addition to audio-recordings of group interactions (twenty-eight 10-minute interactions per group), which were transcribed using conversation analytic conventions for close analysis. The multimodal analysis of the group interactions shows that after STs explicitly orient to and/or quote task questions (21 cases for the focal group of three students) during the group work phase of TV-GDTs, they collaboratively establish understanding, which leads to the co-construction of evaluative actions and common ground. The explicit orientations to task questions helped STs stay on task and lead to task-convergent behaviours, observable in the ways the student-teachers collaboratively construct turns and create alignment. Implications for designing teacher education courses and professional development sessions will be given.

Reference
Sert, O. (forthcoming) The design and implementation of a course on interactional competence for teachers: Teacher-learning through video-based guided discovery tasks. In (Eds. Filliettaz L., Berger E., Horlacher A. & Ticca A.C.) Developing interactional competences at and for work: Analyzing talk-in-Interaction in professional and training contexts, Springer.