Interactivity plays a fundamental role in learning and developing one’s foreign language competency. Indeed, “optimal learning comes from productive engagement built on the creative co-construction of knowledge in interaction between teachers and learners” (Shea (2018, p.1). Against this backdrop, this study aims to assess the level of interactivity in a corpus of academic lectures delivered Tunisian students in four subjects: Cultural studies, Linguistics, and Literature. An innovative mixed method approach will be used. First, a quantitative assessment of interactivity is carried out. It involves the generation of an index of interactivity for lectures in the Tunisian Lecture Corpus (TLC) based on an analysis of the three interpersonal dimensions of the metadiscourse categories (viz., organizing, involving/evaluative, and bi-dimensional) (Bouziri, 2021). Second, a qualitative assessment of interactivity will examine the quality of interaction in TLC through a more in-depth analysis of lecture episodes featuring metadiscourse. Findings will be discussed and interpreted against the characteristics of the academic lecture genre and Tunisia as an EMI context. Pedagogical applications relating to developing academic speaking tasks for university students will be offered.

The presentation deals with a project that investigates societal awareness of linguistic variation and change (of Finnish language) using participatory methods (LANGAWARE 2023–26). The project stretches from Folk Linguistics (e.g. Niedzielski & Preston 2003) to Citizen (socio)linguistics (e.g. Svendsen & Goodchild 2023) by promoting co-researchers' ownership and agency, stemming from key principles of Citizen Science (ECSA 2015). The scientific goal of the project is to contribute to the development of perceptual sociolinguistics, on ‘language regard’ (perceptual and ideological dimensions of language, see e.g. Preston 2013) by building on academics collaborating with language users as co-researchers.

In this presentation, we first present an overview of the co-research design of the project and its general and discourse level approaches in Zoom and face-to-face contexts. The exploratory co-research practices were applied in collaboration with high schoolers and adults.

Second, the presentation will address interaction between researchers and lay participants (co-researchers). We particularly concentrate on how co-researchers reflect on and react to the input provided by academic researchers. The specific focus is on the analysis on how the scientific input concerning language variation and perceptual approaches contribute to the viewpoints and prior expectations of co-researchers, and possibly challenge these. More generally, this analytical focus contributes to developing co-research practice as a form of citizen science.


References

ECSA (European Citizen Science Association) 2015. Ten Principles of Citizen Science. Berlin. http://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/XPR2N

(LANGAWARE 2023–26. https://research.tuni.fi/arkisuomet/en/

Niedzielski, N. & Preston, D.R. (2003). Folk linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Preston, D. R. 2013. The influence of regard on language variation and change. Journal of Pragmatics, 52, 93–104.

Svendsen, B. A., & Goodchild, S. (2023). “Citizen (socio)linguistics: What we can learn from engaging young people as language researchers.” Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies, paper 341.

Aesthetic judgments and evaluations can be seen as both personal and shared. In evaluative activities, speakers are confronted with expressing their own taste and preferences as well as respecting the taste and preferences of one’s co-participants’. A way of calibrating one’s taste and preferences is by providing reasons – accounting – for them, which is an essential phenomenon of social interaction.

In this presentation, I examine and compare sequences where Finnish university students (laypeople) in task-based group discussions about visual art choose their favorite artworks and give reasons for these choices. With a multimodal interactional approach, I investigate how these explanative sequences are co-constructed, and what kind of aspects the participants put forward to account for their choice of their favorites. Earlier research on the reception of visual art in Finland (see Linko 1992) has shown that formalistic aspects such as composition, colors, light or a realistic style are in focus in accounts by school students in upper secondary education.

A similar pattern seems to be the case for the university students in my data. Interactionally, it is not only the speakers themselves that come up with reasons for appreciating a work. The recipients also step in with descriptions and analyses that bring forth e.g. formalistic aspects or the craftmanship of the artist. Through these reasons they can affiliate with the speakers' choices. Thus, the explanative sequences in these group discussions are collaboratively achieved, and the participants seem to orient to the process of accounting as a joint project.

This presentation is about the role of resistance in the development of ideas in Sloyd classes. The school subject Sloyd is a compulsory part of elementary education in the Nordic countries and is according to the curriculum intended to foster, among other things, innovative thinking. Thinking innovatively involves aligning with ideas proposed by peers as well as input that evolves in interaction with materials. Innovation however also involves being able to resist and rethink, something that may be interactionally challenging. The tension between the management of resistance while sustaining collaboration and progression in students’ idea development, is moreover an important pedagogical question.
The study is based on video recordings of a research lesson in a Sloyd classroom, documenting how pupils aged 8 ̶ 9 years, in pairs, collaborate to create waste wood sculptures by drawing on inspiration from existing sculptures and a place of their own choice in the schoolyard. The data are analysed using multimodal conversation analysis, involving talk, embodied actions (gaze, movement), and the materials that the students work with.
In the analyses, interest is directed toward interactional displays of resistance and their consequences for the development of ideas. In sloyd, material properties also contribute with resistance that influence the ideation processes. By studying how pupils resist proposals for ideas from peers and how they interact with the material, the analyses detail the interactional organization of idea development. Preliminary results show that resistance is displayed through avoidance, refocusing, and counter-proposals.

In Conversation Analysis (CA), classroom interaction has been investigated not only in relation to whole class teacher-led instruction, but also with a focus on students’ peer interaction and the thereby emerging participation frameworks (Goffman 1981; Goodwin/Goodwin 2004; Jones & Thornborrow 2004; Koshmann 2013), in middle and secondary schools, and higher education (e.g. Musk 2021; Konzett 2023). Attention has also been given to pre-school and primary school settings (Cobb-More et al. 2006; Cekaite/Björk-Willén 2012; Cekaite et al. 2014; Schanke 2019), in which peer interactions are seen as shaping a “double opportunity space” (Blum-Kulka et al. 2004) in terms of children’s acquisition of social and linguistic skills as well as co-construction of social organization and peer-culture within the larger institutional context (Tholander/ Aronsson 2003; Kyratzis 2004; Nasi 2022).
Building on this background, the present study – based on audio- and video recordings (approx. 20 hours) from a CA-informed project examining 8-9 year-old-children’s interactional competence in Italian primary schools – explores how children manage working as a “team” (Lerner 1993; Antaki/ Widdicombe 1998; Djordjilovic 2012; Nissi/Stevanovic 2021) during the joint accomplishment of didactic tasks by negotiating and distributing interactional roles and opportunities for participation. Drawing on interactions in 2-5 member groups engaged in collaborative activities (e.g. inventing a fairy-tale, solving a math problem), the analysis focuses on the practices children employ to negotiate turn-taking and individual contributions to the task-at-hand, manage peers’ conduct not aligning with joint activity, and present outcomes as the product of group vs. individual work.