Classroom interaction research (Gardiner, 2019)

Gardner, R. (2019) Classroom interaction research: The state of the art. Research on Language and Social Interation, 52(3), 212-226.

In this paper Rod Gardener provides a comprehensive review of the ethnomethodological origins of classroom research that focuses on the structural organisation of teacher student interactions.

Gardner highlights influential studies such as Mehan (1979) and McHoul (1978; 1990) then shows how the body of classroom research in conversation analysis also draws on Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) to make sense of sequence sequential actions of teaching and learning, including repair (Schegloff, Jefferson & Sacks, 1977).

The discussion surveys the early body of work in SLA classroom research with the push from Seedhouse, Wagner, Firth and others for the second language classroom research to incorporate social elements of the classroom, and the interactional elements of language acquisition.

In the past 20 years, the focus on tun taking (the management of speaker selection) and sequence organization (repetition and reformulations allowing for clarification of concepts) reveals how learning sequences are built across different types of classrooms. Gardner shows us that future research could productively explore the longitudinal development of knowledge and how specific classroom projects are achieved.