Centre of Excellence in Research on Intersubjectivity in Interaction, Department of Finnish, Finno-Ugrian and Scandinavian Studies

This study investigates student-initiated questions in English as a medium of instruction (EMI) interaction in a higher education setting. Although there is a growing body of research on EMI, classroom interactions occurring in this institutional setting are still underinvestigated. Considering the importance of learner-generated questions, which can promote autonomous inquiry-based learning as well as be diagnostic of students’ learning in content-based classrooms, no study has been found conducted on the phenomenon at hand in full EMI settings. Motivated by this research gap, the current study seeks to understand how participants initiate and handle knowledge gaps. It particularly focuses on the instances where student-initiated questions are constructed and managed by the students and the teacher, respectively. More specific research questions concern what the distinctive features of these learner-generated questions are and what kind of interactional resources participants use in the instances of knowledge gaps. The data for this study comprise video data recorded in twelve weeks with three cameras. The data come from a corpus of 30 hours of video-recorded interaction in two content classrooms at an EMI university in Turkey. The participants (n=78) are fourth year undergraduate students in the Faculty of Education. This study adopts the conversation analysis methodology. The data were transcribed and analyzed with a special focus on student-initiated question episodes, and interactions were examined with particular attention to various interactional resources such as language use, body orientation, gesture, gaze and instructional materials.  The findings of the study include three categories of student-initiated questions, namely (1) procedural and task-related questions, (2) content-related questions, and (3) terminology-related questions. First category of questions reveals that although English is the institutionally-assigned classroom language, students navigate classroom language norms by switching between L1 (Turkish) and L2 (English). The findings also shed light on the teacher’s divergent treatment of L1 initiations in task-oriented and whole-classroom interaction modes in terms of both language choice and the interactional resources utilized to resolve the problems. Second category of questions demonstrates that the normative language in pursuits of resolving content-related knowledge gap is L2 and students can handle quite complex professional issues using L2, which relates to the specific EMI context. More specifically, content-related questions address issues including practical concerns, guidelines for conduct, and ways of handling specific situations. Most notably, these questions are mainly designed in multi-unit questioning turns which do not come straightforwardly as the other two categories of questions do. Third category of questions shows that students resolve their knowledge gaps (1) by proposing an understanding in L1 and (2) by engaging in meaning negotiation between two terminology-related items. The first case demonstrates that the use of living language norms is a complex process, thereby unveiling the institutional fingerprints of EMI interaction, in which there is a shared language (L1) available to all participants. In the second case, students indicate their epistemic access to the domain following the teacher’s turn by displaying understanding through providing some analysis of the information, which points that there is a clear orientation by students towards engaging in internalizing the meanings of lexical items through demonstration-of-(mis)understanding turns. The study has several implications for research on interactional repertoires and student agency in EMI and bilingual classrooms, and feeds into the growing body of research on L1 use in L2 classrooms, as well. Overall, this study contributes to the field of conversation analysis in general and to research on learner initiatives in EMI interaction in particular.

Keywords: conversation analysis, student-initiated questions, English as a medium of instruction, higher education, use of bilingual resources, classroom interaction

The purpose of this study is to reveal how study abroad experiences of exchange students in English as a lingua franca (ELF) communities affect their perceptions on ELF. The participants of the present study were six Turkish ERASMUS exchange students as members of an ELF community of practice in two European countries. The study drew upon three data sources: semi-structured interviews before and after the study abroad program and controlled journals. The data was analyzed qualitatively by using thematic analysis. The results of the study indicated that the primary concern of the participants was to reach mutual intelligibility in the only shared language available to them with cooperative and supportive behaviors. Thus, they made use of many strategies to reach their goal such as using gestures and mimics, drawing, code switching, simplifying language which shows the importance of accommodation skills for convergence in accomplishing mutual understanding in ELF-resourced community. Another finding of the study was that ERASMUS students, who were initially quite strict in teaching 'standard English' and concerned about teaching different accents, had a more flexible stance in teaching different varieties of English after the program. However, they were still not sure about to what extent they would integrate what they had experienced as an ELF speaker into their future teaching practices and most of them were in favor of giving just simple examples from the ELF-resourced community in their classes. Regarding the findings of the study, the contribution of the study is that intensive orientation programs prior to study abroad should be provided and students should be more familiar with the term 'ELF' and its real implications in ELF contexts.

This study aims to find a relationship between accuracy in students' production of lexical errors and their level of language proficiency. The data were gathered from 167 opinion essays of intermediate, upper‐intermediate and advanced Turkish students learning English as a foreign language (EFL) at an English preparatory school in Turkey. A general analysis of the students' corpus showed that there were various sources for lexically based errors; the most frequently occurring error types were similarity, calques, collocation, coinages and borrowings. A close analysis of the data revealed that although there was a general tendency of decrease in errors as the proficiency level increased, there was not always a linear relationship between proficiency and number of errors, i.e., coinage errors where intermediate and advanced students made the same amount of errors. The results of the study suggest some pedagogical implications to improve the lexical production of English language students in their writing.

Previous conversation analytic research has documented various aspects of preference organization
and the ways dispreference is displayed in relation to pedagogical focus in L2 and CLIL classrooms
(Seedhouse, 1997; Hellermann, 2009; Kääntä, 2010). This study explores preference organization in
an under-researched context, an English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) setting, and it specifically
focuses on how a teacher displays dispreference for preceding learner turns. The data consist of 30 h
of video recordings from two EMI classes, which were recorded for an academic term at a university
in Turkey. Using Conversation Analysis, we demonstrate that the teacher employs a variety of interactional
resources such as changing body position, gaze movements, hedging, and delaying devices to show
dispreference for preceding student answers. Based on our empirical analysis, the ways the teacher prioritizes
content and task over form/language are illustrated. The analyses also reveal that negotiation
of meaning at content level and production of complex L2 structures can simultaneously be enabled
through teachers’ specific turn designs in EMI classroom interaction. This demonstrates that preference
organization, particularly in a teacher’s responsive turns, can act as a catalyst for complex L2 production
and enhance student participation. This study has implications for conversation analytic research
on instructed learning settings, and in particular on teachers’ turn design in classroom interaction.

Studies conducted on seminar discussions reveal that the participants want active discussion, yet they often complain that this does not occur. Problems in seminar discussion have been explained by face concerns, frustration with various seminar practices, or as a strategic response to conflicting identities. This study provides an alternative viewpoint: two factors that can inhibit discussion are rigid institutional roles and turn-taking and sequence organization of the seminar. The two participants who have significant roles in the interaction are the thesis author and the discussant. The role of the other students in the seminar is unclear. They also orient to the fact that there is something problematic or unexpected in their participation. The study is based on a corpus of 25 h of videotaped master's thesis seminar discussions in a Finnish university. The data were transcribed and analyzed using ethnomethodological conversation analysis.

This article examines the design of opponent feedback turns given as part of Master’s Thesis seminars. The material used in this research consists of twelve video-recorded seminar sessions encompassing four different humanities subjects. This article examines in greater detail feedback sequences, of which there were 101 in total, taken from three different seminar sessions. The present analysis concentrates on feedback turns in which the opponent points out problems arising from the thesis draft and suggests possible changes to the text. The research method employed in this article is ethno-methodological conversation analysis.

The opponent’s feedback progresses in a somewhat linear fashion, following the order of the text itself. This resembles a pattern that recurs in many other institutional settings. Common features of such routine progression from one stage to another are typically clear pauses and transitions between the feedback sequences.

Feedback turns involving some aspect of criticism typically feature a long introductory section and phrases such as mä jäin miettii ‘I was thinking’ or mulle tuli mieleen ‘it occurred to me’. In particular the initial parts of the feedback turn feature many elements denoting uncertainly, caution and reservation, such as pauses, self-correction and restarts.

The feedback itself is generally very carefully worded. Recurring linguistic elements in the opponent’s advice include modal verbs (generally voida ‘to be possible’), the zero subject, and the conditional, as well as a variety of modal adverbs (for instance, ehkä ‘perhaps’) and scalar elements (e.g. pikkasen ‘a little’ and lyhyesti ‘in brief’). In some instances, in phrases pointing out a problem with the text, the evaluating adjective is omitted altogether (e.g. tää on ehkä vähän ‘this is perhaps a little’).

One feature that recurs with great frequency is the rapid backing down from critical feedback, using a variety of concessionary terms and structures. This backing down often takes the form of highlighting the fact that the text is still incomplete or, indeed, by questioning the relevance of the feedback.

The various ways of constructing feedback turns outlined above will help opponents to rise to the institutional challenge of having to assess and comment upon a fellow student’s work. Moreover, the complicated construction of such feedback seems to represent an attempt to elicit some kind of response from the writer of the text, something of which there may otherwise be very little. On the other hand, the ability tentatively to present one’s opinions, bringing into question the relevance of one’s own comments and highlighting opposing points of view give the impression of a student competent of academic debate.

The paper studies the activity of note-taking in interactions between a university student counselor and an undergraduate student. The study is based on authentic videotaped discussions recorded in a Finnish university. The study concentrates on sequences consisting of a question, an answer, and the taking of notes. The aim of the paper is to present a detailed multimodal analysis on how the note-taker moves from not writing to writing and how nodding is used in both receiving the answer and indicating the transition from listening to taking down notes. Listening and note-taking are seen as a dual involvement depending partially on the same embodied resources, especially the gaze and bodily orientation. The shift from listening to note-taking often is indicated with a pronounced writing initial nod.