A Longitudinal Conversation Analytic Study on Learning a Lexical Item in an EFL Classroom at a Secondary School
Özet
Classroom interaction is vital in language teaching discourse where social interaction is
constructed by not only the teacher but also students. Previous research has shown a
reflexive relation between language classroom interaction and creating learning
opportunities. Earlier studies on English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom
interaction have not dealt with secondary school EFL classrooms in detail although they
constitute a great deal of compulsory education in Türkiye. This study aims to portray the
interaction unfolding in a secondary school English Language Teaching context by
bringing empirical evidence to displays of socially distributed cognition. A longitudinal
multimodal conversation analytic study is conducted to identify and detail a specific
student‘s process of learning the lexical item ‗soğukkanlı (cold-blooded)‘ by focusing on
the interactional resources and practices deployed by the participants. The study traces
how a lexical item is added into a learner‘s interactional repertoire progressively in terms
of content-related (i.e., biology) and metaphorical meaning, how a learner shows
orientation to her/his own learning process, how language teachers provide both the
meaning and definition of a polysemous word and how a language teacher deals with
content knowledge both in L1 and L2 in an emergent Content and Language Integrated
Learning (CLIL) environment. The findings contribute to a better understanding of
secondary school EFL classroom interaction in general, and of L2 learning process
emerging in and through classroom interaction with an orientation to CLIL environment in
particular offering implications holding the potential to improve the awareness of pre and
in service teachers.
