A Longitudinal Conversation Analytic Study on Learning a Lexical Item in an EFL Classroom at a Secondary School

Abstract

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.