Mobilizing Students’ Choral Responses in Chinese L2 Classrooms
The Temporal Coordination of Gesture, Gaze, and Successive Prompts
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7146/si.v9i2.162868Keywords:
choral response, multimodality, projectability, temporality, classroom interaction, Conversation AnalysisAbstract
Drawing on video-recordings of Chinese L2 classroom interaction, this study investigates how teachers mobilize students’ choral responses through the coordinated deployment of multimodal interactional resources, including materially anchored pointing gestures, gaze reorientation, and successive prompting. Fine-grained multimodal Conversation Analysis (CA) reveals that these multimodal resources perform analytically distinguishable yet interactionally complementary functions in the mobilization of choral responses. Materially anchored pointing gestures functions to project and delimit the content of anticipated responses; gaze reorientation signals the appropriate moment for collective entry; and successive prompts together with teachers’ reformulations serves to establish recognizable response formats when initial attempts at mobilizing whole-class participation prove unsuccessful. These findings highlight that the successful accomplishment of choral responses depends not merely on linguistic projection but on the dynamic coordination of verbal, embodied, material, and sequential resources that jointly organize both the projectability and the temporality of collective participation. This study also extends research on Classroom Interactional Competence (CIC) by showing that whole-class participation constitutes a collaborative interactional achievement, emerging through teachers’ strategic employment of multiple modalities and students’ timely orientation to those multimodal resources.
References
Balaman, U. (2018). Embodied Resources in a Repetition Activity in a Preschool L2. Novitas-Research on Youth and Language, 12(1), 27-51.
Candela, A. (1999). Students’ power in classroom discourse. Linguistics and Education, 10(2), 139-163.
Clayman, S. E. (1993). Booing: The Anatomy of a Disaffiliative Response. American Sociological Review, 58(1), 110-130.
Cummins, F. (2018). The Ground from Which We Speak: Joint Speech and the Collective Subject. Cambridge Scholars.
Cummins, F., & Longo, L. (2023). The empirical discovery of domains of assembly and communion. Language Sciences, 100, 101586.
De Stefani, E., & Mondada, L. (2014). Reorganizing mobile formations: When ‘guided’ participants initiate reorientations in guided tours. Space and Culture, 17(2), 157-175.
Deppermann, A., & Streeck, J. (2018). Time in Embodied Interaction. Synchronicity and Sequentiality of Multimodal Resources. Benjamins.
Du Bois J. W., Schuetze-Coburn, S., Cumming, S., & Paoline, D. (1993). Outline of discourse transcription. In J. A. Edwards & M. D. Lampert (Eds.), Talking Data: Transcription and Coding in Discourse Research (pp. 45-90). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Duncan, S. (1972). Some signals and rules for taking speaking turns in conversation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 23, 283-292.
Glenn, P. J. (2003). Laughter in Interaction. Cambridge University Press.
Goodwin, C. (1981). Conversational Organisation: Interaction between Speakers and Hearers. Academic Press.
Hall, J. K., & Looney, S. D. (2019). The Embodied Work of Teaching. Multilingual Matters.
Hazel, S., & Mortensen, K. (2019). Designedly incomplete objects as elicitation tools in classroom interaction. In D. Day & J. Wagner (Eds.), Objects, Bodies and Work Practice (pp. 216-249). Multilingual Matters.
Hosoda, Y., & Aline, D. (2013). Two preferences in question-answer sequences in language classroom context. Classroom Discourse, 4(1), 63-88.
Jefferson, G. (1973). A case of precision timing in ordinary conversation: overlapped tag- positioned address terms in closing sequences. Semiotica, 9, 47-96.
Jefferson, G. (1979). A technique for inviting laughter and its subsequent acceptance declination. In G. Psathas (Ed.), Everyday Language (pp. 79-96). Irvington.
Jefferson, G. (1986). Notes on ‘latency’ in overlap on-set. Human Studies, 9, 153-183.
Jefferson, G. (2004). Glossary of transcript symbols with an introduction. In G. H. Lerner (Ed.), Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation (pp. 13-31). John Benjamins.
Kendon, A. (1973). The role of visible behavior in the organization of social interaction. In M. von Cranach & I. Vine (Eds.), Social Communication and Movement: Studies of Interaction and Expression in Man and Chimpanzee (pp. 29-74). Academic Press.
Kendrick K. H., Holler, J., & Levinson, S. C. (2023). Turn-taking in human face-to-face interaction is multimodal: gaze direction and manual gestures aid the coordination of turn transitions. Philosophical Transactions B, 378, 20210473.
Kerrison, A. T. (2018). We’re All behind You: the Co-construction of Turns and Sequences-At-Cheering. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation. Ulster University.
Koshik, I. (2002). Designedly incomplete utterances: A pedagogical practice for eliciting knowledge displays in error correction sequences. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 35(3), 277-309.
Lee, Y.-A. (2009). Yes-No Questions in the Third-Turn Position: Pedagogical Discourse Processes. Discourse Processes, 45(3), 237-262.
Lerner, G. H. (2002). Turn-sharing: The choral coproduction of talk-in-interaction. In C. Ford, B. Fox, and S. A. Thompson (Eds.), The Language of Turn and Sequence (pp. 225-256). Oxford University Press.
McHoul, A.W. (1978). The organization of turns at formal talk in the classroom. Language in Society, 7, 183-213.
Mehan, H. (1979). Learning Lessons: Social Organisation in the Classroom. Harvard University Press.
Mondada, L. (2018). Multiple temporalities of language and body in interaction: challenges for transcribing multimodality. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 51, 85-106.
Mondada, L. (2024). Multimodal transcription conventions. In J. D. Robinson, R. Clift, K. H. Kendrick, & C. W. Raymond (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Methods in Conversation Analysis (pp. 990-998). Cambridge University Press.
Mondada, L., & Tekin, B. S., & Koda, M. (2025). A sequential approach to simultaneity in social interaction: The emergent organization of choral actions. Language & Communication, 102, 1-14.
Pfänder, S., & Couper-Kuhlen, E. (2019). Turn-sharing revisited: an exploration of simultaneous speech in interactions between couples. Journal of Pragmatics, 147, 22-48.
Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., & Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language, 50(4), 696-735.
Seedhouse, P. (2004). The Interactional Architecture of the Language Classroom: A Conversation Analysis Perspective. Oxford: Blackwell.
Sari, C. C. (2020). Conversation Analysis: Turn-Taking Mechanism and Power Relation in Classroom Setting. Celtic: A Journal of Culture, English Language Teaching, Literature and Linguistics, 7(2), 118-136.
Sert, O. (2015). Social Interaction and L2 Classroom Discourse. Edinburgh University Press.
Tekin, B. S. (2023). Cheering together: the interactional organization of choral vocalizations. Language Communication, 88, 73-89.
Walker, G. (2016). Phonetic variation and interactional contingencies in simultaneous responses. Discourse Processes, 53, 298-324.
Walsh, S. (2012). Conceptualising classroom interactional competence. Novitas-ROYAL, 6(1), 1-14.
Walsh, S. (2014). Developing classroom interactional competence. Language Issues, 25(1), 4-8.
Wang, X. (2023). The interplay of designedly incomplete utterances and representational gestures in Chinese as a second language classrooms. At the Crossroads Between Grammar and Multimodality: Resources for Interaction, Bulletin suisse de linguistique appliquée, 117, 81-104.
Wang, X. (2024). Multimodal resources for managing student participation after unsuccessful designedly incomplete utterances in CSL classroom. In H. Tao & Y. Zhou (Eds.), Teacher-Student Engagement Patterns in CSL Classrooms and Beyond: Video-Based Multimodal Analysis (pp. 279-307). John Benjamin.
Waring, H. Z. (2011). Learner initiatives and learning opportunities. Classroom Discourse, 2(2), 201-218.
Yagi, J. (2022). Achieving (a)synchrony through choral chanting: Co-operative corrections in taiko ensemble rehearsals. Journal of Pragmatics, 195, 48-68.
Zhou, Y. (2024). What’s next after a correct answer: Maximizing engagement by shifting participation frameworks in the Chinese as a second language classroom. In H. Tao & Y. Zhou (Eds.), Teacher-Student Engagement Patterns in CSL Classrooms and Beyond: Video-Based Multimodal Analysis (pp. 251-278). John Benjamin.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Author and Journal
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
We follow the Budapest Open Access Initiative's definition of Open Access.
The journal allows the author(s) to hold the copyright without restrictions.
The journal allows software/spiders to automatically crawl the journal content (also known as text mining)
The journal provides article level metadata to DOAJ
The journal allows readers to read, download, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of its articles and allow readers to use them for any other lawful purpose.
