Vocabulary explanations in beginning-level adult ESOL classroom interactions: a conversation analysis perspective

Re­cent stud­ies have ex­am­ined the in­ter­ac­tional or­gan­i­sa­tion of vo­cab­u­lary ex­pla­na­tions (VEs) in sec­ond lan­guage (L2) class­rooms. Nev­er­the­less, more work is needed to bet­ter un­der­stand how VEs are pro­vided inthese class­rooms, par­tic­u­larly in be­gin­ning-level Eng­lish for Speak­ers of Other Lan­guages (ESOL) class­room con­texts where stu­dents have dif­fer­ent first lan­guages (L1s) and lim­ited Eng­lish pro­fi­ciency and theshared lin­guis­tic re­sources be­tween the teacher and learn­ers are typ­i­cally lim­ited. Based on a cor­pus of be­gin­ning-level adult ESOL lessons, this con­ver­sa­tion-an­a­lytic study of­fers in­sights into how VEs are in­ter­ac­tion­ally man­aged in such class­rooms. Our find­ings con­tribute to the cur­rent lit­er­a­ture in shed­ding light on thena­ture of VEs in be­gin­ning-level ESOL class­rooms

Sustaining Critical Approaches to Translanguaging in Education: A Contextual Framework

Translanguaging remains a timely and important topic in bi/multilingual education. The most recent turn in translanguaging scholarship involves attention to translanguaging in context in response to critiques of translanguaging as a universally empowering educational practice. In this paper, seven early career translanguaging scholars propose a framework for researching translanguaging “in context,” drawing on the Douglas Fir Group\u27s (2016) transdisciplinary framework for language acquisition. Examining translanguaging in context entails paying attention to who in a classroom wields power, as a result of their greater proficiency in societally valued languages, their more “standard” ways of speaking these languages, their greater familiarity with academic literacies valued at school, and/or their more “legitimate” forms of translanguaging. In our framework for researching translanguaging in context, we propose three principles. The first principle is obvious: (1) not to do so apolitically. The other two principles describe a synergy between ethnographic research and teacher-researcher collaborative research: (2) ethnographic research can assess macro-level language ideologies and enacted language hegemonies at the micro- and meso levels, and (3) teacher-researcher collaborations must create and sustain inclusive, equitable classroom social orders and alternative academic norms different from the ones documented to occur in context if left by chance