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Part of
New Perspectives in Interactional Linguistic Research
Edited by Margret Selting and Dagmar Barth-Weingarten
[Studies in Language and Social Interaction 36] 2024
► pp. 384–415

Language alternation in the multilingual classroom

Communicative functions and multimodal gestalts

| Leipzig University
| University of Potsdam
The aim of this paper is twofold: First, we show that language alternation is an important resource for the accomplishment of actions allowing for participation in classroom activities, and that it can only be understood through careful sequential and multimodal analysis – as proven in IL studies. IL research is thus expanded to the multilingual classroom. The study is based on video-recordings of a classroom setting in which the students make use of Arabic – not the language of instruction, which is German. In addition to the communicative functions of actions realized through language alternation, our study shows the teacher’s strategies of how to deal with the students’ use of Arabic. These observations on “orderly” going-ons are intended to encourage teachers to allow for multiple language use in the classroom.
Keywords: classroom interaction, interactional linguistics, multimodality, language and content integrated learning, language alternation, code-switching, translanguaging, participation, German, Arabic
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Code-switching, translanguaging, language alternation
  • 3.Methodological background and data
    • 3.1Applied conversation analysis, interactional linguistics, multimodality research
    • 3.2Data
    • 3.3Methodological procedure
  • 4.Findings
    • 4.1Negotiating understanding oriented to learning
      • 4.1.1Negotiating understanding in order to accomplish the task
      • 4.1.2Negotiating understanding of terminology
    • 4.2Doing self-talk
    • 4.3Designing talk as “private” conversation
      • 4.3.1Designing “private” conversation oriented to classroom interaction
      • 4.3.2Designed as private conversation oriented to joking
  • 5.Considerations for pedagogy
    • 5.1On the relevance of IL work on language alternation for pedagogy
    • 5.2A teacher’s communicative strategies to deal with students’ language alternation
  • 6.Summary
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 26 August 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slsi.36.14kup
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