Rod Gardner

The Making of Multi-Unit Turns is the first book-length treatment to comprehensively describe extended turns produced by a single speaker. It draws on multiparty everyday conversations in English, using the methods of Conversation Analysis. It brings together the currently scattered literature on MUTs, and goes on to expand our understanding of the ‘natural history’ of MUTs by showing how speakers and recipients deploy linguistic and embodied behaviours in intricate ways, from the launch of an extended turn of talk to beyond the end of the MUT. The chapters report on the diverse ways in which speakers secure a second turn-constructional unit, and show how grammatical, prosodic, gestural, and postural resources, as well as gaze direction, are deployed to extend the speaker’s floor in a long MUT. Further investigating how speakers and their recipients transition out of the MUT and return to turn-by-turn talk, and how recipients sometimes disrupt an extended MUT, this book aims to provide a fresh understanding of the orderliness which underlies our everyday interactions.

It is well recognised that classroom teaching is highly complex and that teachers must navigate and negotiate myriad interactions just within a lesson in order to manage the learning opportunities of their students. What is less well recognised is precisely how these interactions are managed in real time during actual classroom interactions. This book is designed as an original, close-up account of processes by which children learn to become school learners in their first year of school, unpacking some of the recognised complexity of busy classrooms to hone in on what teachers and children do and how learning takes place. Using the tools of conversation analysis, the authors unpack a range of pedagogical interactions between teachers and children during normal class, focusing on procedural instructions and the outcomes of instructed activities. By including transcripts of recordings of classes in schools located in diverse communities, it is possible to see which aspects of classroom interaction may be impacted by external factors, such as children’s language or cultural background, and which aspects are applicable regardless of such factors. The chapters examine teacher instructions and children’s behaviour during instructions and during task performance in whole-class and small-group interactions. Effective Task Instruction in the First Year of School brings forward a much-needed wealth of knowledge into how to teach children in the first year of schooling and beyond in a way that is accessible for practising teachers, student teachers as well as education researchers.

It is well recognised that classroom teaching is highly complex and that teachers must navigate and negotiate myriad interactions just within a lesson in order to manage the learning opportunities of their students. What is less well recognised is precisely how these interactions are managed in real time during actual classroom interactions. This book is designed as an original, close-up account of processes by which children learn to become school learners in their first year of school, unpacking some of the recognised complexity of busy classrooms to hone in on what teachers and children do and how learning takes place. Using the tools of conversation analysis, the authors unpack a range of pedagogical interactions between teachers and children during normal class, focusing on procedural instructions and the outcomes of instructed activities. By including transcripts of recordings of classes in schools located in diverse communities, it is possible to see which aspects of classroom interaction may be impacted by external factors, such as children’s language or cultural background, and which aspects are applicable regardless of such factors. The chapters examine teacher instructions and children’s behaviour during instructions and during task performance in whole-class and small-group interactions. Effective Task Instruction in the First Year of School brings forward a much-needed wealth of knowledge into how to teach children in the first year of schooling and beyond in a way that is accessible for practising teachers, student teachers as well as education researchers.

'This collection is the first to consistently adopt Conversation Analysis as an approach to second language interaction. By examining first and second language speakers' participation in a wide range of activities, it challenges the dominant view of 'nonnative speakers' as deficient communicators. Proposing instead to understand second language users' conversational participation as interactional achievement, the book makes a powerful case for 'ethnomethodological respecification' in second language research.' Professor Gabriele Kasper, University of Hawai'i Conversations involving speakers whose first language is not the language in which they are talking have become widespread in the globalized world. Migration, increased travel for business or pleasure, as well as communication through new technologies such as the internet make Second Language Conversations an increasingly common everyday event. In this book Conversation Analysis is used to explore natural, casual talk between speakers in a second language. The contributors shift emphasis away from controlled contexts such as the classroom towards more sociable environments in which people go about their daily routines. English, German, French, Japanese, Finnish and Danish are all analyzed as second languages within a variety of professional, educational and sociable situations. This collection of essays aims to present naturally occurring Second Language Conversations in order to show what speakers in these situations do; how they utilize first language conversational practices, and whether or not grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation help or hinder the construction of meaning.