Teacher smiles as an interactional and pedagogical resource in the classroom
Author
Jakonen, Teppo
Evnitskaya, Natalia
Publication date
2020ISSN
0378-2166
Abstract
In classroom settings, laughter and smiles are resources for action that are available to both teachers and students. Recent interactional studies have documented how students use these resources to deal with trouble of various kind, but less is known about the sequential and activity contexts of teachers’ laughter-relevant practices, as well as their pedagogical functions. We use multimodal conversation analysis (CA) to investigate the interactional unfolding and pedagogical orientations of teacher smiles during instructional IRE (initiation-response-evaluation) sequences in a corpus of 37 bilingual lessons collected in schools in Finland and Spain. In analysing the focal smiles, we pay attention to their temporal relationships to students’ preceding and subsequent facial expressions and the unfolding of on-going talk. We argue that smiling can index teachers’ affiliative and pedagogical responsiveness to troubles and competences implied by prior student actions. The analysis of selected data fragments shows how smiling is part of multimodal action packages through which teachers manage momentary action disalignments and restore a sense of students as competent actors. The findings contribute towards recent CA research on the embodied and interactional nature of teaching and learning by showing some ways in which smiling is a situated practice used for professional purposes.
Document Type
Article
Document version
Published version
Language
English
Subject (CDU)
37 - Education
Keywords
Somriure
Interacció a l'aula
Riure
Anàlisi de converses
Aprenentatge integrat de contingut i idiomes (CLIL)
Sonrisa
Interacción en el aula risa
Análisis de conversaciones
Aprendizaje integrado de contenido e idiomas (CLIL)
Smile
Interaction in the classroom
Laugh
Conversation analysis
Integrated content and language learning (CLIL)
Pages
14
Publisher
Elsevier
Collection
163;
Is part of
Journal of Pragmatics
Citation
Jakonen, Teppo; Evnitskaya, Natalia. Teacher smiles as an interactional and pedagogical resource in the classroom. Journal of Pragmatics, 2020, 163, 18-31. Disponible en: <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378216620300825>. Fecha de acceso: 22 sep. 2021. DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2020.04.005
This item appears in the following Collection(s)
- Educació [109]
Rights
© 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/