Conversation Analysis (CA) is an approach to studying social interaction that takes verbal and paraverbal aspects, as well as non-verbal cues such as gestures, posture and facial expressions, into account. CA provides methods and software tools for documenting and analysing talk-in-interaction. This course introduces students to the theory and methods of CA and familiarises them with transcription conventions and software tools (e.g. EXMARaLDA) for the multimodal analysis of audio-visual data. As this course forms part of the Master of Education (M.Ed.) programme, the main focus of our analysis will be on teacher-student and student-student interactions in English as a second/foreign language classrooms. Applying CA to L2 classroom interaction is particularly fruitful because (i) language is both the vehicle and the subject of instruction in ESL/EFL contexts and (ii) language learners are expected to develop communicative and pragmatic competence alongside other skills. An issue that is becoming increasingly relevant in German ESL/EFL classrooms due to migration is multilingualism and multiculturalism. The fact that learners often bring a home language to school that is not used for instruction in the education system requires us to reconsider language policies and teaching strategies. One section of the course is therefore dedicated to code choice, translanguaging and language awareness in the plurilingual classroom. As well as typical day-to-day classroom interactions, we will examine other education-related oral formats, such as student assessment (oral language tests) and parent-teacher conferences. |
eG