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

Abstract

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.