Pursuing student response through incomplete syntax, prosody, bodily- and visuo-orthographical resources in Chinese-as-a-second-language classrooms

ABSTRACT

This study investigates how teachers use designedly incomplete utterances (DIUs) and other multimodal resources to pursue student responses to their questions to accomplish particular pedagogical tasks in Chinese as a second language (CSL) classrooms. Adopting interactional linguistics and conversation analysis, we examined 18.5 hours of CSL classroom interactions. We identified two different types of DIUs based on their syntactic projectability: DIU with a local projection and DIU with a global projection. Both types of DIUs are used after a lack of student answers to teachers’ prior questions. However, DIUs with a local projection are used after teachers’ identification or characterisation questions, whereas DIUs with a global projection are used to pursue student answers to teachers’ telling questions. These two types of DIUs are produced with the prosodic feature of final lengthening, bodily movements such as torso lean and eyebrow raise, and visuo-orthographical resources such as Chinese characters on blackboards and screens. The findings contribute to our understanding of the multimodal resources that teachers use to pursue responses in L2 classrooms.

KEYWORDS:

• Designedly incomplete utterances
• syntactic projection
• multimodal resources
• Chinese as a second language classroom
• classroom interaction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The Chinese language here refers to Mandarin, the standard variety of Modern Chinese (Chen 1999).

2. The Chinese name for ‘Singing Sand Dunes’ is 鸣沙山 Ming Sha Shan. The name originates from the fact that when the wind passes over a sand dune, a singing sound can be heard. Therefore, Ming Sha Shan does not necessarily refer to a collection of sand dunes in a specific place, but is a classifying name for sand dunes which produce sound. There are multiple Ming Sha Shan in China. The one that is introduced in the textbook is located in Zhongwei city/county, Ningxia autonomous region, China.

3. Recycling the copula shi ‘be’ results in the student’s response not fitting grammatically into the NP slots following the DIU. One possible explanation is that the limited language proficiency influences the learner’s performance in grammar. This is evidenced by the pause (in line 5), indicating Student A’s difficulty in fluently producing a complete response.