Language Teachers’ Response Interruption across Question-answer Sequences: A Conversation Analytic Study

Drawing on sociocultural theory, we consider learning opportunities as the moments when teachers facilitate learner participation during classroom interaction. One way to create such moments is through the practice of asking questions. Available scholarship pertaining to teachers’ questioning practice has largely focused teachers’ referential questions on the grounds that they have been found to be more conducive for engaging students in extended talk sequences. However, we are still a long way from knowing whether referential questions scaffold a favourable climate for the learning processes. The qualitative study reported here adopted a conversation analytic perspective to examine EFL teachers’ structuring of referential questions across unfolding sequences by focusing on teachers’ response interruption. The data were collected through videotaping of eleven EFL lessons from seven intermediate-level teachers at four private language schools in Iran. Based on detailed microanalysis of classroom extracts the study reveals that teachers tend to interrupt learners’ responses in three different ways; they complete learners’ turns, expect closed answers, or give self-elaborated answers. Implications for teacher education and classroom practice are discussed.