Teacher-initiated talk and student oral discourse in a second language literature classroom: A sociocultural analysis

For students studying foreign languages at the college level in the United States, developing second language (L2) speaking abilities can be a difficult task. As students progress through the sequence of foreign language coursework and continue their studies in upper-level courses that primarily focus on the teaching of literature, they often confront a number of challenges that can hinder the ongoing development of their L2 oral ability. Furthermore, instructors teaching upper-level L2 literature courses rely a great deal on whole-class discussions. Little is known about the ways in which whole-class discussions unfold between instructors and their students in L2 literature courses, and few studies have attempted to understand oral discourse in this context at a micro-level of analysis.;The study employed macro- and micro-levels of analysis to understand the dynamics of teacher-initiated whole-class discussions in a college-level Latin American literature classroom from a sociocultural theoretical perspective while also drawing on ecological linguistic views of language learning. Macro-level views of discourse included an analysis of the instructor's and students' goals, expectations, and intentions regarding the course. Micro-level views of talk focused on the linguistic structures that emerged in classroom talk.;The results indicate that both the instructor and her students entered the course with a wide range of course goals and expectations. The resulting tensions between instructor and student goals influenced the interaction patterns observed in the data. Analysis also revealed that interaction-response-feedback patterns were more present when compared to interaction-response-evaluation patterns. Micro-level analysis revealed that meaning was made via affordances that emerged in the talk. Three distinct discourse patterns in the talk, termed affordance structures, were identified to mitigate the conflicting goals indicated by the instructor and her students. This study's results deepen our understanding of microgenesis via the affordance construct.