Co-constructing learning opportunities in Hong Kong Chinese-as-an-additional-language classroom interactions: a conversation analysis perspective

Abstract

Recent conversation analytic research has demonstrated how teachers’ and students’ interactional skills for the creation of opportunities for learning have a positive impact on the learning of English in ELT classrooms. However, little empirical research has been conducted into the micro-details of how learning opportunities are co-constructed by teachers and students in Asian language learning classrooms. This thesis focuses on the sequential and embedded organisation of classroom practices in learning Sinitic linguistic knowledge and investigates how language teachers and students jointly create different learning opportunities through talk, material objects, and a range of semiotic and multimodal resources in four secondary schools in multilingual Hong Kong.

This thesis adopts Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (EMCA) as a methodological framework to document different pedagogically-oriented social actions. Approximately 27 hours of naturally-occurring video data for this study were collected from four English-Medium-Instruction secondary schools in 2019 and 2021. These schools provide instructions in international Chinese language curriculum (GCSE/IGCSE Cantonese/Mandarin) for ethnolinguistic minority students in Hong Kong with Chinese-as-an-Additional-Language (CAL) needs. The student participants in the present study are typically of South and Southeast Asian origin, and the subject teachers are non-native speakers of English. This means there is an absence of a common language for effective instruction in the CAL classrooms where students may not share the same L1 with their teachers and classmates.

The findings of this dissertation reveal three different methods employed by the CAL teachers for creating learning opportunities. Learning spaces are constructed through (i) managing volunteering responses for peer support in sentence-building activities; (ii) orienting to practiced language policies by producing Sino-lexical alternative repair; and (iii) creating orthographic mediated space by Sinographic visualisation. This thesis argues that teachers can transform problems of understanding, expectation and acceptability into learning opportunities for promoting intersubjectivity (e.g. grammatical patterns, bipartite lexical choice, and Sinographic writing system) in the CAL classroom setting where shared linguistic resources are significantly limited. The findings of this research will contribute to a growing literature on classroom discourse and language policy by examining language teaching and learning practices in multilingual classrooms. This study also explores implications for teaching Chinese to beginner-level adolescent learners and for teacher education for L2 Classroom Interactional Competence.