Showing attention

Abstract

Students in a science class conducted through French as an additional language carry out a complex task consisting of answering the questions formulated by the teacher at the same time they look at two slides depicting phenomena related to the life of plants. Images in the slides are accompanied by inscriptions in Catalan. In this multilingual setting, the conversational analysis of talk-in-interaction reveals that participants orient themselves to the science content and the language of instruction as the medium of interaction. Showing attention to the questions formulated by the teacher and the information presented on the computer screen, students co-construct their answers by choral responses and by completing utterances initiated by a classmate. Students pay also attention to the language of instruction echoing the repairs made by the teacher and repairing their classmates.