Can you see what I mean? A multimodal approach to interactional competence in English-Medium Instruction

Abstract

Driven by internationalisation, few would argue that English has become the professional lingua franca in numerous fields, as well as in academic instruction (Dafouz & Nuñez, 2009). One way universities prepare citizens for the globalised world and labour market, is by giving access to the international community through programmes taught partially or entirely in English (Cots et al., 2012). This strategy has led to the implementation of English-Medium Instruction (EMI) in higher education across Europe. However, concerns have been raised about the effectiveness of English as the lingua franca (ELF) of instruction in achieving optimal outcomes in higher education contexts (Jenkins, 2011, Seidlhofer, 2009). Therefore, this thesis aims to investigate the quality of pedagogy in the EMI classroom by looking mainly at how teachers construct the space for learning and how content knowledge is built. The overarching research objective of this doctoral dissertation is to analyse teacher-student interactional competence, understood broadly as the successful collaboration between participants to construct a sphere of shared meaning (Young, 2011), through the mobilisation of multimodal resources in an English-Medium university lecture where ELF is used for instruction. This thesis aims (1) to provide a deep understanding of how semiotic resources, in particular embodied modes, are naturally deployed in ELF-EMI settings, and (2) to explore the affordances and impact of these modes as meaning-making systems in the context of internationalised higher education. This phenomenon is brought into focus through three main interrelated theoretical lenses: (1) the university classroom as an interactional event (Goffman, 1981), (2) multimodality, as a situated meaning-making system (Jewitt et al., 2016), and (3) interactional competence (Young, 2011). Theoretical depth of interactional competence and multimodality was sought through the neurocognitive theory of mirror neurons (Gallese, 2001; Iacoboni et al., 2005) as they relate to the Merleau-Pontian notion of corporal intersubjectivity (Escribano, 2004; Tanaka, 2017). A data corpus of audio-visual material was collected from EMI lectures given in the English-track Dentistry Program mainly, at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences of a private Catalan University in the greater Barcelona area. The 5 lecturers that participated in this study are content specialists in the area of science. At the time of data collection, two lecturers had a CEFR English proficiency level below B2, whilst the other three lecturers had a level over B2, whereas students registered a C1+ level on admission to the university programs. Multimodal interactional analysis (Norris, 2004) provided a systemic approach to organising, producing and analysing the datasets. A fine-grained analysis of classroom interaction was approached from a perspective of notions inspired by conversation analysis, such as the long turn (Sacks et al., 1974), the recipient design (Pekarek-Doehler, 2002; Sacks et al., 1974) and participation frameworks (Goffman, 1981; Goodwin & Goodwin, 2004). The process and products of analysis resulted in transcripts of talk (Schegloff, 2007) and image vignettes capturing movement trajectories, formats in which the data are presented. The analysis showed the pivotal role of embodied actions to construct spaces for learning, manage classroom interaction, elicit participation, transfer speakership rights, provide nuance and precision to talk, build rapport, express solidarity, establish and mitigate expressions of institutional power, create a shared classroom experience, evaluate student contributions and co-construct subject matter knowledge. The results of this thesis illustrate ELF-EMI teachers’ interactional competence through embodied actions, demonstrating that multimodal resources are not an accessory in pedagogy, but form a fundamental meaning-making system in the enactment of teaching in internationalised university classrooms, such as those of this study.