‘LEARNING MOMENTS’ AS INSPECTABLE PHENOMENA OF INQUIRY IN A SECOND LANGUAGE CLASSROOM

Abstract

Learning is an omnipresent feature of social life. However, in educational fields, learning is often studied through indirect instruments, such as surveys, interviews and coding schemes. In this paper, a praxiological approach to observe learning moments is proposed. This means that learning moments are not explored here through schematic reporting or statistical evaluations, but as accountable and inspectable phenomena as they became available in the corpus explored. Using a video-recorded fragment of interaction that occurred during a second language (L2) class in a primary school in Macau (China), the practical, collaborative instructed experiences of participants (teacher and students) in a lesson are analysed. It was observed that classroom participants attend to the categorial and sequential features of learning environments, which provide the contextual details that afford members’ realization of phenomena as learning moments. Stated differently, learning moments should not be confused with the successful accomplishment of a lesson plan just to satisfy programmatic (and disciplinary) requirements, but as something produced and accountable by participants as learning in and through their very practices of concerted interaction. As learning moments are ubiquitous characteristics of educational environments, the discussion of the results has pedagogical implications for teacher training, and for the assessment of teaching. Keywords: conversation analysis, ethnomethodology, learning moments, membership categorization, social competence, turn-allocated categories