Quick body torque toward blackboard at third position: Teachers’ material practice in classroom interaction

Abstract

Although scholars have illustrated various embodied and material practices in social interactions, they have faced challenges documenting specific collection-based practices across different datasets. Analyzing classroom institutions as an exemplary setting, this paper documents a recurrent embodied and material practice regarding a teacher's use of a blackboard. Specifically, we examined teachers' mobile body torque toward the blackboard at the third position, which signals a positive evaluation of a student's response in the initiation (first)–response (second)–evaluation (third) sequence, known as IRE. Using video recordings of five English-language classrooms in Japan, we conducted multimodal conversation analysis on IRE sequences within a knowledge-check activity involving a blackboard. The activity was organized around teachers' known-answer questions directed to the students. When the teachers obtained a “correct” answer from a student, they quickly moved their bodies toward the blackboard to write the answer while withholding verbal evaluation. At this sequential moment, the teacher's body torque toward the blackboard projects a positive evaluation, along with other embodied conducts, such as a head nod. Terming this practice as the “embodied-material projecting third,” we will demonstrate the recurrence of this embodied and material practice across classrooms. In conclusion, we will discuss how the evaluative action is multimodally constructed through the interplay of the teacher's bodily placement and material engagement in classroom ecology. The data are in Japanese with English translations.