The role of teacher gaze in speaking turns during interactive book reading: a multiple case mobile-eye-tracking study

Gaze is foregrounded as a central interactional resource positioning individuals as speakers or bystanders. In early childhood education (ECE), where direct involvement in interactions with the teacher is central to language development and where unequal participation may lay the groundwork for far-reaching processes of educational inequality, research into gaze remains scarce. This study, including six teachers and thirty children, examines variation in children’s involvement during book reading activities and analyses how teachers shape these conversational dynamics. Using epistemic network analysis alongside multimodal quantitative and qualitative conversation analyses, this study provides a fine-grained account of multimodal turn-taking. The findings reveal unequal distribution of teacher attention, resulting in unequal opportunities for children to participate. Results revealed a relationship between teachers’ fixations (i.e. sustained moments of visual attention) and both teachers’ and children’s speaking turns, underscoring the central importance of gaze in conversational dynamics in classrooms. Conversation analysis further shows that children’s participation is largely teacher-driven, with most child turns being initiated by the teacher. Overall, the results indicate interactional inequalities in ECE.