Disciplinary knowledge-building in EMI classroom interaction: a multi-framework approach

This study examines disciplinary knowledge-building in classroom interaction in a 3rd-year English-medium instruction (EMI) chemistry classroom in a Japanese university. It uses a multi-framework analytical approach, which integrates the construct of Cognitive Discourse Functions (CDFs), a multimodal conversation analytic approach to classroom interaction, and Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) dimension of Semantics, more specifically the concepts of unpacking/repacking, semantic gravity, and semantic density. The fine-grained analysis demonstrates that knowledge-building is accomplished through the coordinated interplay of CDF sequences, multimodal resources (talk, gestures, inscriptions on the whiteboard), and the processes of knowledge unpacking, all of which enact dynamic shifts in semantic gravity and semantic density. The study contributes methodologically to EMI research by demonstrating the value of the multi-framework approach to knowledge-building in classroom interaction. It also contributes theoretically to LCT by providing a revisualised representation of the notion of the semantic plane and by further reconceptualising unpacking as a multidirectional process across levels of abstraction. It further offers more dynamic models of semantic movement as multiple, non-linear pathways, each of which might contain local repacking moves. The study concludes with a series of implications for EMI practice and teacher education.