Teachers’ embodied allocations in instructional interaction

This paper describes how teachers employ gaze, head nods and pointing gestures in allocating response turns to students in whole-class instructional interaction. Specifically, it focuses on examining teachers’ embodied allocations – that is, turn-allocations produced (mostly) by embodied means – and the sequential positions in which they are performed within the tripartite instructional sequence of IRE. While prior studies have noted their use in classroom interaction, the way in which they are drawn on by teachers has not been examined in detail. By using conversation analysis in conjunction with the study of embodied interaction, this article aims to show how these ephemeral embodied resources become interactionally meaningful for participants in managing speaker change and negotiating participation in multi-party classroom interaction. The findings show how teachers’ embodied allocations are contingently produced and sensitively timed in relation to the unfolding interaction and the emerging participation frameworks. They also manifest how teachers occasionally produce embodied allocations simultaneously with talk so that they perform two interactional tasks at the same time, thereby showing a momentary ‘division of labour’ in operation between the two modalities.