‘Can anyone help her?’: Managing Student Embarrassment in the Adult ESL Classroom

This paper investigates how an English as a second language (ESL) teacher manages student embarrassment in the adult ESL classroom. Data consist of approximately 4 hours of video-recorded classroom interactions at a low-intermediate adult ESL class in the United States. Participants include a female teacher and eight adult English learners of various L1 backgrounds. Using conversation analysis, this paper describes several ways in which the teacher orients to potential displays of student embarrassment during classroom interactions: (1) excusing the failure and inviting peer support, (2) excusing the failure and providing a factual account, and (3) attributing the failure to creativity. The findings of this study contribute to the growing literature on contingency in teacher talk (e.g. Waring, 2016; Waring, Reddington, & Tadic, 2016) by identifying a set of teaching practices teachers can use to remediate student embarrassment. The study also contributes to the limited literature on embarrassment in interaction (e.g. Heath, 1988; Sandlund, 2004) by examining the sequential environments of embarrassment in the adult ESL classroom, the characteristics of and orientations to embarrassment, and how such sequences are made relevant by the participants in classroom talk-in-interaction

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