This study examined teachers’ claims of entitlement in collaborative teaching sequences where the non-leading teacher enters into the domain of another teacher’s ongoing instructional business. The data involves video recordings of second-grade elementary Korean and American teachers co-teaching math and science lessons. The analysis reveals that directives were prevalent in teacher-teacher communication, and unilaterally involved the Korean teacher making corrective remarks of American teacher’s instructions or entering to take control of classroom management. The directives were also formulated as declarative interrogatives, proposals, and imperatives, which implied the Korean teacher’s high entitlement. Also when the Korean teacher’s directive was not met with immediate compliance, it escalated into a more demanding imperative. These findings reveal the differential institutional status and power balance between the two teachers and demonstrate the analytical gains of applying conversation analysis to co-teaching interactional data. Potential implications for teacher training are discussed in light of collegiality and complementary collaborative teaching.

This study aligns with the recent calls in L2 Willingness to Communicate (WTC) research that mark a shift from viewing WTC as a static, trait-like variable to a construct that is dynamic, fluid, and situational. To accomplish this aim, this study collected both interactional and interview data to examine the situational changes of an ESL learner’s WTC. The data was from two courses – one ESL course, and one academic graduate seminar – collected during the participant’s first semester at an American university. The findings show that the participant’s WTC fluctuates according to the course topic, interlocutors, group size, and the anxiety level of the L2 speaker. These findings imply that teachers in L2 classrooms need to take into consideration the various situational factors that promote or inhibit WTC. Other than these pedagogical implications, the study also offers a methodological framework for documenting situational WTC by means of combining interviews with conversation analysis of interactional data.

Lee, Josephine. 2018. “Preference Organization as a Characterization Device in TV Sitcoms.” The Sociolinguistics Journal of Korea 26(2), 167~193. This study employs conversation analysis to examine how preference organization is exploited as a characterization device in the American sitcom, The Big Bang Theory. The analysis shows that by enacting exaggerated and overt forms of preferred actions, the relationship and personalities of the main characters are constructed in a particular light. By focusing on dispreferred turns, and especially the violations of them, the analysis also demonstrates that preference organization is used to configure the main characters as “funnily abnormal nerds” while achieving the sitcom's purpose of providing entertainment and humor. These findings shed light on the workings of fictional dialogue and the specific resources used to accomplish different identity displays of sitcom characters.

The present study examines the interactional organization of EFL collaborative teaching interaction by focusing on the teachers’ co-initiation turns. Drawing on conversation analysis, the aim is to produce a fine-grained description of the interactional structure that sets coteaching apart from those of single-teacher classroom interactions. More importantly, the article also seeks to promote a deeper understanding on effective practices that teachers draw on to collaboratively manage their local classroom contingencies, coordinate student participation, and ultimately, to move towards accomplishing the curricular focus of the lesson. The analysis highlights that through the conjoined initiation turns, the teachers were able to elicit the instantaneous participation from the students to present in front of the classroom. In addition, by adjusting and reformulating the scope of each other’s initiation turns, they are also able to efficiently guide the students toward providing the correct response. Such collaboration, as it occurs in situ in the classroom, realizes a particular type of interactional competence that requires close and sensitive monitoring of both the students’ and the other co-teacher’s actions.

The present study investigates the effect of peer evaluation tasks on learners’ noticing and production of prominence. Attention is placed on the students’ noticing episodes during the task, and whether the student utilizes what is noticed into their re-recordings to achieve more intelligible speech. The results reveal that the students directed their attention to the features of prominence, with metalinguistic reflections evident in their transcriptions and exchanges of evaluative comments. The students’ first and second recordings were then assessed by four native speakers based on five criteria: comprehensibility, rhythm, stress, intonation, and perceived naturalness. The ratings indicated that the students’ second recordings were evaluated lower in intelligibility and were regarded as being unnatural, forced, and overly exaggerated in their production of prominence. Lastly, qualitative analyses of the audio revealed that the post-task recordings involved an increased frequency of stress production, but the exaggerated prosodic qualities in pitch, elongation, and volume may have been contributing factors leading to lower intelligibility.

Lee, Mijin Josephine Mijin. 2014. Metaphor use in TED Talks: Implications for EFL. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 22(2), 65-90. This study examines the use of metaphor in TED talks with respect to its density, distribution, and functions. Adopting a cognitively-informed discourse framework of metaphor studies, the present paper quantifies and explicates the extent to which metaphors are mapped across the different disciplines of Art/Humanities, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and Technology. Also analyzed is the distribution of metaphor across word classes as well as the discursive functions that they work to achieve. The findings indicate that TED Talks are dense with metaphoric lexical units regardless of the type of scholarly discipline. When considering the distribution across word classes, however, diverging patterns in the metaphoric use of nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, and determiners create a dividing line among certain disciplines as in Humanities/Art and Technology. The functions of these metaphors are also described in terms of representational, interpersonal, and textual use. Potential implications for EFL teaching as derived from the analysis are discussed at the end. (155)