LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES IN THE NEW COMMUNICATIVE ORDER OF CONTEMPORARY CLASSROOM TALK-IN-INTERACTION: SPANISH IN SECONDARY EDUCATION

ABSTRACT We examine learning opportunities in contemporary classroom talk-in-interaction. The data were generated from March to October 2012 and consist of observations captured in field notes and transcripts of segments of 11 hours of audiovisual records of talk-in-interaction during Spanish language classes in Group 10 of the second year of secondary education in a public school in Porto Alegre. In the interaction in this classroom, at least some students constantly engage, amongst themselves and with the teacher, in lively participation, which, following Rampton (2006), we refer to as characteristic of the new communicative order of contemporary classrooms. Non-canonical participation by students during Group 10 classes shows participants (also) engaged in doing learning. The ethnographic account, closely attentive to the actions of participants, suggests that there are indeed learning opportunities in the new communicative order in which Group 10 participants interact: 1) there is participation by some students through self-selection to speak (often in exuberant participation); and 2) there is engagement by all in the class agenda, which is evident either in self-selection to speak by some, or in the attention paid by all to a what takes place in the main floor of talk-in-interactional activity. We argue that students in Group 10 are attentively participating in the curricular agenda within the organization of the new communicative order. Participants orient to the Spanish language as an object of learning and some produce actions around and through that object, for example, when challenging the teacher, thus displaying evidence of doing learning. More than showing that participants are having opportunities to perform through exuberant participation in contemporary classroom interaction, we argue that the interactants in Group 10 are demonstrating to each other that they are engaged (also) in doing learning as they use the target language and construct social action of doing Spanish language classes in the new communicative order.