A multimodal analysis of pair work engagement episodes: Implications for EMI lecturer training

Abstract

Lecturers' abilities to use semiotic resources to construct meaning and to create engagement play an important role in university classrooms where English is the medium of instruction (EMI). The main focus of this study is on how EMI lecturers enrolled in a professional development program use semiotic and interpersonal resources to engage students through pair work activities. Two analyses were conducted on a dataset of twelve micro-teaching sessions extracted from an EMI teacher training corpus. The first analysis identified the moves and pedagogical functions lecturers instantiated while carrying out engagement episodes (EEs). The findings of this analysis served to design the “Pair work engagement episodes framework”, which includes five basic moves: 1) contextualizing, 2) setting up, 3) monitoring, 4) eliciting, and 5) summarizing. The second analysis illustrated how the pedagogical functions found in each move of four EEs were constructed multimodally through verbal and non-verbal communicative modes (i.e., spoken, written, non-verbal materials, space, and posture). The pair work EEs framework and the multimodal analysis lend support to strategies that may be implemented in EMI professional development programs to enhance lecturers’ multimodal interactional competence.