Explanations in Pedagogical Interaction

As a method and a framework, conversation analysis (CA) has been used to uncover the tacit methods participants use to accomplish a variety of social actions, such as offering, promising, giving advice, complaining, and disagreeing. This forum explores one such action, explaining, within the context of pedagogical interaction due to its ubiquity and relevance to the project of teaching and learning. While every discipline seems to have developed critical and extensive guidance (e.g., in the form of manuals, textbooks, and curricula) on what should be taught and, by extension, explained, CA is uniquely positioned to shed light on the “how” of explanations as it shifts the analytical spotlight to how participants (e.g., students and teachers, tutees and tutors) make sense of and respond to each turn of talk. After all, teachers and tutors are not simply delivering a laundry list of facts; they are addressing the here and now, unplanned demands of learners as they arise in interaction. This forum thus aims to draw more attention to the moment-to-moment work that participants engage in when producing such explanations.