Talking in Sync: How Linguistic Synchrony Shapes Teacher-Student Conversation in English as a Second Language Tutoring Environment

Linguistic synchrony, or alignment, has been shown to be critical for student learning, particularly for L2 students (second language learners), whose patterns of synchrony often differ from fluent speakers due to proficiency constraints.While many studies have explored various dimensions of synchrony in global language tutoring contexts, there is a gap in understanding how linguistic synchrony evolves dynamically over the course of a tutoring session and how tutors' pedagogical strategies influence this process.This study incorporates three dimensions of synchrony-lexical, syntactic, and semantic-along with tutors' dialogue acts to evaluate their association with student performance using multivariate time-series analysis.Results indicate that lower-performing L2 students tend to lexically align with their tutor more consistently in the long term and with higher intensity in the short term.In contrast, higher-performing students demonstrate greater alignment with the tutor in syntactic and semantic dimensions.Furthermore, the dialogue acts of eliciting, scaffolding, and enquiry were found to play the strongest roles in influencing synchrony and impacting learning outcomes.