Textbook-Mediated Teacher Talk in Social Studies Lessons at Primary School

This study investigates a teacher's use of a textbook in a primary school social studies course. It focuses on the moments when the teacher looks at the textbook during classroom interaction and how this practice promotes and shapes the interaction. Using conversation analysis, it provides new insights into the classroom discourse with reference to how the textbook supports the teacher talk. The corpus consists of 17 hours of video-recorded, naturally occurring classroom interaction. The analysis shows that the teacher extends her turn by using the content of the textbook at different moments of the interaction, such as the question and answer sequence and the lecture sequence. It also shows that the teacher experiences multitasking in the classroom by following the textbook while continuing with another classroom activity. Overall, this study fills a gap in the field by focusing on the use of the textbook in organizing classroom interaction.