Creating learning opportunities through cultural categories: a sequential categorization analysis of multicultural cooking instruction

Abstract This study investigates how immigrant teachers and local Taiwanese students collaboratively construct cultural categories to create learning opportunities in a Southeast Asian cooking class. The data consist of 12.5 h of video recordings from an adult learning center. Drawing on sequential categorization analysis, the study examines how participants invoke formulation-, turn-, and sequence-generated cultural categories to organize epistemic authority and establish what counts as learnable knowledge. Three interactional practices are identified through which participants mobilize cultural categories to teach and learn about Southeast Asian cuisines: (a) generalizing features of Southeast Asian culinary practices, (b) constructing analogies bridging Taiwanese and Southeast Asian cuisines, and (c) contrasting observed Southeast Asian cooking with Taiwanese practices. These practices are accomplished through multimodal coordination, particularly gaze shifts that expand or change participation frameworks to index cultural distinction or affiliation. The findings extend research on identity construction in instruction beyond language learning contexts, revealing how cultural categories function as mutually constructed epistemic frameworks that simultaneously organize epistemic authority and create learning opportunities – making visible the category-bound predicates through which participants facilitate the learning of culture-specific culinary practices in situ.