Bringing the expert to the fore: Learner practices for reproducing teachers' institutional identity during teacher-led and open pair-work interactions

Within the institution of the language classroom, participants for the most part display their orientations to the institution-specific identities of expert and novice on a turn-by-turn basis so as to materialize teaching and learning as the institutional business of this setting. While existing conversation analytic (CA) studies have shown how the institutional identities of expert and novice are constructed in language classrooms, little attention has been given to how language learners may actively bring these identities to the fore through interactional practices. Drawing on 22 h of video-recordings from Iranian EFL classrooms, our study illustrates how language learners reproduce their teachers' identity as experts during both teacher-led and peer interactions. Our analysis showcases two practices through which learners accomplish this: (1) downgrading certainty; and (2) displaying insufficient knowledge. Our findings also indicate that the teachers respond to such learner practices by either aligning with the preferred action projected by learners' turns, or departing from it through the enactment of their institutionally sanctioned rights. In this study, we refer to the former as negotiable , and the latter as non-negotiable aspects of teachers' expert identity. We further argue that teachers' orientations to negotiable or non-negotiable aspects of their expert identity are contingent on the pedagogical goals of the moment. Our study thus sheds light on how learners may actively make relevant institutional identities and how teachers respond to such learner practices in keeping with the pedagogical goals of the ongoing classroom interaction.