Language negotiating students? Evidence from classroom vocal tract interactivity
Hear Simon Harrison discuss changes in vocal tract interactivity when students encounter unfamiliar words in an academic classroom.
Language negotiating students? Evidence from classroom vocal tract interactivity
02 Jun 2025, 16:30 – 18:00
In a classic ‘language-related episode’, students working in pairs or groups encounter, negotiate, and resolve an issue with language traditionally seen as the object of their meta-talk.
Sense-making perspectives, on the other hand, help to appreciate that such students are discovering and exploring the affordance layouts of new perceptual experiences of the enlanguaged world with which we are all entangled.
In this seminar, Simon will develop this perspective with material from an academic English classroom at a university in China. This analysis involves repeated viewings and transcriptions of sense-making behaviour, especially speech as whole-bodily gesture. It focuses on a surge in student group vocal tract interactivity that occurs as an unfamiliar wording from the textbook begins reverberating through this classroom.
This event will be particularly useful for educators and researchers working in language education.
Related links
- International Centre for Intercultural Studies seminar series
- International Centre for Intercultural Studies
- Department of Culture, Communication and Media
Image
Katerina Holmes via Pexels.
Dr Simon Harrison
Associate Professor in the Department of English
City University of Hong Kong
His research explores relational and embodied understandings of language, communication, and culture across different scales and settings, with a specific focus on gesture.
Further information
Related events
Beyond business as usual (but greener) politics
Global citizenship education and the principles of degrowth and interdependence.
The banality of citizenship: Nationalism, labour and mobility controls
Bridget Anderson will argue that recognising the banality of citizenship can help to reframe debates on migration.
Multi-agency safeguarding hubs: An implementation and process evaluation
Ro Méndez-Pineda and Jenny Woodman highlight some of the complexities in relation to information-sharing and decision-making relating to their study of Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hubs in England.