The Body and Practiced Language Policies in EMI and CLIL Classrooms

This chapter provides a multimodal account of how language choice is managed in bilingual classrooms. Drawing on EMI and CLIL classroom recordings in Turkey and Finland, respectively, this Conversation Analytic (CA) study explores how participants observably orient to the teacher’s gestures, facial expressions, and movement in the classroom space as they negotiate the medium of classroom interaction. Earlier research on practiced language policies has tended to focus the analysis on talk, but this chapter demonstrates how the human body can also offer important resources for constructing, calibrating, and making sense of a language policy interactively. Findings contribute to a growing body of research on language choice practices in bilingual classrooms, in particular, and on Conversation Analytic research on classroom interaction in general.