An Investigation of Communicative Interactions and Identities in an EFL Classroom: A Case Study in Southeastern Turkey

In communicative settings, participants engage in some kinds of small interactive manners in natural classroom context, and they indicate their language learning potential via multimodal aspects such as using hand movements, gestures, mimics, eye contact, etc. The current study examines the interactions of learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) in natural classroom contexts to investigate how their learner identities reflect in their multimodal interactions. The study is comprised of two cycles; the piloting cycle which lasted three weeks with twenty-six participants, and the main cycle which lasted seven weeks with sixteen participants. The general data collection tools for both cycles are video-audio recordings and interviews (Stimulated Recall Interviews- SRIs). During the data collection period, the participants were asked to participate interactively in the classroom discussions every week around the topics that were previously selected by the researcher. Each of these sessions were video recorded; then the transcripts of them were prepared and analyzed qualitatively based on the conversation and multimodal conversation analyses. SRIs were conducted each week during data collection process in order to provide a chance for participants to view their interactions during the conversations in both piloting and main cycles. The results revealed that the participants were able to develop and indicate some kinds of learner identities such as turn-taking learner identity (which can also be attributed to their knowing learner identity, and social learner identity), unknowing learner identity silent learner identity, and cultural identity. One of the most common observation throughout the study was the participants ‗teacher-dependent learner‟ identity. This can be interpreted as an urgent necessity for teachers to develop themselves professionally so that they would know how to transform their teaching pedagogy into a more effective and learner centred one. It is believed that the findings of this study offer some useful suggestions for further studies which would employ Conversation Analysis (CA) and Multimodal Conversation Analysis (MCA) to investigate other aspects of interactions in EFL contexts under different lenses. Keywords: conversation analysis, multimodal conversation analysis, interaction, identity.