Observing a teacher ’ s interactional competence in an ESOL classroom: a translanguaging perspective

: Research on translanguaging practices in multilingual contexts has explored how translanguaging highlights the multilingual and multicultural nature of social interactions and its transformative nature in transgressing established norms and boundaries. This article aims to provide an alternative view of interactional competence by connecting it to the notion of translanguaging and its emphasis on the active deployment of multiple linguistic, semiotic, and sociocultural resources in a dynamic and integrated way. We argue for extending the notion of interactional competence as we suggest that translanguaging is the practice of drawing on a speaker ’ s interactional competence for constructing new con ﬁ gurations of language practices for communicative purposes. Such a conceptualization reinforces the meaning-making process as a locally emergent phenomenon and a jointly accomplished social action. It also conceptualizes the undertaking of co-constructing social interactions as a process of translanguaging whereby interactants need to seek out available multilingual and multimodal resources and make strategic choices among these resources in order to achieve their social actions on a moment-by-moment basis. This article utilizes Sequential-Categorial Analysis, which combines Multi-modal Conversation Analysis and Membership Categorisation Analysis, in its analysis of classroom video recordings of vocabulary instruction in a beginner-level adult English-for-Speakers-of-Other-Languages classroom in order to demonstrate our argument.


Introduction
Interactional competence (IC) refers to 'the ability to mutually coordinate our actions' (Hall and Pekarek Doehler 2011, p. 2), which involves 'a relationship between participants' employment of linguistic and interactional resources and the contexts in which they are employed' (Young 2003, p. 100).The conceptualization of IC has undergone three main stages: (1) defining IC as the ability for functional language use (Kramsch 1986), (2) explicating sequential indicators of IC (Lam 2018;Roever and Kasper 2018) and ( 3) exploring the multidimensional nature of IC that focuses on its real-world functionality (Dai 2021a, forthcoming).Although research on IC has gained increasing specification of what effective interaction constitutes, existing IC studies tend to see interaction and its related language use as confined to a specific named language, such as second language (L2)-English or L2-Chinese IC.This conceptualization of language use under-represents the inherent translanguaging nature of interaction, where language users freely draw on their multilingual and multimodal repertoire to achieve real-world interactional conduct (see Routarinne and Ahlholm 2021 for an example).Further research is therefore needed to recognize the fluid nature of language use for successful interaction, exploring the wide range of multilingual and multimodal sign-making practices in the process of transcending the traditional divides between linguistic and non-linguistic, cognitive and semiotic systems (Li 2018).The fluidity of interaction connects the field of IC with the growing translanguaging scholarship that investigates the process of mobilizing diverse resources for meaning-making by language users.Translanguaging is an emerging concept that refers to the process where speakers draw on their full linguistic and semiotic resources to make meaning (Li 2018).Translanguaging aims to transcend the boundaries between different named languages and also between different modalities (e.g.speech, sign, gesture).Research on translanguaging practices in multilingual contexts has explored how translanguaging has highlighted the multilingual, multicultural, and multimodal nature of social interactions and its transformative nature in transgressing established norms and boundaries (e.g., Allard 2017;Tai 2022aTai , 2022b;;Tai and Li 2020, 2021a, 2021b, 2021c;Zhu and Li 2022).
The aim of the current study is to offer an alternative view of IC by connecting it to the notion of translanguaging and its emphasis on the mobilization of various multilingual and multimodal resources for transcending socially constructed language systems and structures to facilitate meaning-making processes.This paper will examine how translanguaging is intrinsic to IC in facilitating the co-construction of meaning-making in a beginning-level English-for-Speakers-of-Other-Languages (ESOL) classroom, where students have limited English proficiency and where limited linguistic resources are shared between the teacher and the students.When analysing the ESOL classroom video-data, we adopted Sequential-Categorial Analysis.As interaction is concurrently sequential and categorial (Kasper 2009;Stokoe 2012;Watson 1997), we argue for the use of Sequential-Categorial Analysis since it combines Conversation Analysis (sequential) and Membership Categorization Analysis (categorial) (for more details see Dai 2021aDai , 2023a, forthcoming), forthcoming).Sequential-Categorial Analysis allows us to look at how language teachers and students employ translanguaging practices to manage complex interactional conduct related to sequence, affect, logic, morality and categorization.It is hoped that the paper will broaden the understanding of IC by including the element of translanguaging as an interactional phenomenon.Such a perspective highlights that language users' ability to become competent speakers is predicated on the marshalling of a range of semiotic resources for mediating complex social activities.

Interactional competence and social interactions
IC as a theoretical construct, first appeared in Kramsch (1986) in response to the proficiency-oriented practices in second language (L2) teaching and testing.Recognizing language use is socioculturally embedded and interactionally shaped, Kramsch argued that L2 teaching and testing needed to move away from prevalent proficiency models where language was compartmentalized into discrete components such as grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation.Instead, Kramsch proposed that language education should prioritize the development of L2 speakers' ability to mobilize their knowledge and resources in grammatical structures, lexical items, and prosodic features to conduct real-world interactional business, termed their IC.
Taking up the call in Kramsch (1986) and drawing on the analytic methodology of Conversation Analysis (CA), IC researchers, over the following three decades have generated a plethora of empirical research to shed light on what L2 IC entails (Hall et al. 2011), how L2 IC develops (Pekarek Doehler et al. 2018), how to teach L2 IC (Dai 2023b;Dai et al. 2022;Wong and Waring 2020) and how to assess L2 IC (Dai 2021a;Salaberry and Burch 2021).
Although the majority of research on IC prioritizes L2 speakers, this does not imply that only L2 speakers need to develop IC, an ability that every competent interactant, L1 or L2 speaker of any language, need to possess in order to navigate the complexity of interpersonal communication in their everyday social world.It is especially telling when growing evidence suggests that L1 speakers in certain cases pale in comparison to their L2 peers on measures of IC (Dai 2019(Dai , 2021a(Dai , 2021b;;Roever and Dai 2021).So far there has been little empirical research that specifically focuses on L1 speakers' IC apart from the theoretical discussion on how L1 IC mediates L2 IC (Barraja-Rohan 2013;Pekarek Doehler and Pochon-Berger 2015).Within the context of classroom interaction, Walsh (2006) coined the term 'Classroom Interactional Competence' which emphasizes IC as a resource that both language learners and their teachers can draw on to promote learning in the classroom, without specifying whether the teachers are L1 or L2 speakers of the target language.This conceptualization of classroom IC provides space for the discussion of L1 teachers' IC, although most classroom IC studies either did not mention their teachers' L1/L2 status (Can Daşkın 2015; Konzett-Firth 2020), or only recruited L2-speaker teachers (Girgin and Brandt 2020).Situated in an ESOL classroom, the analysis presented in this paper examines L1-speaking teachers' IC.The focus on L1 IC in this paper can provide insight into the full range of semiotic resources L1 native English speakers draw on for effective interaction, complementing findings from existing research on L2 IC.
The burgeoning research in IC, whether foregrounding L2 interaction or the dynamics of classroom interaction, has contributed to increasing specification of IC as a theoretical construct.If we look at how the definition of IC has evolved, its theorization has gone through three stages.At its inception, Kramsch conceived IC as the ability for functional language use, ensuring L2 speakers' "survival as a tourist or a student to negotiating treaties" (p.366).IC's focus on real-world language use, instead of abstract linguistic knowledge such as grammar and vocabulary, aligns with the general communicative language movement spearheaded by Hymes's seminal work on communicative competence (Hymes 1972).This led to IC for a very long time being subsumed under models of communicative competence, which also included socio-cultural competence, linguistic competence, formulaic competence, strategic competence and discourse competence (Celce-Murcia 2007).During the first stage, IC was largely a concept in theory, awaiting empirical specification through appropriate methodological apparatuses.
The second stage of IC theorization is characterized by a proliferation of datadriven empirical studies that use CA to specify indicators of speakers' IC.Influenced by the primary concerns CA places on sequence, this stage of IC theorization primarily focused on sequential indicators of IC such as turn-taking, listener response, topic management, and preference organization (Kecskes et al. 2018;Lam 2018;Roever and Kasper 2018).This emphasis on the sequential aspect of interaction is observable in both developmental L2 IC research (Hall et al. 2011) and classroom IC research (Walsh 2012).
The third stage of IC theorization marks an increasing awareness of the multidimensional nature of interaction that is predicated on sequence but goes beyond sequence.Revisiting the ontological roots of IC in functional language use (Hymes 1972;Kramsch 1986) and drawing on the Goffmanian concept of speaking as a performance of self-presentation (Goffman 1956), Dai (2021a, forthcoming) proposes a holistic model of IC that is built on sequence, but has the capacity to describe the emotional, logical, moral, and categorial dimensions of interaction.A speaker's IC is defined as their ability in: managing affective engagement between themselves and their interlocutors (e.g., how to demonstrate alignment and affiliation with a story-teller in Stivers 2008) demonstrating logic in the organization of their talk (e.g., how speakers proffer accounts, explanations, and reasons when needed in Heritage 1988) preserving the moral order of interaction (e.g., how doctors respond when patients challenge their medical expertise in Turowetz and Maynard 2010) enacting and orienting to the social roles/membership categories that speakers take up in interaction (e.g., how speakers draw on their members' knowledge of how an employee is supposed to act vis-à-vis their manager in the workplace setting in Dai andDavey 2022, 2023, or how a senior member in society talks to a junior one in the Chinese community in Roever and Dai 2021)  Teacher's interactional competence reliably assessed using both qualitative and quantitative measures (Dai 2019(Dai , 2021a;;Roever and Dai 2021).This stage of IC research orients IC more explicitly to its realworld functionality, strengthening the connection between IC as a theoretical construct and its immediate, palpable consequentiality in everyday interactional conduct.Therefore, in this paper, we adopt this holistic, multi-dimensional definition of IC to examine teacher's interaction in the ESOL classroom as this IC model allows us to not only investigate language teachers' IC in sequential terms, but also how teachers manage rapport with their students (affect), explain linguistic concepts in a reasoned manner (logic), display positive personas (morality), and enact their fluid social roles vis-à-vis the roles their students take on (categorization).This conceptualization of IC differs from the one of Classroom Interactional Competence (Walsh 2012), which has a stronger focus on sequential indicators of IC such as turn-taking, repair and sequence organization.Despite the increasing theoretical explication and specification of IC as a construct, there is a lack of acknowledgement of the fluidity of interaction in IC research.Although existing IC research has emphasized the joint construction of social interaction and the functionality of language use, it has not illuminated the dynamic movement between communicative modes, frames, footings and resources.In this paper we argue the notion of translanguaging can further expand our understanding of IC and interaction in general as translanguaging highlights the intrinsically fluid nature of language use: language users freely draw on semiotic resources from different named languages and modalities to conduct interaction (see below section for further information).Interaction, therefore, is translanguaging in nature.An appreciation of the porousness of language use can more precisely describe everyday interactional practices, contributing to improved teaching and assessment of IC.Documenting longitudinally how an L1-Russian middle-childhood speaker develops IC in L2-Finish, Routarinne and Ahlholm (2021) demonstrate that the elaboration of the speaker's L2-Finish IC is couched in translanguaging practices, drawing on semiotic resources and enacted embodiment from named languages such as Russian, English, and Finnish.In this paper, we, therefore, argue that the discussion of IC can productively draw from the current debate in translanguaging to better capture the "multiplicity, fluidity, mobility, locality and globality of semiotic resources" (Moore et al. 2018) that speakers employ for interactional conduct.

Translanguaging as a theory of language
The concept of translanguaging involves drawing on various multilingual resources and different multimodal resources for knowledge construction.In other words, speakers not only deploy different languages and dialects but also styles, registers, and other variations in language use for constructing new meanings.Additionally, speakers draw on diverse multimodal resources, including switching between speaking and writing, or coordinating gestures, body movements, facial expressions and visual images for shaping their verbal talk.The translanguaging perspective differs from the traditional view of code-switching (Li 2018).The notion of codeswitching perceives each language as a separate linguistic system and codeswitching analysis typically starts with the identification of different linguistic codes during discursive exchanges.Linguists then follow a functional analysis in order to understand the process of integrating various grammatical systems into a coherent unit and the functions of shifting from one language to another at a specific point of the communicative episode.However, the concept of translanguaging encourages researchers to interrogate the traditional divides between the linguistic, the paralinguistic and the extralinguistic aspects of human communication as problematic.It advocates language as a social practice and as an assemblage of meaning-making resources.
With the development of translanguaging as a theory of language, Li (2011) proposes the notion of 'translanguaging space' which refers to the act of translanguaging creating "a social space for the multilingual language user by bringing together different dimensions of their personal history, experience and environment; their attitude, belief, and ideology; their cognitive and physical capacity, into one coordinated and meaningful performance" (p.1223).Li's (2011) concept of a translanguaging space allows for the description and theorization of the fluidity of interaction.A translanguaging space can be created in and for social interaction which enables speakers to employ various linguistic and semiotic resources creatively and critically to challenge the traditional configurations, categories, and power structures, and construct new meanings (Li 2018).By doing so, a translanguaging space provides an opportunity for speakers to demonstrate their IC through coordinating multiple resources for achieving effective communication.As speakers become more engaged in complex communicative tasks, they gradually incorporate different resources for different purposes, which will lead to functional differentiation of various linguistic and other multimodal resources.It is therefore through translanguaging practices speakers develop the ability to interact and become competent social members.In this article, we build on Li's notions of translanguaging as a theory of language and argue that language users' capacity to learn to use diverse resources for different communicative purposes is a reflection of their IC.Such a capacity in coordinating different resources echoes the idea of a 'translanguaging instinct' (Li 2016) which highlights a speaker's innate capacity to exploit different multisensory and multimodal resources to interpret the meaning intentions in human social interactions and to achieve functional language use pertaining to the sequential, emotional, logical, moral and categorial dimensions of interaction.
Recent translanguaging research has conceptualized translanguaging as an analytical perspective which encourages researchers to focus on the range of linguistic and semiotic resources that a speaker can draw on to display their IC and create a translanguaging space for achieving real-world interactional business.As argued in the previous section, translanguaging enables speakers to bring out the full multilingual, multimodal, multi-semiotic and multi-sensory resources that a speaker has to conduct interaction.That is, interactants deploy all of the available resources at their disposal to achieve their specific communicative goals.In the context of English Medium Instruction (EMI) where students and teachers are encouraged to use only English as the only linguistic code to teach academic subjects, Tai and Li (2021a) illuminate the potential of playful talk in transforming the EMI classroom into a translanguaging space, which allows the teacher to bring in various linguistic and multimodal resources and different kinds of knowledge to perform a range of creative acts for facilitating content learning and promoting meaningful communication that values students' ideas and expressions of their everyday life experiences.Alternatively, Tai and Li (2020) illustrate the ways the EMI mathematics teacher constructs an integrated translanguaging space by bringing the student's everyday life space into the EMI institutional learning space in order to turn the classroom into a lived experience.This allows the teacher and students to bring their funds of knowledge to the forefront which makes the content knowledge more relatable and relevant to the student's everyday life experiences.A recent study by Tai and Wong (2022) provides a fine-grained account of how a native English teacher deploys translanguaging as a pedagogical resource to enable meaning-making and knowledge construction in an English-as-an-L1 classroom which only consists of L1 English students.The authors argue that translanguaging is not only used as a scaffolding strategy, but it is also employed as a way to develop students' social-emotional wellbeing and identities as citizens in this contemporary multilingual world.The authors further argue that creating a translanguaging space in English as an L1 classroom has a transformative effect on students' learning as it transforms the ways in which students enhance their communicative repertoire and appreciate linguistic and cultural diversity in our society.These studies demonstrate that the creation of a translanguaging space in the classroom enables EMI teachers to draw on their available multilingual and multimodal resources to facilitate students' understanding of disciplinary knowledge, which in turn demonstrates the teachers' IC in promoting interaction in the classrooms.

Participants and data collection
The paper draws on a classroom context, namely an ESOL adult classroom in the US, in order to examine how the teacher draws on her diverse linguistic (e.g.L1 and L2) and multimodal resources for constructing a translanguaging space in the ESOL classroom context.The ESOL classroom video-data for this study were drawn from the Multimedia Adult English Learner Corpus (MAELC).The data were collected at Portland Community College.This corpus was compiled to allow researchers to conduct longitudinal studies in studying the adult ESOL learners' language learning process (Reder 2005).The full corpus involved over 4,000 h of classroom interactions, recorded employing six video cameras in the classrooms.The whole corpus included 900 lessons.The segments of data selected for this study were collected from a beginning-level ESOL lesson in April 2002.The ESOL teacher was an experienced L1-English teacher who had studied German and Spanish at a US university.Focusing on an ESOL teacher that uses English as their L1 allows this paper to contribute to existing classroom IC research by highlighting the range of semiotic resources L1 speakers can employ for effective classroom interaction, which has not received enough attention in classroom IC literature.There were twenty-one adult learners of English enrolled in the class: two from Romania, nine from Latin American countries, one from Russia, three from Africa, six from China and one from Korea.

Sequential-Categorial Analysis
This study employs Sequential-Categorial Analysis to understand how an ESOL teacher employs multilingual and multimodal resources in the beginning-level ESOL classroom to demonstrate her IC in promoting interaction in the classrooms.As argued previously, in this paper we adopt the holistic model of IC from Dai's (2021a), a model that conceptualizes interaction at the sequential, emotional, logical, moral and categorial dimensions.This definition of IC converges with translanguaging's analytical focus on the rich semiotic resources speakers employ for meaning-making, but at the same time, calls for the combinational use of Multimodal Conversation Analysis (sequential) and Membership Categorization Analysis (categorial) to understand the functionality of language use (Dai 2021a(Dai , 2023a, forthcoming), forthcoming).
More specifically, Multimodal Conversation Analysis 'focuses on how social order is co-constructed by the members of a social group' (Brouwer and Wagner 2004, p. 30) through fine-grained analysis of social interaction.It takes an emic/participant-relevant approach (Markee and Kasper 2004) in order to explicate the detailed process of how social actions, such as learning, are co-organized and achieved through talk-in-interaction.Combining Multimodal Conversation Analysis with Membership Categorization Analysis (Stokoe 2012), the Sequential-Categorial Analysis we used in this study is concurrently sequential and categorial, the latter of which investigates the categorial aspect of interaction in terms of how speakers demonstrate their social roles and orient to the roles of their interlocutors.The use of Sequential-Categorial Analysis also allows us to more agilely investigate the other dimensions of interaction proposed in Dai (2021a, forthcoming)-namely the emotional, the logical and the moralas they are tied in with how speakers deploy sequential and categorial resources for interaction.A detailed methodological account of Membership Categorization Analysis can be found in Stokoe (2012).Data in this study were transcribed using Jefferson's (2004) transcription conventions.Multimodal transcription conventions developed by Mondada (2018) were employed to include descriptions of embodied conduct.The first stage of analysis involved taking a stance of 'unmotivated looking' (Mori 2004) as the guiding principle when reviewing the video-recordings.The first author watched multiple classroom videos with an open mind (i.e.without any particular interest in research focus) to discover any interesting interactional phenomenon that is worthy of further exploratory analysis.The segments of data selected for this study were collected from a beginning-level ESOL classroom from January to April 2002 (two lessons per week, each of which lasts 2 h).The first author started reviewing classroom video data that occurred on the 7th of January 2002, as it was the first day of the new teaching term.We did not review any lessons beyond the 29th of April as most of the students moved to the intermediate-level ESOL class in May 2002.After transcribing the data, both the first and second authors carried out line-by-line analyses to closely investigate various sequences-of-talk which entailed the teacher mobilizing diverse resources to facilitate classroom interaction.In order to ensure the reliability of the analysis, we make use of the next turn proof procedure (Schegloff 1992) and participant orientation for validating the analyst's claims (Tai 2022a).In other words, we as analysts are required to make observations based on the participants' observable orientations and understandings.

Analysis
In this section, we will analyse three extracts (Extracts 1-3) which are extracted from the beginning-level adult ESOL classroom.These extracts are representative instances of the interaction.The representative extracts are interrelated in order to illuminate how the teacher's translanguaging practices demonstrate their IC in fostering interaction in the classrooms (ten Have 1990).
Extract 1: Engaging in Embodied Enactment through Transitioning between the Instruction frame and Hypothetical frame Extract 1 is an example of how the ESOL teacher and students co-construct the meaning of 'after you' through engaging in embodied enactment in order to visualise the contextual meaning of 'after you' to other students.Prior to the extract, the teacher (T) was explaining the use of 'go ahead' and emphasizing that such a phrase could be used in situations where a person wishes to invite the other person to walk through ahead of him or her.However, T was relying on verbal utterances to explain the phrase and the students in the class were unsure about T's verbal explanation.At the beginning of this extract, student 9 (S9) and student 15 (S15) take the initiative to enact an imaginary scenario and practise using the target phrase in front of the class in order to demonstrate their conceptual understanding of the target phrase to T.
At the beginning of the extract, S15 and S9 are both standing next to the classroom door.In line 1, S15 utters 'together' and concurrently holds S9's left hand, which signals to the class that their forthcoming actions are going to be performative.T repeats S15's utterance which validates the previous turn as a moment for constructing an embodied enactment.At the same time, S15 opens the classroom door (line 3) and several students take the turns to indicate the forthcoming utterances that S15 will utter (i.e., 'go ahead') in lines 5-6.In line 7, S15 touches S9's shoulder and stretches out his right arm, lowering it to his knee as he invites S9 to 'go ahead' (line 7, figure #1).S9 follows S15's instruction and she walks out of the classroom (line 9).Simultaneously, T utters 'oh please go ahead' and points at S15 (line 9) and enunciates acknowledgement tokens 'yeah um hm' repeatedly (line 11) to indicate an assessment of S9's action of walking out of the classroom, which reflects S9's understanding of the meaning of 'go ahead' in this specific context (Girgin and Brandt 2020).
T initiates a new turn to provide additional information.She first announces S15's name and repeatedly says 'just for you' (line 13).She then walks to the whiteboard while speaking, orienting to the object.Such an action enacts her role (Roever and Dai 2021) as a teacher which sanctions the pedagogical moves that follow.In lines 15 and 17, T introduces the phrase 'after you' to the class and writes it down on the whiteboard.It is also revealing that in lines 17 and 21, S15 repeats 'after you' after the teacher in line 15, recognising the previous lines as teaching moments.
In lines 23-29, T attempts to create another imaginary context through embodied enactment.In line 23, she first indicates to the students that she attempts to give an 'example' to the class.She then stretches out her arms and bends her fingers quickly and verbally asks students to come forward which indicates to the class that the forthcoming actions are going to be performative.Here, T's recipient design practices are evidenced through her use of embodied actions and production of incomplete utterance, 'example (.) example (0.5) please come', for giving instructions to the students.T continues to give instructions to students in line 25 by using several incomplete constructions, such as 'here', 'yes', and a range of body movements, including touching S15's and S9's shoulders (figure #2) and then pointing S15 to stand at the right spot.T then constructs the imaginary context in an instructional frame as she walks towards the door and uses incomplete utterances to verbally explain to the students they 'go together' at the 'same time' (line 27).In line 29, T switches from an instructional frame to a hypothetical frame as she utters 'oh (0.5) after you'.As T extends her left arm and invites S9 to walk ahead of her while uttering 'after', S9 walks out of the classroom and thus the embodied enactment is collaboratively brought to a close.A number of students utter changeof-state tokens 'oh' and 'ah' in lines 31-32 (Heritage 1984) which displays their understanding of the enactment.
T indicates the completion of the enactment by providing a verbal explanation to the class (line 34).This indicates the shift back to the instructional frame.It is noted that T constructs a truncated sentence which aims to enable students to understand that she will now walk after S9.Several students, such as student 3 and student 14, deploy Spanish, their L1, in order to make sense of T's instruction and attempts to confirm their understanding of the meaning of 'after you' amongst themselves (lines 37 and 40).It is also noticeable that when T extends the verbal explanation, she categorizes S15 as a man for teaching.This is evidenced as she points at S15 and utters 'usually a man (0.6) a man is very' (line 47).S15 becomes a representation of a category for pedagogical purposes (Dai 2021a;Kasper 2009).In line 49, T enacts the action of making a tie (figure #3) and uses the word 'gallant' to describe a man's appearance.T then utters 'very polite' which completes the sentence that is constructed in line 47, which aims to scaffold the student's understanding of the adjective 'gallant'.This is possibly because this word can be deemed difficult for beginning-level students to grasp.T initiates a question for checking students' understanding by asking student 8 'you know gallant?' (line 51), but student 8 only laughs without offering a verbal response (line 53).In line 55, T shifts from an instructional frame to a hypothetical frame again in order to imitate a situation where a gentleman is allowing a woman to walk after him.T first utters a complete sentence 'I say after↓ you↑' with the use of intonation to highlight the imitation of a voice of a gentleman.She also slightly bends down, lowers her arms, and makes a 'welcoming' gesture with her hands (figures #4 and #5) to invite an imagined character to walk past her.It is indicated that T's embodied action draws on the shared category knowledge of what a gentleman will typically look like.This demonstrates T's ability to draw on participants' shared knowledge of categories in order to help students to understand the explanation of the target phrase (Dai et al. 2022).
In this extract, it is demonstrated how T deploys diverse linguistic resources (complete and incomplete utterance), multimodal resources and members' shared knowledge of categories to swiftly transition between the instruction frame and hypothetical frame for doing embodied enactment (Tai and Brandt 2018).This extract reveals T's strong competence in drawing on her linguistic and multimodal repertoire to co-construct imaginary contexts with her students for facilitating their learning of the target phrase and to make such social actions recognizable to her students.

Extract 2 (Extracts 2a and 2b): Remedying Epistemic Imbalances between ESOL Teacher and Student
Extract 2 is a typical example of how the students describe the meaning of the vocabulary items (VIs) and ask T to identify the vocabulary items for them.In this way, T is doing an explanation by offering the corresponding VIs to students and the teacher-student interaction is driven in large part to remedy knowledge imbalances between T and the students (Heritage, 2012).As shown, in Extract 2, T has the vocabulary knowledge to offer the corresponding VIs to S3 based on S3's description of the VIs.However, in comparison to Extract 1, T also has the semantic knowledge in providing the meaning of the unfamiliar VIs to students.The main difference between Extract 1 and Extract 2 is that while T has the vocabulary knowledge, S3 occupies a knowing (K+) epistemic status in having semantic knowledge of the VIs.In other words, Extract 2 highlights the ways in which vocabulary explanations are coconstructed by S3 and T in which S3 supplies the descriptions of the VIs and this information is connected together by T to form coherent vocabulary explanations (VEs) through offering the appropriate VIs in order to equalize the imbalance in knowledge.
Extract 2a: Prior to the extract, T explained the meaning of 'grandchildren'.S3 then explained that her grandson was twelve-years-old.
The extract begins with T orienting to the category of a conversational participant as she makes a personal comment regarding the age of S3's grandson.In line 1, T points to her chest when talking about "heart" and gesticulates the height of a kid when saying "a baby" (figure #6).Here, T coordinates non-verbal resources with linguistic resources in order to reinforce her opinion that S3 is treating her grandson as a 'baby' although he is thirteen years old.It is noticeable that S3 employs Spanish to initiate a new sequence (first-pair part, FPP) (Schegloff 1980) to introduce her daughter-in-law to the T ('my la nuera', line 3).Simultaneously, S3 first moves her chair backwards to provide her with the space to enact her gestures.Then S3 moves both of her hands forward and backwards repeatedly to visually form a shape of a semi-circle (figure 16).This iconic gesture refers to S3 daughter-in-law's pregnancy, but this is not immediately understood by T.
After a 0.5-s pause (line 4), T does not initiate a second pair-part (SPP) (Schegloff 1980), to acknowledge S3's utterance.Rather, T occupies an unknowing (K-) epistemic status and initiates a side-sequence (Schegloff 1980) to display her nonunderstanding of S3's utterance.This is demonstrated when T asks the question, 'my daughter?' in line 5. S3 rejects T's response by uttering 'no' and then utters the hesitation markers 'er' twice in line 7 after a 0.9-s silence.This potentially indicates S3's pausing to search for the appropriate response.T again utters 'daughter?' to seek confirmation from S3 (line 9) but S3 paraphrases her prior response in line 3 and responds to T immediately, with no hesitation or pause, in line 10 by providing a short definition of 'daughter-in-law'.T accepts S3's description of the VI as adequate by repeating the noun 'daughter-in-law' twice in line 12, which indexes an epistemic shift from K− to K+ position.At the same time, the teacher moves from orienting to the category 'conversational participant' to the category 'teacher' in the interaction as she introduces the new VI to S3. T's role is also recognised and sanctioned by S3 as S3 repeats the VI in line 14.
T then initiates another turn by uttering 'uh ha?' (line 16) to close the sidesequence and invite S3 to elaborate on the FPP which was first initiated in line 3. Having been given the floor, S3 initiates several hesitation markers 'er er' in line 18 which potentially indicates her uncertainty about the appropriate words for expressing her thoughts (Gardener 2001).However, S3 illustrates her thoughts through using the same iconic gesture that she did in line 3, forming a shape of a semi-circle.This leads to T's initiation of an SPP to provide the VI to S3, as shown by T's utterance of the noun 'pregnant' to refer to the meaning of S3's iconic gesture.Similar to line 14, S3 repeats the noun voluntarily in line 22.This indicates that S3 occupies a K+ position in providing the semantic information of the VI to T and T shifts from K− to K+ epistemic status once she realises the meaning of S3's iconic gesture as representing 'pregnant'.In line 22, S3 utters 'two month' to imply that her daughter-in-law is two-month pregnant.
In this extract, it is revealed how the ESOL classroom can be both a translanguaging space for classroom participants to engage in informal conversation, laughter and chit-chat (e.g.lines 1-5), a space where genuine interaction and meaning-making takes place (e.g."daughter?" in line 5, which is during the process of establishing intersubjectivity), and also a space for pedagogy (e.g. the teacher's talk in introducing a new vocabulary item to S3 in line 12).This demonstrates the teacher's ability in mediating different social roles (Dai andDavey 2022, 2023) as she has transformed her role from a conversation participant (lines 1-5) to a teacher (line 12) through contingent adjustment of her speech.
Extract 2b: Extract 2b is a subsequent part of the interaction in Extract 2a (5 min after Extract 2a).
As Extract 2b begins, S3 initiates a turn to provide further information regarding her daughter-in-law's pregnancy.Similar to line 18 in Extract 2, although S3 does not have the vocabulary knowledge to express her thoughts, S3 has the semantic knowledge which makes her occupy a K+ position vis-a-vis K− for T.This is demonstrated as S3 produces a series of noises to imitate the sound of vomiting and simultaneously enacts a vomiting gesture (figure 8) to reinforce that her daughter-in-law is suffering from vomiting.In line 55, T initiates an elongated change-of-state token 'oh:' (K− to K+ epistemic status) which indicates her understanding of S3's description.S3 further elaborates on her description by uttering 'sick' to clarify the health of her daughter-in-law.T produces a more complex construction 'she is two months pregnant' and writes it on the whiteboard (line 69).T is drawing learners' attention to the context (i.e. the pregnancy of S3's daughter-in-law) that was introduced by S3 before providing the VI which is used to describe S3's description.By doing so, T is linking S3's description to form a coherent VE for other students in the classroom.
Notice that there is a change in T's spoken language from producing a more complex construction (lines 69 and 74) to incomplete constructions-'very small' (line 78) and 'no tummy' (line 82)-to explain that S3's daughter-in-law has a small pregnant bump.T is potentially aligning her use of language with the epistemic state of students' English proficiency to allow them to understand T's explanation.This is also accompanied by T's use of iconic gestures (moving her hands repeatedly around her navel) to indicate a woman's pregnant bump.This leads to S3's acknowledgements in lines 80 and 84 to confirm T's explanation.It is in line 87 where T attempts to provide the noun which relates to S3's enactments in line 53.T begins by appropriating S3's production of a 'vomiting' noise and moving her hands from up to a low position repeatedly to reinforce the act of vomiting (figure 9, line 87).Then T produces a preclosing 'okay?' (Barnes 2007) in line 91 and both S3 and S13 utter an acknowledgement token 'ya' (line 93) to display their understanding of T's talk.In line 97, T is reinforcing the difference between 'has' and 'have'; a differentiation that was introduced by T at the beginning of the lesson.By doing so, T seizes the opportunity to employ the target auxiliary verbs to reinforce previous pedagogical content.
T continues to produce a more complex construction by writing down 'morning' on the whiteboard in line 99.However, T then provides an additional explanation about the VI by stating that this VI is normally employed in the American context, 'in america (0.2) we call it' (line 101).After that, T returns back to the formulation of her construction and introduces target VI by first repeating the word 'morning' (line 101), and then writing the word 'sickness' on the whiteboard in line 101.Afterwards, T enunciates 'morning sickness' to the students and repeats it again in line 105, which signals the end of her formulation of the complex construction.Note that until this moment, T has established two complex constructions ('she is two months pregnant' and 'she has morning sickness') for expression.Rather than drawing on the established constructions to reinforce the meaning of 'morning sickness', T utters an incomplete construction 'every morning' (line 109) and appropriates S3's productions of the vomiting sounds and gestures in line 53 to ensure that the other learners in the classroom understand the meaning of it.Although S3 repeats the sentence 'she has morning sickness' in line 111, T still chooses to appropriate S3's enactment again and initiates a few incomplete expressions to emphasize her constructions (line 113).This encourages S3 to utter an acknowledgement token 'ya' (line 115) to indicate her understanding of T's explanation.
As S3 heavily draws on embodied resources in lieu of her limited lexical and grammatical resources to construct the meanings of the vocabulary, it is noticeable that T pays attention to S3's gestures and speech, as evidenced through her appropriation of S3's vomiting noise and iconic gestures to explain the act of vomiting during pregnancy, in order to understand the VIs that S3 is referring to.Similarly, S3 has the epistemic authority to describe the situation of her daughter-in-law's pregnancy and is in a position to offer accurate descriptions to T in order to enhance T's understanding of her recount and allow T to produce the correct VIs which correspond to S3's explanations.Additionally, T also makes her roles as a teacher and as an interactant/conversationalist recognizable to students by the way she delivers her speech.This is evidenced when T talks as a teacher from line 69 to 74, she uses complete sentences and 'formal' intonation which enable S3 to recognise this as a teaching moment and subsequently repeat the VI (line 76).When T talks as an interactant (e.g.laughter in line 58 and comprehension checking from lines 78-82), T adopts a more "natural" way of speaking with incomplete language, which is designed at the student's level, and natural elements of interaction, including laughter to promote affiliation.
Extract 3: Use of Limited Linguistic Repertoire in Scaffolding Student's Vocabulary Learning Extract 3 was previously analysed in Tai and Khabbazbashi (2019).However, this paper will analyse this extract from a translanguaging perspective.Prior to this extract, learners were asked by T to employ the adverbials of time (i.e.'yesterday', 'today' and 'tomorrow') to complete a sentence (e.g.today is Monday).Although S3, a Latin-American student, was chosen by T to complete the sentence, S3 seized the opportunity to ask T to clarify the meanings of these adverbials of time.
S3 first enacts her role as a student in line 153 by saying "question", which initiates an answer-seeking sequence directed at T. Line 153 concurrently establishes a relational pair (Stokoe 2012) that places T in the teacher role vis-à-vis S3 in the student role.T then readily sanctions the enacted teacher role, encouraging S3 to elaborate in line 155.After seeing that S3 struggles to explain her question about the lexical item "tomorrow" from line 157 to 164, T issues "okay" in line 165 with a falling intonation that is characteristic of teacher talk, taking the turn from S3 and commanding attention from all students.Her simultaneous self-pointing gesture in line 165 is well coordinated with her verbal message, with both resources working to establish the start of an instructional moment.The effectiveness of T's classroom management is evidenced by S3's immediate gaze on T in the same line.We, therefore, argue that the teacher here demonstrates strong IC through the swift enactment of her social role as a teacher and skillful deployment of a range of category-resonant (Stokoe 2012) semiotic resources to make her teacher role recognizable to the students.
In response to S3's question, T first utters 'yesterday' and gestures backwards in order to indicate that the noun 'yesterday' refers to the past.T also translanguages to Spanish by saying 'pasado' in order to offer the Spanish equivalent of the noun 'yesterday' (line 169).T provides a further explanation by uttering 'past' in line 173 in order to highlight the connection between 'yesterday' and the past simple.In line 175, S3 asks a follow-up question by enunciating 'toda↑y?' with high intonation.This implicitly asks T about the accurate tense for describing 'today'.T responds to S3's question by uttering 'present' and concurrently pointing to the ground (line 177).It is noticeable that T's use of deictic gestures in line 177 can be seen as an imitation of S3's deictic gesture in line 175 to illustrate the present time frame.S3 subsequently acknowledges T's response in line 179.
In lines 182-184, T provides a short explanation of the connection between 'tomorrow' and its corresponding time frame.T first moves her right hand forward in line 182 and utters 'future' in line 184 which suggests that the meaning of 'tomorrow' refers to the future time frame.Nevertheless, S3 switches to Spanish and initiates a follow-up question about the time frame for describing 'after tomorrow' (line 186).While S3 is uttering in Spanish, she first moves her arms forward and subsequently, she moves them further forward.It is important to note that S3's use of metaphoric gestures is referring to two different time frames and they are different in relation to a spatial extent.The first metaphoric gesture in line 186 (i.e.moving her hands forward) is indicting the future time frame.The second metaphoric gesture (i.e.moving her arms further forward) is indicating 'the future of the future' (Gutiérrez 1995).In response to S3's question, T first utters 'future' as well as moves her right hand further forward, which imitates S3's second metaphoric gesture.This explains to S3 that the adverb 'future' itself entails the meaning of 'after tomorrow'.T further clarifies her explanation by offering the Spanish equivalent of 'future' ('futuro') to S3 in line 192.This results in S3's display of understanding, as indicated by her initiation of a change-of-state token 'ah:' in line 196.Uttering a change-of-state token (e.g.oh, ah) indicates a change in the state of the speaker's knowledge from non-understanding to a claimed understanding of the information (Heritage 1984).
As illustrated in Extract 3, T sometimes imitates S3's gestures to complement her own explanations.By doing so, T firstly displays alignment with S3 and secondly treats S3's gestures as an appropriate interactional resource for T to explain the target words to other learners.It can be argued that this is a form of affiliation with the student by using linguistic and bodily resources that are familiar to the students to communicate.T is making an effort to affiliate with the students, which serves to promote rapport and is evidence of her IC (Dai 2021a).It is evidenced that T eventually needs to draw on her limited linguistic knowledge of Spanish to explain the meaning of the 'future of the future' to S3.This serves as a good example of how T draws on her available linguistic and multimodal resources to construct her vocabulary explanations.

Discussion and conclusion
The principal aim of this paper is to offer an alternative view of IC by connecting it to the notion of translanguaging and its emphasis on the deployment of multiple linguistic, semiotic, and sociocultural resources for achieving the speaker's specific communicative goals.In particular, we employed Sequential-Categorial Analysis to illuminate how translanguaging practices contribute to effective classroom management in the sequential, emotional, logical, moral and categorial dimensions of interaction, which represents a holistic construct definition of IC.The analysis of the ESOL classroom illustrates that the teacher and students employ multiple linguistic and multimodal resources including physical objects, gestures, bodily movement, registers, L1 English and L2 to create imaginary scenarios to initiate clarification requests (in the case of the students) or produce explanations in response to the student's initiatives (in the case of the teacher).Throughout the analysis, we have revealed that since the teacher and students do not share the same L1, classroom participants have to mobilize different multimodal resources as means of communication for compensating the limited available linguistic resources shared between the teacher and students.Importantly, we argue that such translanguaging practices (i.e.mobilizing verbal and gestural elements together) allow the ESOL teacher to scaffold the students' L2 learning processes when learners' L2 repertoire is somewhat limited.Additionally, the teacher translanguages through switching between her different styles of speaking in Extracts 1-3 in order to make her social roles as a teacher at a teaching moment and her role as a conversationalist at a non-teaching moment recognizable to students.This is evidenced as she uses 'formal' intonation and complete sentences to orient to the teaching moment and employs a more 'natural' way of speaking when she talks as a conversationalist.It is also noticeable that the teacher is drawing on her linguistic knowledge of Spanish to assist her student to understand the target vocabulary items (Extract 4).This demonstrates how the teacher is mobilizing different linguistic and multimodal repertoires to create a translanguaging space for students to learn new vocabulary items.
Although research on IC has broadened our understanding of what competency in language use means, so far existing IC studies have not used translanguaging as an analytical perspective to capture the rich movement between modalities, frames, and resources.These findings in translanguaging research extend the construct of IC, which to date emphasizes the co-construction of social interaction purposefully and meaningfully (Hall et al. 2011) and the functionality of language use for real-world conduct (Dai 2021a;Dai et al. 2022).IC, more importantly, encompasses the element of translanguaging as an interactional phenomenon where speakers draw on diverse resources for enabling their meaning-making processes (Li 2018).This creates a translanguaging space in and for interaction for participants to translanguage fluidly between registers, styles, languages, as well as across modalities in order to mediate meaning-making processes (Tai and Li 2021a, 2021b, 2021c;Tai 2022aTai , 2022bTai , 2023aTai , 2023b)).It can be argued that from a translanguaging perspective, a competent language user is one who can marshal the appropriate linguistic and multimodal resources for effective communication, demonstrating the ability to make the appropriate assessment of what, how and why specific resources should be used at that moment of the interaction.A competent speaker also attends to the multidimensional nature of functional language use, taking into account the sequential, emotional, logical, moral, and categorial aspects of interaction (Dai 2021a, forthcoming), as the ESOL teacher in this study has demonstrated.Therefore, we argue that translanguaging is a constitutive feature of IC which entails speakers drawing on a diverse range of semiotic resources for creating new configurations of language practices and achieving their specific communicative goals.Such a perspective emphasizes the meaning-making process as a locally emergent phenomenon and a coconstructed interactional endeavour which promotes fluid and dynamic language practices between speakers on a moment-by-moment basis.
The findings from this study contribute to research on translanguaging, IC and multimodality, highlighting the multilingual and multimodal nature of interaction and fostering multilingual competence in the classrooms.In terms of IC research, this study foregrounds L1 speakers who have received less attention in previous studies (see Wootton 1997 for an exception).A focus on L1 speakers, in the context of this study the ESOL teacher, has allowed us to examine the wide range of semiotic resources teachers can creatively draw on for effective classroom interaction.Through analysing their interactional practices using Sequential-Categorial Analysis we have generated empirical evidence of how teachers manage sequence, affect, logic, morality, and categorization, which are embedded in interaction on a momentby-moment translanguaging basis.The explication of effective teaching practices in this study can provide insight into pedagogy and teacher training.Methodologically, adopting translanguaging as an analytical perspective enables researchers to reconceptualize IC and move beyond structural and functional analysis of social interaction to identify patterns with high frequency and regularity (Tai 2022a(Tai , 2022b;;Tai andLi 2021b, 2021c).In other words, this requires researchers to go beyond analysing language as an abstractable coded system, such as CA research which views interaction as structurally organized and aims to discover the sequential patterns in social interaction (Hutchby and Wooffitt 2008).Rather, researchers should focus on the speaker's capacity in drawing on diverse linguistic, multimodal, and sociocultural resources to challenge the boundaries between named languages and non-linguistic semiotic systems in specific moments of the classroom interactions for purposeful communicative activities.Therefore, adopting a translanguaging perspective enables us to illuminate how teachers demonstrate their IC and create new configurations of pedagogical practices through their strategic and appropriate use of the affordances of various available interactional resources creatively and critically in different classroom contexts.The findings also draw attention to the significance of extending the teacher's practical understanding of IC.Throughout the paper, we argue for the need to capture the intrinsically fluid nature of language use since social interaction is a process of translanguaging in nature.Therefore, developing an understanding of the diverse interactional resources that teachers and students can use to scaffold their teaching and learning processesmost notably in terms of how teachers and students manage sequence, affect, logic, morality and categorization in interactioncan contribute to improved teaching and enhance their multilingual competence in the classrooms.

Figure 1
Figure 1 is a schematic representation of Dai's IC model.This conceptualization of IC has brought IC closer to the functional and high-inference nature of interaction discussed in Hymes (1972), highlighting the real-world implications of interaction.Recent empirical studies have provided examples of how such functional dimensions of ICaffect, logic, morality and categorizationcan be empirically described and