Doing project work in the L2 English classroom: The interactional accomplishment of tasks, between-desk encounters and post-presentation discussions

Abstract in English

Although project work has received considerable attention in Swedish educational research, it has rarely been investigated within a specific school subject. Drawing on video recordings from two upper-secondary schools in Sweden and grounded in ethnomethodological conversation analysis, this compilation dissertation explores how project work is interactionally accomplished in English as a foreign language (EFL) classrooms. Across the constituent studies, I examine students’ task discussions, teacher–student desk interactions, and follow-up discussions after students’ project presentations, describing how these events are interactionally organized and what they reveal about the situated accomplishment of project work in EFL classrooms.

The first study explores how students perform a film-based group discussion task designed to engage them with the project theme. The analysis shows how students, in the course of reconstructing scenes from the film, engage in corrections and word searches. In doing so, they create learning opportunities that involve both linguistic forms and content-related words and expressions that are consequential for their understanding of the film and their engagement with the project theme. Both the second study and the third examine how instructional support is given and received during teacher–student desk encounters. The second study focuses on student-initiated interactions and investigates how shared understanding of task instructions and procedures is established. As the analysis shows, students use so-prefaced formulations to display their understanding of the teacher’s prior responses, which the teacher then either confirms or disconfirms. In this way, establishing shared understanding becomes a joint, collaborative process between the teacher and the students. The third study zooms in on how teachers respond to different types of student questions that emerge throughout the different stages of project work. Analyzing the response formats, the study shows that teachers design their responses in different ways, depending on students’ needs and the pedagogical contingencies of the moment. Centered on follow-up discussions after students’ project presentations, the fourth study investigates how students hold one another accountable for their project outputs. The findings show that students mobilize question–answer sequences in which the presented work is explained and justified in relation to the task expectations.

Taken together, these studies illuminate the interactional ecology of EFL project work by showing how participants create learning opportunities, manage contingent instructional support, and organize accountability for both the process and the product. With this dissertation, I argue that project work is not a fixed educational approach, but a situated classroom practice that is socially and locally accomplished.