Responding artfully to student-initiated departures in the adult ESL classroom

• Students initiate departures from teachers’ pedagogical trajectory.
• Teachers tactfully respond to these departures with ironic teasing or by invoking learning orientation.
• These methods enable the teacher to maintain control while validating participation and advancing learning.

Teachers constantly endeavor to strike a balance between the arguably competing tasks of maintaining control on the one hand and encouraging student participation on the other (Paoletti & Fele, 2004). How precisely such a balance is accomplished, however, remains largely a mystery. Based on videotaped data from the adult English as a Second Language (ESL) classroom, we describe two teacher practices for responding to student-initiated departures, where teacher control is maintained in the service of participation and learning. Findings of this conversation analytic study contribute to a growing understanding of how certain learner contributions in the language classroom may be tactfully and efficiently handled while offering increasing specificity for strengthening the foundations of language teacher education.