Missing response after teacher question in primary school English as a foreign language classes

• This study examines interaction in primary school English language classes.
• It explores teacher orientation to and interpretation of student response delay.
• Teachers often treat students’ lack of linguistic knowledge as a source of delay.
• Problem in understanding question is prioritized over problem in producing answer.
• Teachers also attribute response delay to their inadequate way of producing question.

This study investigates question and answer sequences in primary school English language classes. Using the framework of conversation analysis, it explores instances in which student responses are noticeably absent after teacher questions and reveals teacher interpretation of the missing responses. This study draws on 22 h of video-recorded primary school English classes collected in Japan. The analysis revealed that overwhelmingly teachers treated students’ insufficient linguistic knowledge as a source of missing responses and such interpretation was found to be specific to language classrooms. Moreover, in dealing with missing responses due to students’ linguistic problems, teachers prioritized the preference for dealing with problems in understanding questions over the preference for dealing with problems in producing the answers. However, there were also occasions in which teachers attributed missing responses to their failure in producing questions appropriately. In such cases the trajectory of the interaction approximated to that of mundane conversation and other types of institutional interaction. This study suggests the significant consequences of on-line interactive decisions teachers make in classrooms.