Displaying orientation in the classroom: Students’ multimodal responses to teacher instructions

This paper is about the displays of orientation that students use to participate in the classroom. It is argued that students use their direction of gaze, body posture, gesture and other modes of communication to realize such displays and respond to what goes on when they are not nominated speakers. The focus of the paper is on the silent but active participation of a recently immigrated student in a secondary classroom in England. Fine grained analysis of the preparatory stages of a lesson on Romeo and Juliet shows that she demonstrates understanding of the changing contextual grounds for meaning making in the classroom through careful alignment of her displays of orientation with the subsequent stages in the whole-class activity. It is suggested that this interactional fluency will have a significant impact on her educational career.