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.