Academic discourse practices in action: Invoking discursive norms in mathematics and language lessons

•Analysis of how academic language norms are dealt with in classroom interaction.•Norm invocations occur within IRE sequences and can have two distinct placements.•Teachers adopt different procedures of invoking norms.•Procedures of invoking norms vary in interactive effort and degree of explicitness.•Teachers normatively require particular practices of explaining and arguing.

Previous empirical research has mainly focused on the analysis of lexical and grammatical features of academic language and has inferred underlying language norms. The present study, in contrast, addresses the normative aspect of academic language as a topic of reconstructive research and investigates “norms-in-interaction”. Based on a corpus of videotaped language and mathematics lessons in grade five, the analysis illuminates how teachers and students display their orientation to discursive norms in actual instances of classroom interaction. Inspired by conversation analysis and genre-oriented approaches, the study reconstructs the sequential contexts and the interactive procedures of invoking norms. Varying procedures are described that differ in their degree of explicitness. Findings indicate that the ability both to interpret the often subtle displays of orientation to norms and to contextualize switches to the metalevel of communication is essential for mastering academic discourse.