Enabling audience participation and stimulating discussion after student presentations in English as a foreign language seminars

Although discussions after student presentations play an important role in higher education seminars, relatively little attention has been paid to the ways in which the presenters, teachers and audience members actually interact. Building on a data set consisting of 12 videotaped follow-up discussions collected in an undergraduate English as a foreign language (EFL) seminar, this conversation-analytic study focuses on teacher practices and shows how teachers can build on previous student utterances to improve the clarity or accuracy of the discussion, or how they can create space for audience participation by inviting audience questions. The study also describes how teachers can encourage the presenters to elaborate on their answers. The findings contribute to the body of research on seminar talk by describing teacher practices utilized during discussions after student presentations.