The ability to express oneself and to understand others is a vital goal of foreign language teaching that is captured by the concepts of (intercultural) communicative competence or proficiency  (for a critical review of the concepts see Llurda, 2000). As  some authoritative reviews of current state of the art in foreign language teaching suggest, language is seen as a tool for social (and economic) participation (e.g. Kramsch, 2014; Larsen-Freeman & Freeman, 2008; Widdowson, 2004). This view has also been integrated in European language policy (e.g. the CEFR). The conduct of communicative tasks and activities, whose integration in foreign language courses is in line with the above-mentioned trends and policies, is a highly collaborative and situated achievement that presupposes mutual understanding among the participants. In the context of classroom interaction, as Macbeth (2011, p. 441) points out, this type of understanding underlies the organization and coherence of instruction, and it is distinct from understanding in terms of instructional outcomes, i.e. what students have learned at the end of a teaching unit.

The analysis, whose outcomes are presented in this paper, aimed to contribute to the understanding of the dynamics and organization of whole-class discussions and interactive seminar talk at universities. Interaction in these contexts has been addressed in some other studies (e.g. Benwell & Stokoe, 2002; Lee, 2016; Svinhufvud, 2015), on which the present analysis builds.

Conversation analysis (Seedhouse, 2004; ten Have, 2007) was used to uncover the practices that the participants in an English as a foreign language course deployed  in classroom interaction. The data comprised a set of 11 video-recordings of lessons (987 mins) in a foreign language course at university settings. The course was taught by one teacher and attended by 18 students, its target level was B1. 

The findings presented in this paper focus on whole-class teacher-student interaction in speaking activities, i.e. exchanges with a communicative purpose, in which students typically presented their interpretations and views, or outcomes of preceding pairwork. These exchanges were typically initiated and further shaped by the teacher. The paper focuses on the practices that the teacher used to elicit student answers and on corresponding student behaviors. In the data the teacher encouraged the students to elaborate on their relatively short answers. In order to do that, as the analysis showed, the teacher typically used “mhm” or briefly summarized the previous students’ turn(s), or the teacher reshaped the question. After that the students generally attempted to respond and elaborate on their answers. In doing so, the students normally used hesitation markers or initiated repair sequences.

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