Dialogic Teaching: Rethinking "Messy" Classroom Interactions in a French Grammar Lesson

In our paper, we will investigate classroom talk in terms of “dialogic teaching” in order to rethink classroom interactions that appear to be “messy” at first sight. To do so, we will analyse a video excerpt taken from the film “Entre les murs” that shows classroom interactions in a French secondary school. A fine-grained analysis of teacher- student interactions is conducted according to a conversation analytic approach. With reference to the concept of “dialogic teaching”, analysing sequence organisation of the classroom talk occurring in the selected French grammar lesson opens up a new perspective on the event, i.e. it becomes possible to consider students’ utterances not as digressions but as enriching contributions to an expansion of the learning/teaching object.