Conference Agenda

From a sociocultural perspective, classroom talk and interaction are not only vehicles for communication but also main contexts for learning and thinking. Classroom interaction functions as a dual resource, offering opportunities for both content and language learning. This dual role becomes particularly important in multilingual mainstream classrooms. Unlike specialized programs such as CLIL, where the integration of content and language learning is explicitly planned, mainstream classrooms typically operate with a single language of instruction that many learners have not yet fully acquired. Lan and de Oliveira (2019) describe the experience of multilingual learners in such settings—who are expected to learn new subject content through a language they are still acquiring—as an “accidental version” of CLIL programs (p. 1).

Research on classroom interaction has increasingly moved beyond the question of whether interaction supports learning to examine how it contributes to learning and under what conditions it is most effective (Gass, 2012; Howe & Abedin, 2013; Loewen & Sato, 2018). A converging body of research highlights that learning opportunities are critically shaped by the quality and organization of interaction (e.g., Evnitskaya, 2018; Mercer & Howe, 2012; van der Veen et al., 2015).

Building on this focus, certain practices have been found to facilitate or restrict learners’ participation and learning opportunities. Interactional organisation in mainstream classrooms often has a largely monologic nature, in which pupils are positioned in primarily responsive roles and their contributions are constrained to brief, teacher-elicited answers, while teachers retain a dominant role in directing both the flow and the epistemic framing of classroom interaction (Mercer & Howe, 2012; Skidmore, 2016). In brief dialogue exchanges such as IRF pattern, teachers close interaction quickly (Mercer & Dawes, 2014). In contrast, interactionist and dialogic teaching approaches emphasise the central role of social negotiation and interaction in meaningful learning processes. From this perspective, learning is understood as a socially situated activity in which knowledge is co-constructed through engagement with others, where teachers act primarily as facilitators of learning (Cummins, 2001; Villegas & Lucas, 2002). Within this framework, opportunities for opening up dialogic spaces for participation have emerged. For example, when teachers delay their feedback and invite pupils to compare, justify, and build on one another’s contributions, it can become a starting point for dialogic engagement rather than a mechanism of closure (Mercer & Dawes, 2014).

Drawing on sociocultural views of learning and dialogic approaches to classroom interaction, the three contributions in this panel share a common theoretical perspective on participation and learning. Our findings show recurring interactional practices that are significant for multilingual learners’ participation. These include the clarity and explicitness of teacher demands, the use of explicit transitions, and the ways teachers initiate and close dialogic exchanges around their inquiries. These practices shape not only whether learners participate, but also the forms and depth of their participation. Other findings show that the way teachers implement high-level linguistic demands (e.g., justification) constrains multilingual learners’ participation. Interaction either moves toward progressive simplification to secure participation, thereby limiting opportunities for extended language use, or maintains high demands without sufficient linguistic or interactional support, restricting participation to linguistically more proficient or first-language learners. Additionally, teachers seem to retain control of whole-class interaction in multilingual classrooms by either including languages in which they are not proficient to a limited extent or by resorting to monologic interaction.

The panel discussion will draw on these findings to facilitate a comparative dialogue across three European contexts (Germany, the Netherlands, and the Basque Country). It will focus on how specific interactional practices simultaneously enable and constrain multilingual learners’ participation in whole-class interaction and their opportunities for language and subject learning.