In video-mediated teamwork, participants need to coordinate participation and elicit contributions, including situations where uptake is not immediately forthcoming. The present study examines how participants in a virtual teamwork simulation use questions at the end of their extended turns to manage participation. Based on four hours of video-recorded small-group online interactions, this multimodal conversation analytic study shows that polar questions and “what do you think?” questions function as turn-exit devices in two sequential environments. First, when deployed after an extended turn has already reached a transition-relevance place but received little or no uptake, questions are used as response pursuits. Second, when deployed before a transition-relevance place has been projected, they add a response-mobilizing feature to the extended turn, making speaker change conditionally relevant. Across these environments, polar questions function as requests for confirmation after summaries and proposals for joint action, while “what do you think?” questions invite co-participants to express their opinions following proposals for joint action. The findings demonstrate how questions at the end of extended turns help members manage participation and constraints specific to video-mediated interaction, including connection delays and limited mutual visual access. The study contributes to our understanding of how teamwork and participation in video-mediated environments are accomplished interactionally.
Municipal adult education in Swedish for Immigrants (SFI) has been a frequent subject of debate in the Swedish daily press for a number of years. Building on the proposition that societal discourses affect immigrants’ educational and learning conditions, this study investigates conceptions about the motivation to learn among LESLLA learners in media texts from the Swedish daily press between the years 2003 and 2024. Using critical discourse analysis (CDA), this study examines recurring linguistic patterns in the media texts, aiming not only to gain knowledge about the different conceptions of motivation but also to bring attention to how ideologies and power relations in contemporary Swedish society are reflected and perpetuated in the texts through lexical choices. The current study reveals contradicting conceptualizations of the learners’ motivation. However, the learners are predominantly positioned as unmotivated, and motivation, in turn, is often conceptualized as something that can be controlled by extrinsic factors such as money or limitation of study time. Consequently, many of the media texts implicitly articulate a problematic behavioristic logic. Critical linguistic analysis focusing on figurative language, nominalizations and antonyms, furthermore, reveal several underlying ideologies in the media texts, such as neoliberalism, graphocentrism and a deficiency perspective on the learners’ abilities. In conclusion, the ideologies and power structures that manifest in the media texts marginalize the learners, thereby potentially affecting their literacy, and language development, as well as the ways in which the SFI education is organized and governed.
Negotiation of meaning (NoM) is central to task-based language teaching (TBLT), yet studies of young learners often report strategy frequencies without examining how negotiation unfolds and reorganizes the activity in which it occurs. This study examines NoM across eleven storytelling sessions designed in alignment with TBLT and Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP), with ten second-grade children and four parent facilitators. Analysis of audio and video recordings, artifacts, and field notes proceeded in two connected stages, combining deductive coding of established NoM strategies with sequence-based analysis of task demand, local trigger, uptake, reconstruction, and consequence. Children drew on a stable repertoire of strategies across both phases, yet the same moves varied in interactional consequence with task modality. In traditional storytelling, negotiation made narrative meaning, form, and the legitimacy of a contribution publicly accountable in talk that then dissolved. In digital storytelling, the same moves settled how meanings could be built in materials and fixed them in a durable artifact, where coherence and authorship became open to negotiation. Building on the established account of NoM as communicative repair, the study broadens the analytic scope to what negotiation reorganizes within the activity, an emphasis captured by treating NoM as task-mediated reconstruction, with task modality bearing on what children negotiate and what their negotiation leaves behind. (c) 2026 Elsevier Inc. All rights are reserved, including those for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies.
As China’s global presence expands, Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) education has become an important site for the international circulation of cultural narratives about contemporary China. Despite the rapid growth of CFL programs, limited research has critically examined how Chinese culture is represented in widely used instructional materials. Addressing this gap, the present study analyzes cultural representations in two widely used CFL textbook series in international university programs. The dataset comprises four core textbook volumes (two per series) designed for beginner and intermediate learners. Guided by a critical discourse analytic perspective and informed by Moran and Lu's cultural dimensions framework, the study combines systematic content analysis with discourse-oriented interpretation to examine how cultural references are distributed across the curriculum. The analysis shows that the textbooks predominantly emphasize visible cultural elements such as social groups, everyday practices, and symbols of modernization, while giving comparatively limited attention to internal diversity and deeper sociocultural perspectives. These patterns suggest that CFL textbooks construct a pedagogical discourse presenting China as socially cohesive, economically modern, and globally integrated.
