178 Liu Kelly: Liu:


in fact I feel I agree with you it’s good it’s good erm


=so we are only talk of international


no we can change our ideas through the discussion I think she’s definitely right


We again see criticality in exploratory talk, although with a disputational undertone as Danyang emphasises weaknesses in Liu’s point using ‘just’. After Sam’s challenges, Liu struggles to formulate a counterargument (‘er’; ‘it’s good’) before conceding and suggesting learning from the exchanges: ‘in fact I feel I agree with you’. This excerpt is notable because Liu explicitly acknowledges the ‘rules of the game’ about learning as an objective of discussion, making the metadiscoursal comment that ‘we can change our ideas through the discussion, I think she’s definitely right’.


LEXICAL DENSITY


Lexical density rose from 25% in Week 1 to 34% in Week 3. Although I was surprised to find no increase in Academic Word List items, disciplinary lexis such as international investor, adopt or the cost of money became more frequent. These terms often appeared in students’ pre-discussion reading, congruent with Ho’s (2011) finding of intertextuality in academic discussion. Together with longer turns, reduced overlap, and increased accountability of talk in later discussions, this lexis signifies more formal discussion and its abstract topics, and joint orientation towards speaking for subject- specific learning. Lexical resource and topic knowledge from pre-task reading may have facilitated exploratory talk, as students could elaborate on ideas and challenge claims.


Rachel Elmslie


Week 4 recordings on discussions of Efficient Market Theory were inaudible due to external noise. However, field notes and short audible segments indicate continued criticality, elaboration and use of disciplinary lexis from Week 3. As students debated strengths and weaknesses of opposing models, this opened up dialogic space for reasoning, challenge and accountability in talk.


STUDENT REFLECTIONS Students’ Week 2 reflections reported that they lacked confidence, grammar and vocabulary for classroom interaction, wanted more practice, and tended to approach speaking as monologic. By Week 4, four new themes emerged which generally reflected change in students’ spoken classroom interaction. The main one was improved participation or confidence in discussions, which like the increase in exploratory talk may have resulted from practice, feedback and clearer understanding of the speaking ILOs. Secondly, speaking was usually framed as interactive rather than monologic, as students mentioned audience, communication and learning from others. Students also reported vocabulary and development of ideas as learning goals, which suggests increasing orientation towards meaning-making and complex, subject-specific discussion. Reflecting the intertextuality recorded in observational data, some students noted that reading helped their speaking, although none specified whether this was due to topic knowledge or the language they learned from reading. Overall, students appeared to feel increasingly confident about their speaking and saw it as interactive, intertextual and orientated towards joint


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