Facilitating Students' Learning of a Target Construction Through Teacher Interactional Resources in EFL Kindergarten Classrooms

This paper presents research-led responses to two central questions concerning English as a foreign language (EFL) learning in kindergartens, namely how do the teachers facilitate EFL learning? and how does the impact of certain teacher interactional resources on learning become observable in interaction? Previous research showed that classroom routines facilitate learning, and learners' increased participation through repeating teacher turns is considered as evidence for learning. Using multimodal conversation analysis to examine video-recorded, face-masked kindergarten EFL classrooms during the pandemic, we argue that classroom routines transcend repeating teacher turns and create space for learners' contextually meaningful use of target constructions when the teacher introduces such constructions by strategically deploying embodied explanations, translanguaging, choral repetition, understanding checks, repairing dispreferred responses, and designedly incomplete utterances. We adopt a longitudinal perspective to trace one construction in particular, a little bit, and describe how the construction is introduced and routinely circulated by the teacher, and eventually added to a learner's interactional repertoire. The findings offer rich pedagogical implications for EFL kindergarten teachers.