Paul Stone

Gakushuin University · Foreign Language Teaching and Research Centre

In this article, I use conversation analysis (CA) to focus on how Japanese language resources are used in repair sequences that occur in ‘off-task’ English interactions in a lower-level EFL classroom at a Japanese university, considering how this may create opportunities for learning. While previous research has found that ‘off-task’ peer interacti...

With the sudden shift to online teaching brought about in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, both teachers and students have had to quickly adapt to new ways of working. In this article, we examine what happens in the online video interactions of Japanese university students in university English communication classes. We recorded student discussio...

This study is part of a larger ongoing series of projects that aims to both raise awareness of, and develop, L2 interactional competence (IC) in the context of classroom group discussions. While discussion is a common activity in university classrooms, Japanese learners of English may sometimes lack appropriate discussions skills. For example, Haus...

In this paper, we investigate how asking our Japanese university EFL students to watch and analyze videos of 'expert' speakers may help raise awareness of and develop interactional competence. In particular, the analysis focuses on how the participants themselves chose to focus on repair practices.

This article describes an application of ethnographically-informed approaches to discourse analysis that attempts to bring about change in EFL classroom practice. The project was conducted by a teacher-researcher at a Japanese university and one group of learners that he taught. It centres on the use of video as a tool to bring about discussions be...

In this paper I describe and analyse learner task-based interactions from a multimodal perspective with the aim of better understanding how learners’ interpersonal relationships might affect task performance. Task-based pedagogy is focused on classroom interaction between learners, yet analysis of tasks has often neglected the analysis of this inte...

In this article I investigate how Japanese students manage interaction together in a task-based English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom. Using methods from conversation analysis and focusing on the contextual dimensions of language, I analyse data from a real classroom task with a view to understanding the ways in which social processes and t...

This paper outlines some findings of a three-month investigation into the effects of students’ interpersonal relationships on communication in two EFL classrooms in a Japanese university. Data was collected to identify and describe the various social subgroups that existed within the classes, and samples of classroom discourse were then analysed to...

Mutual Benefits of Feedback on Materials Through Collaborative Materials Evaluation Chapter 16 in Tomlinson, B. and Masuhara, H(. Eds.)Research for Materials Development. Continuum. With C. Stillwell, A. Kidd, K. Alexander, T. McIlroy, & P. Stone. (2010).

Student self-transcription can greatly enhance the power of tasks to promote language learning, for it allows students to re-examine their experience freed from the pressure of performing the task itself, so they can notice and reflect on the language used and encountered. This is a powerful step in language development because it allows for increa...