Analysing interaction in primary school language classes: Multilevel annotation and analysis with EXMARaLDA

Language classrooms provide a rich terrain for language acquisition research, and
classroom observation has a long history (Passy 1885; Brebner 1898) This interest
has resulted in a considerable set of transcribing conventions and observation grids,
but the analytical techniques have varied little since the initial conversation
analyses of the 1970s and 1980s: transcription is often done without the aid of dedicated software and analyses are carried out by hand.
As part of an exploratory study of elementary school foreign language learning, a
French research team observed two classesduring their first year of beginning-level
English lessons.
This chapter presents the methodology adopted for transcribing and annotating
the lessons using EXMARaLDA (Schmidt & Wörner 2014)and analyzes the ways
in which well-designed transcription software can contribute to an
understanding of methodological and interactional classroom variables, and how they may affect emergent language knowledge and skill in the classroom. Video-linked
transcription and multi-tiered annotation in EXMARaLDA can enable automatic and
semi-automatic analyses of various aspects of the classroom experienceOur analyses compare the two classrooms and explore features of these young learners’
initial contact with new words and their semantic-grammatical properties.