This paper primarily investigates the interactional unfolding and management of ‘claims of insufficient knowledge’ (Beach and Metzger 1997) in two English language classrooms from a multi-modal, conversation-analytic perspective. The analyses draw on a close, micro-analytic account of sequential organisation of talk as well as on various multi-semiotic resources the participants enact including gaze, gestures, body movements and orientations to classroom artefacts. The research utilises transcriptions of 16 (classroom) hours of video recordings, which were collected over a six-week period in 2010 in a public school in Luxembourg. The findings show that establishing recipiency through mutual gaze and turn allocation practices have interactional and pedagogical consequences that may lead to claims of insufficient knowledge. Furthermore, the findings illustrate various multi-modal resources the students use (e.g. gaze movements, facial gestures and headshakes) to initiate embodied claims of no knowledge and to show specific exchange structures. Finally, we suggest that certain interactional resources, including embodied vocabulary explanations and Designedly Incomplete Utterances (Koshik 2002), deployed by the teacher after a student's claim of insufficient knowledge may lead to student engagement, which is a desirable pedagogical goal. Our findings have implications for the analysis of insufficient knowledge, for teaching, teacher education and in particular for L2 Classroom Interactional Competence (Walsh 2006).

Language teachers perform constant multi-tasking in L2 classrooms while they are teaching. They manage materials, behaviours, content, discourse, and organise and co-construct learning environments at the same time. At the heart of this multi-tasking lies a process of instant decision making during classroom interaction: they initiate turns, respond to student utterances, attend to linguistic mistakes within micro-seconds. As research in the last two decades has clearly documented, the convergence between pedagogical goals and unfolding classroom interaction (Seedhouse, 2004; Walsh, 2011, 2013; Sert, 2015) is perhaps one of the most important means of creating learning opportunities for students. Opportunities for language learning are facilitated if interactional practices are fine tuned to the goal of teaching the L2. Mainly using conversation analytic methods, researchers of L2 classroom interaction have documented the interactional manoeuvres of teachers so as to understand the microscopic details of instructed language learning and teaching. Findings of these empirical observations have recently been incorporated into teacher education and development programmes, increasing the importance of classroom interaction in teacher education. Against this background, this chapter provides a review of classroom interaction research with a focus on the role of teacher talk in facilitating language learning opportunities and presents how classroom interaction and teacher development are closely related by reviewing research in both initial teacher education and in-service teacher education. After presenting research on the longitudinal development of L2 CIC, it makes a case for a technology-enhanced, reflective, and micro-analytic teacher education framework, presents practical applications, and discusses future directions.