Abstract
More and more, in the field of pedagogy, new approches and instruments allowing to address the complexity of educational processes as they take place moment-by-moment in classroom interaction, are being developed; an example of such (re)orientation is to be found in inclusive education research, which, against the background of its long tradition of investigations at the macro-level of school systems and at the meso-level of single school institutions, is now widering its perspective towards microanalysis of classroom communication as observable and documentable from teachers’ and students’ verbal and non verbal conduct in classroom activities.
The microanalytical approach, on the other hand, is at the core of conversation analysis (cf. Sidnell & Stivers 2012), a methodology born within sociology but currently adopted also within linguistics and foreign language teaching research (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting 2017; Seedhouse 2011) for its ability to capture social interaction from the participants’ emic perspective and to provide insights on the procedures – actions and the verbal and multimodal resources employed to perform them (Streeck, Goodwin & LeBaron 2011) – these systematically draw upon to reach their communicative goals and to make sense of their own conduct.
In this paper, which takes its departure point from an interdisciplinary research project carried out within the framework of both inclusive education and conversation analysis on classroom interaction (cf. Gardner 2012; Koole 2013, among others), we thus reflect on the interplay between the two disciplines, discussing and comparing their fundamental tools and concepts. On the basis of examples of joint analyses of classroom interaction carried out within the project, furthermore, we aim at outlining possibilities for collaboration and ‘dialogue’ between the two research cultures; possibilities in which each of them, with its own specificities and enriched through the perspective of the other, can provide richer and ‘thicker’ insights on the shared object of investigation.