Multilingual International Students in University Classrooms : Multimodal Approaches to Interaction

This book elucidates the communicative practices of multilingual international students in university classrooms, charting how they employ not only speech but also a rich set of nonverbal semiotic resources for successful communication.

This book elucidates the communicative practices of multilingual international students in university classrooms, charting how they employ not only speech but also a rich set of nonverbal semiotic resources for successful communication. Matsumoto scrutinizes multilingual multimodal interactional sequences in which distinct multimodal features, such as gesture, laughter, or mobile technology, play key roles in enacting agency in multilingual international students. Supported by data drawn from face-to-face classroom interactions as well as virtual settings that were crucial means of communication during the COVID-19 pandemic, the volume argues that, in expanding the borders of what we consider “classroom interaction,” we can uncover new insights into learner agency and interactional norms in multilingual university classrooms. This volume is intended for students and scholars interested in multilingual international students, multimodal and multisensory communication, applied linguistics, language education, and classroom discourse analysis.