With the advancement of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), many European countries quickly jumped onto the bandwagon of communicative language teaching approaches (Carlgren et al., 2006), thereby embracing a massive movement for reform of second language teaching from traditional, teacher-centered, and decontextualized teaching to the so-called student-centered approaches, notably task- and project-based language teaching. These approaches are motivated by the belief that, for second language acquisition to be possible, the target language should be used in ways reminiscent of the kinds of communication taking place in natural environments. The attempt to eschew traditional teaching approaches and methods was further enhanced by the rapid societal changes and the need to create an education that takes as its starting point students' needs and interests and is capable of equipping them with the knowledge and skills necessary for late-modern society (Säljö et al., 2011). To this end, learning a second language while doing projects has become a prominent staple in language education in recent years. Using project work, teachers aim to engage their students over an extended period of time in an active and interactive pursuit of knowledge while focusing on real-life issues, which enables them to use the language communicatively in authentic contexts to eventually accomplish a final product that may be in the form of presentation, debates, posters, written essays, etc.

Not only has project work transformed the topics and tasks into more authentic ones, but it has also modified the teacher's role in coordinating the project process. While the focus on teaching the language remains prime, much of the teacher talk in project work is devoted to helping students with the logistics of their work (Legutke & Thomas, 1991). Furthermore, since project work involves different constellations of students searching for knowledge and building up their project ideas, a great deal of classroom talk, including teacher instructions, happens at their desks. Therefore, constant visits to the students’ desks to supervise the students’ work, answer their questions and monitor their progress become a prerequisite for the accomplishment of the project tasks. This format of teaching constitutes a departure from traditional teaching and requires more demanding input from the teacher. Despite this rather substantial change in the teacher's role, there are barely any available studies that zero in on how teachers manage the project process that is mediated via a great deal of small group work and between-desk instructions (Amri & Sert, 2022). Surely, most teachers working with projects rely primarily on their common sense and experience repertoire to coordinate the process. Still, crucially, as researchers, we should contribute to an informed understanding of teaching strategies and practices that are consequential for accomplishing language projects. Based on this overarching aim, I intend to offer an understanding of – what is, in many ways, lacking from studies on second-language classrooms – teachers' responding strategies to students' initiatives. Therefore, I ask the following research question:

How do teachers respond to students' initiatives in the context of project-based instruction?

Given the lack of studies on teachers' strategies in answering students' questions in the context of project-based instruction, I attempt to use a qualitative approach that is based on the methodological tools of multimodal conversation analysis (henceforth MCA, Kääntä & Kasper, 2018; Mondada, 2018). MCA provides a fine-tuned interactional analysis of participants' turns-at-talk in order to shed light on the social co-construction of these interactions that is part and parcel of the entire social encounter. Such research is essential as more innovative teaching approaches that can cope with the rapidly changing societal and educational needs should be empirically investigated to help us pinpoint pedagogical practices that are consequential for language learning.  

The data used for this study, a total of 32 hours, were collected in two upper-secondary-level English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes in Sweden that were audio- and videotaped using three high-definition cameras and multiple audio recorders. The two classes were taught by two experienced English language teachers and were both made up of 25 students whose ages ranged from 17 to 18 years. Using two different datasets emanating from two classes involving two different teachers, students, and projects is strategic to avoid creating categories of interactional trajectories of some strategies that are largely idiosyncratic to a single teacher. In other words, the categorization of the teachers' response strategies should depict the emergent responding strategies that are most frequently used by language teachers while working within this approach. In the first classroom (collected Oct/Nov 2019), the students were engaged in project work about 'Sports'. The main objective of this project is to gather information from various audiovisual sources on three perspectives of sports (Sports as a Role Model for Society, Gender Pay Gap, and Kids Dropping out of Sports), which will be presented in the form of formal discussions at the end of the project. The second project (collected Sep/Oct 2022) concerns 'Democracy' and targets several topics related to citizens' rights and responsibilities, political propaganda, political elections, and dictatorships. Consents from the teachers and students had been gathered prior to data collection and GDPR rules, as well as ethical research guidelines of the Swedish Research Council (2017), had strictly been followed. Participation was voluntary and the participants were informed that they could withdraw from the study at any time. Stressing the central role of talk in organizing teaching and learning in the classroom, I use the theoretical and methodological framework of MCA to investigate how "daily activities in classrooms are produced as such in the first place, rather than having these 'in place' and then theorizing them" (Hester & Francis, 2000, p. 1). MCA enables us to understand teachers' strategies in answering students' initiatives in between-desk encounters, based on turn-by-turn analysis of their talk-in-interaction, taking the participants' own perspective in organizing these interactional encounters while paying close attention to micro-level interactional details, including suprasegmentals and embodied conduct. Furthermore, the use of this qualitative approach is driven by the theoretical belief that, in order to understand how people organize their social experiences, researchers should investigate the kinds of practical activities that people achieve while engaging in social interaction.

As mentioned above, project work is characterized by a great deal of group work where students, either in dyads or in larger groups, engage in researching a topic for the purpose of accomplishing a final product of some sort. Therefore, much of classroom talk happens between desks, thereby breaking from the “traditional” teacher-fronted approach. While students are collaboratively working on several tasks, the teacher is constantly visiting their desks to perform multiple actions, one of which is to answer their initiatives. A preliminary analysis of the students’ initiatives in the present dataset yielded the following categories: - requests for clarifications or explanations of instructions matters (e.g., task procedures or instructional issues) - questions on problem words or phrases located in source readings or in the teacher's guiding materials - requests for new information Since these initiatives are different in terms of content and the types of information needed by students, the teachers’ responding strategies vary accordingly. For instance, both teachers predominantly used direct responses when the students asked about grammatical/lexical items. In some instances, they used a counter-question strategy (i.e., responding with a question to a question, see Markee, 2004) when they wanted to locate the items in the source readings or in the guiding materials. On the other hand, when the students requested their teachers’ opinions on their work or their perspectives on their ongoing discussions of some issues of direct relevance to them, both teachers mostly responded with a counter-question turn constructed to direct the students to a specific answer or to allow them to notice their own thinking. While these are still preliminary results, the growing collection of the teachers’ responses is promising and shows clear patterns in relation to the students’ initiatives but also in accordance with the overall goals of the application of the project approach.

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