Teacher mobility during small-group instructional rounds for young EFL learners: An embodied resource to promote students' task engagement

Teaching is a highly complex and context-dependent activity that requires teachers’ strategic employment of embodied resources tailored to the specific instructional contexts. Particularly, the coordination of teachers’ whole-body movements, or mobility, becomes indispensable for instructions during small-group rounds (Jakonen, 2020), where teachers monitor and guide students, organize on-task activity, and engage in social talk. Drawing upon multimodal conversation analysis, the present study explores teacher movement, extending beyond walking to encompass leaning in, bending over, sitting with, and kneeling next to students, during a prolonged desk interaction. The analysis demonstrates how mobility is a professional resource that can be skillfully deployed in creating pedagogical opportunities that promote students’ task engagement. The findings also reveal how students respond through mutual displays of bodily engagement that are sequentially and temporally aligning to the instruction. Overall, the study hopes to offer further insights into teacher mobility through fine-grained analysis of subtle bodily movements that engenders mutual student engagement during small-group rounds.