Teacher smiles as an interactional and pedagogical resource in the classroom

In classroom settings, laughter and smiles are resources for action that are available to both teachers and students. Recent interactional studies have documented how students use these resources to deal with trouble of various kind, but less is known about the sequential and activity contexts of teachers’ laughter-relevant practices, as well as their pedagogical functions. We use multimodal conversation analysis (CA) to investigate the interactional unfolding and pedagogical orientations of teacher smiles during instructional IRE (initiation-response-evaluation) sequences in a corpus of 37 bilingual lessons collected in schools in Finland and Spain. In analysing the focal smiles, we pay attention to their temporal relationships to students’ preceding and subsequent facial expressions and the unfolding of on-going talk. We argue that smiling can index teachers’ affiliative and pedagogical responsiveness to troubles and competences implied by prior student actions. The analysis of selected data fragments shows how smiling is part of multimodal action packages through which teachers manage momentary action disalignments and restore a sense of students as competent actors. The findings contribute towards recent CA research on the embodied and interactional nature of teaching and learning by showing some ways in which smiling is a situated practice used for professional purposes. •We investigate pedagogical work done by teacher smiles in bilingual classrooms.•Smiles are used to manage action disalignments and to frame students as competent actors.•Smiling is a way to show pedagogical responsiveness to student-displayed trouble.•In this way, smiling is a situated and embodied professional practice.