41© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
S. Kunitz et al. (eds.), Classroom-based Conversation Analytic Research,
Educational Linguistics 46, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52193-6_4
The Intersubjective Objectivity
of Learnables
Ali Reza Majlesi
Abstract This chapter delves into the theoretical underpinnings of praxeological
and dialogical research on the emergence of opportunities for learning in teacher–
student interactivities. First, I introduce the emergence of objects of learning as a
social phenomenon; then I argue for the intersubjective–intercorporeal understand-
ing of those objects as emergent learnables in classroom talk in their immediate
contextual and interactional environments. Two sequences of classroom activities in
a Swedish as a second language classroom are presented and analyzed from a phe-
nomenological–sociological view on intersubjectivity. The analysis highlights the
signi cance of a dialogical and praxeological approach to the study of learning/
teaching activities, and underscores that attending to intersubjectivity includes pay-
ing attention to corporeal acts in the procedure of orienting to, and showing under-
standing about, learnables. The chapter concludes that, in order to understand
teaching/learning behaviors, a detailed analysis of participants’ actions in their
interactivities is necessary. More speci cally, in all talk-in-interaction (and particu-
larly in classroom talk, with which this study is speci cally concerned), the objec-
tive reality of linguistic expressions – their forms, and their functions – is
accomplished, situated and embodied, and is thus reexive and indexical in nature.
This may suggest that researchers abstain from the dichotomy of the subjective–
objective reality of a learnable in favor of the possibility of considering the intersub-
jective objectivity of a learnable as what is accomplished in real time in a social
activity.
Keywords Intersubjectivity · Intercorporeality · Ethnomethodological
conversation analysis · Multimodal interaction · Learnables
A. R. Majlesi (*)
Department of Education, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
e-mail:
[email protected]
I would like to thank the editors of the book, particularly Numa Markee for his detailed comments
on this chapter and also for allowing me to use his own data to write the practical implications for
the chapter. I am also indebted to Per Linell, Mathias Broth and Charlotta Plejert for their com-
ments on the earlier version of the manuscript.