“What is the date today?”: A dialogist perspective on expert EFL teachers’ classroom interaction

This article presents a micro-analysis of an EFL classroom episode in which the teacher and the pupils worked on the concepts “date” and “day” (and relatedly saying the date in English), which the learners had not fully internalized yet. Conversation analysis (CA) and concepts from sociocultural theory (SCT) are used in the analysis to reveal how the mutual understanding proceeded. It is argued that the presented dialogist perspective can cast light on the intricacies of the teaching and learning processes.