Collaborative knowledge-building in English medium instruction through pedagogical storying practices of students

The research on English Medium Instruction has increasingly shifted its focus towards the dynamics of classroom interaction. However, storytelling as a knowledge-building tool in these settings has yet to be explored. Thus, this study aims to explore how pedagogical storying practices of students interactionally unfold for the co-construction of disciplinary content and how they are positioned within the broader epistemic and social structures of the classroom. The analysed data consists of six hours of video-recorded classroom interactions at a Turkish tertiary institution, drawn from a larger dataset of EMI classroom discourse. The interdisciplinary analytical lens we adopted, combining multimodal Conversation Analysis and the Autonomy dimension of Legitimation Code Theory, reveals that students employ a wide range of interactional and multilingual resources in the pedagogical storying sequences to achieve social and epistemic positions and identities. The turn-taking and sequential organisation of these instances also yield three recurring patterns: (i) self-initiated, (ii) solicited, and (iii) assigned pedagogical storying practices of students. The LCT analysis demonstrates how lecturers manage student stories as external constituents to strategically repurpose them for target disciplinary knowledge-building by using autonomy tours. These findings have implications for the content and design of professional development programs for EMI lecturers.