Conversation Breakdown and Institutional Discourse in Ghanaian ESL Classrooms: A Conversation Analytic Investigation

This study responds to the growing pedagogical interest in optimizing communicative competence within English as a Second Language (ESL) classroom interaction by investigating a critical, yet under-explored, domain, the interactional trouble sources that initiate conversation breakdown. Grounded in a Conversation Analytical (CA) framework, the research methodology utilizes a hybrid approach: CA modeling for the micro-analysis of recorded data and content analysis for the qualitative interview data. The empirical base consists of 52 h of recorded ESL classroom discourse extracted from the Ghana Senior High School corpus of academic spoken English database collected by the researchers and research assistants, and augmented by interviews with practicing ESL teachers. A systematic analysis of the interactional sequences showed a pronounced presence of both etic (analyst-defined) and emic (participant-oriented) conversational trouble sources. The findings delineate six salient categories of trouble sources, namely, mishearing/non-hearing, vagueness, topic transition, information deficit, and lexical inappropriacy. These trouble sources demonstrably impeded interactional flow. Notably, the research establishes that the origins of these trouble sources are multi-layered, transcending mere surface-level linguistic (phonology, syntax, lexis) deficiencies to include institutional factors such as instructional ambiguity, procedural misalignments, disciplinary actions, and culturally situated vocabulary choices. This evidence mandates that future ESL research accord greater significance to the impact of institutional discourse (especially, classroom discourse) features as a primary generator of interactional trouble.