Linguistics and Education 24 (2013) 572–584 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Linguistics and Education j ourna l ho me p ag e: www.elsevier.com/locate/linged Voices, grins and laughter in the lecture room Anne Bannink a,∗ , Jet Van Dam b,1 a ACLC, English Department, University of Amsterdam, Spuistraat 210, 1012 VT Amsterdam, The Netherlands b ACLC, University of Amsterdam, Spuistraat 210, 1012 VT Amsterdam, The Netherlands a r t i c l e i n f o Available online 22 August 2013 Keywords: Educational dialog Multiparty interaction Multimodal communication Complex footings Institutional discourse Higher education a b s t r a c t This paper investigates the listening behaviors of students in a university lecture hall for cues of ‘active listening’ and/or cognitive/emotional engagement. Claims that the lec- ture format intrinsically lacks opportunities for learning since there is no (verbal) student response are examined on the basis of video data of a lecture on the first day of term in a large lecture theater seating 300+ students. We show evidence of the intricate coordina- tion and synchronization of individual and multi-listener responses with emerging units of the lecture-in-progress and conclude that there is no research-based ground to support the aforementioned claim. Laughter, whisper voices, grins, and prosodic cues are part of the data that should be addressed to advance our understanding of complex participation modes in formal institutional settings. © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction This paper started out as an investigation of the notion that there is no evidence of active engagement or cognitive activity on the part of students during institutional events of the type ‘straight lecture’. We address the issue on the basis of detailed analyses of video data recorded during an introductory lecture on the first day of term in a large university lecture theater seating approximately 300 students. In the course of our investigations the emphasis shifted to include linguistic phenomena and multimodal semiotic resources that are more generally relevant to the coordination and synchronization of interactional behaviors. Our investigation is in the nature of a case study in so far as it focuses on just the one lecture, but since this lecture is also part of a larger corpus we will occasionally claim more general relevance for phenomena that we have encountered (and described) elsewhere. Our general aim is to make some progress toward articulating what relevantly happens in the lecture room and what are appropriate ways to describe and interpret the discourse complexity commonly found there. In task-oriented multiparty events such as university lectures there is a lot going on simultaneously. Questions with respect to the selection of data and their interpretation are therefore notoriously difficult to resolve. What needs to be done, we suggest, is that we scrutinize the lecture room interface for online signs of attention and cognitive engagement on the part of individual students and/or groups of students. Detailed observations of the coordination and synchronization of the interactional behaviors of participants might enable us to make valid inferences about the extent to which students are actively processing the lecturer’s input (cf. Goodwin, 1984 for a similar recommendation with respect to the interactional behaviors of story listeners). In this paper we zoom in on the gray area of backchannel communication: the synchronized verbal, nonverbal and paralinguistic behaviors of the students attending the lecture. We also follow prosodic and deictic cues in the lecturer’s ∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +31 205253053; fax: +31 205253052. E-mail addresses: e.a.bannink@uva.nl (A. Bannink), h.r.vandamvanisselt@uva.nl (J. Van Dam). 1 Tel.: +31 205253053; fax: +31 205253052. 0898-5898/$ – see front matter © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2013.06.003