1 This is a pre-print version of an article which appeared in Linguistics and Education (2008) 19, 2, 166‐178. Displaying Orientation in the Classroom: Students’ Multimodal Responses to Teacher Instructions Jeff Bezemer Introduction This paper is about the displays of orientation that students use to participate in the classroom. Building on Goodwin (1981) and Kendon (1990), it is argued that students use their direction of gaze, body posture, gesture and other modes of communication to realize such displays and respond to what goes on when they are not nominated speakers. The multimodal displays of orientation allow students to suggest varying degrees of engagement with (curricular) objects and individuals around them. The focus of the paper is on the silent but active participation of a recently immigrated secondary school student. The analysis shows that she demonstrates understanding of the contextual grounds for meaning making in the classroom through careful alignment of her displays of orientation with subsequent stages in a whole-class activity. Following Mehan (1996) it is suggested that this interactional fluency will have a significant impact on her educational career. Learning how to communicate in the classroom implies a lot more that learning how to speak and write and on what occasion. To be socialized in education means to learn to use a variety of socially and culturally shaped resources for making meaning. Pahl (1999) and Flewitt (2006), for instance, show how children interact in preschool using modes such as gaze,