"I understand one hundred and twenty percent": explicit claims of understanding in L2 teacher feedback

While students' epistemic claims have garnered scholarly interest, teachers' uses of such claims in classroom discourse have received much less attention. This conversation-analytic study fills this gap by examining uses of explicit claims of understanding (e.g. I understand the question; I know whatchu mean) in L2 classrooms. Our analysis shows that these claims can be employed to respond to two types of student contributions: first, students' persistent trouble with self-repairs of their own grammatical errors; and second, 'borderline' answers or suggestions. We show that as part of the teacher's multi-unit feedback turn, these claims explicitly and ostensibly validate the comprehensibility of the student turn or the logic behind a student contribution. In using such claims, the teacher can (1) momentarily and explicitly shift to language-focused pedagogical work or (2) modulate a prior stance towards the student contribution. Data consist of 26 hours of video-recordings of high-beginner and low-intermediate adult ESL classes. The findings contribute to teacher feedback and error correction literature in L2 classrooms by highlighting how explicit claims of understanding can be marshalled as a resource for developing complex and nuanced responses to learner contributions. They also add to a growing body of work on overt formulations of intersubjectivity in pedagogical talk.