Making Learnables Hearable: Eliciting Students’ Responses through Prosody in Mandarin L2 Classrooms

This article examines how teachers prosodically approach designedly incomplete utterances (DIUs) to elicit co-completions in Mandarin as a second language classrooms. Drawing on interactional linguistics and multimodal conversation analysis, this study identifies 312 DIUs from 18.3 hours of video and audio recordings in 12 university classes in China. The analysis reveals that DIU-final syllables are systematically produced with syllable lengthening, raised pitch register, and expanded pitch range, while crucially preserving the lexical tonal contours of Mandarin. These prosodic designs enable teachers to establish pre-possible completion points that students treat as response-relevant. The findings extend prior research on DIUs in intonational languages by demonstrating how tonal phonology constrains and affords prosodic resources for organizing co-completion. The study concludes with implications for learnables and teacher education, emphasizing the need for typology-sensitive descriptions of classroom questioning practices.