Managing multiple competing demands of moment-by-moment classroom interaction is a ubiquitous concern for L2 teachers. Competing demands have been shown to emerge in moments of chaos as learners’ voices coincide in classroom talk-in-interaction. A way of responding to this issue is teachers’ use of “heteroglossic talk” (Waring, 2021), that is, designing utterances in such a way as to simultaneously echo more than one function. Employing an epistemic angle towards the treatment of interactional data, our conversation analytic (CA) study draws on 22 hours of video-recorded data from Iranian EFL classrooms to illustrate how competing demands may also emerge in moments of prolonged silence, where claims of insufficient knowledge (CIKs) are embodied by learners. We argue that such moments necessitate orienting to a “preference for progressivity of talk” (Stivers & Robinson, 2006) as well as making relevant learners’ access to the required linguistic domain. Orienting to both momentary pedagogical necessities, the teachers in our study invoke a conceptually accessible epistemic domain. We define the conceptual epistemic domain as an area of world knowledge to which learners have ostensible access. Our analysis showcases that teachers’ deployment of such practices facing learners’ CIKs accomplishes two pedagogical functions concurrently: (1) by providing contingent assistance; and (2) making relevant learners’ linguistic access. The former function is evidenced by the learners’ provision of relevant further talk while the latter function is indexed in the teacher’s subsequent move of opening up a teaching sequence to repair the linguistic encoding of the learners’ utterances. Considering this, our study sheds light on the heteroglossic quality of invoking conceptually accessible epistemic domains as an interactional resource. We argue that raising microscopic awareness of this interactional resource can enrich teachers’ interactional dexterity for managing emerging competing demands of L2 classroom discourse.
