For a student to learn a foreign language, teachers who are experts in the field use specific educational techniques. One of them is to encourage students to share their own experiences, opinions, and beliefs. In this way, the aim is to promote interaction between the teacher and the student by creating a dialogue, which makes the teacher able to understand and, at the same time, correct the sentences formulated by the student body that are incorrect.

However, these actions position the teacher as being “interactive” without access to this type of internal knowledge among the student body. In this regard, Mandy Deal, from the Institute for Multilingualism at UIC Barcelona and Jaume Batlle from the University of Barcelona, published the following article entitled "Teacher epistemic stance as a trouble in classroom interaction" in the Journal of Pragmatics, a study that makes an important contribution to knowledge about the epistemic stance of foreign language teachers in meaning-centred interactions, a type of interaction in which students are encouraged to share their experiences, beliefs, ideas and opinions.

Based on speech analysis parameters, Deal and Alcalde demonstrate how teachers sometimes adopt an inappropriate epistemic stance, especially when they anticipate information that belongs in the student's knowledge area or when they have to offer a solution to a vocabulary problem that arises through interaction.

In these cases, the inadequate epistemic stance of the teacher causes problems in the development of the interaction, interrupting its progression and causing a problem that needs to be repaired.

Through their study, the authors provide new information about how the interaction between teachers and students in the foreign language classroom works and that foreign language teachers must take into consideration when making their participation in the classroom more effective in terms of student learning.