L2 Interactional Competence and Development (Second Language Acquisition)

L2 Interactional Competence and Development SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION Series Editor: Professor David Singleton, Tri...

Author: Joan Kelly Hall | John Hellermann | Simona Pekarek Doehler

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L2 Interactional Competence and Development

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION Series Editor: Professor David Singleton, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland This series brings together titles dealing with a variety of aspects of language acquisition and processing in situations where a language or languages other than the native language is involved. Second language is thus interpreted in its broadest possible sense. The volumes included in the series all offer in their different ways, on the one hand, exposition and discussion of empirical fi ndings and, on the other, some degree of theoretical reflection. In this latter connection, no particular theoretical stance is privileged in the series; nor is any relevant perspective – sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic, neurolinguistic, and so on – deemed out of place. The intended readership of the series includes fi nal-year undergraduates working on second language acquisition projects, postgraduate students involved in second language acquisition research and researchers and teachers in general whose interests include a second language acquisition component. Full details of all the books in this series and of all our other publications can be found on http://www.multilingual-matters.com, or by writing to Multilingual Matters, St Nicholas House, 31–34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK.

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION Series Editor: David Singleton


Edited by

Joan Kelly Hall, John Hellermann and Simona Pekarek Doehler

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS Bristol • Buffalo • Toronto

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. L2 Interactional Competence and Development/Edited by Joan Kelly Hall, John Hellermann and Simona Pekarek Doehler. Second Language Acquistion: 56 Includes bibliographical references 1. Second language acquisition. 2. Conversation analysis. 3. Communicative competence. I. Hall, Joan Kelly. II. Hellermann, John, 1963- III. Doehler, Simona Pekarek. P118.2.L18 2011 407.1–dc222011015599 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13: 978-1-84769-406-5 (hbk) ISBN-13: 978-1-84769-405-8 (pbk) Multilingual Matters UK: St Nicholas House, 31–34 High Street, Bristol, BS1 2AW, UK. USA: UTP, 2250 Military Road, Tonawanda, NY 14150, USA. Canada: UTP, 5201 Dufferin Street, North York, Ontario, M3H 5T8, Canada. Copyright © 2011 Joan Kelly Hall, John Hellermann, Simona Pekarek Doehler and the authors of individual chapters. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. The policy of Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products, made from wood grown in sustainable forests. In the manufacturing process of our books, and to further support our policy, preference is given to printers that have FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody certification. The FSC and/or PEFC logos will appear on those books where full certification has been granted to the printer concerned. Typeset by Techset Composition Ltd, Salisbury, UK. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Short Run Press Ltd.

Contents Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi 1 L2 Interactional Competence and Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 J.K. Hall and S. Pekarek Doehler Part 1:

The Nature of L2 Interactional Competence

2 Enacting Interactional Competence in Gaming Activities: Coproducing Talk with Virtual Others . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 A. Piirainen-Marsh 3 Learning as Social Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 F. Sahlström 4 The Social Life of Self-Directed Talk: A Sequential Phenomenon? 66 F. Steinbach Kohler and S.L. Thorne 5 Second Language Interaction for Business and Learning . . . . . . . . 93 G. Theodórsdóttir 6 Responding to Questions and L2 Learner Interactional Competence during Language Proficiency Interviews: A Microanalytic Study with Pedagogical Implications . . . . . . . . . . 117 R.A. Van Compernolle Part 2: Development of L2 Interactional Competence 7 Members’ Methods, Members’ Competencies: Looking for Evidence of Language Learning in Longitudinal Investigations of Other-Initiated Repair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 J. Hellermann 8 Achieving Recipient Design Longitudinally: Evidence from a Pharmacy Intern in Patient Consultations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173 H.T. Nguyen 9 Developing ‘Methods’ for Interaction: A Cross-Sectional Study of Disagreement Sequences in French L2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206 S. Pekarek Doehler and E. Pochon-Berger

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10 Becoming the Teacher: Changing Participant Frameworks in International Teaching Assistant Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244 E.F. Rine and J.K. Hall

Contributors Joan Kelly Hall is Professor of Applied Linguistics in the Department of Applied Linguistics at the Pennsylvania State University. Her research focuses on uncovering the interactional resources by which teaching and learning are accomplished in classrooms. She has published in journals such as Applied Linguistics, The Modern Language Journal and Research on Language and Social Interaction. Her books include Teaching and Researching Language and Culture (2nd edn, Pearson, 2011) and Dialogue with Bakhtin on Second and Foreign Language Learning (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003, with G. Vitanova and L. Marchenkova). John Hellermann has worked at Portland State University (Portland, Oregon, USA) in the Department of Applied Linguistics since 2003. His research has focused on the sequential and prosodic organization of classroom talk and on how mundane social interactions may be seen as sites for language learning. He is the author of Social Actions for Classroom Language Learning (Multilingual Matters, 2008). Fee Steinbach Kohler is completing her PhD on co-construction processes in the L2 classroom, drawing from conversation analysis and sociocultural theory. She is more generally interested in how participants use multiple semiotic resources to coordinate and accomplish social actions and how such analysis feeds into an understanding of learning as socio-cognitive process anchored in participants’ social practices. She was a visiting scholar at the Department of Applied Linguistics, Pennsylvania State University and the ICAR Institute, University of Lyon 2, France between 2007 and 2009. Hanh thi Nguyen is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics in the TESOL Program at Hawaii Pacific University. Her research interests include the development of interactional competence in the workplace and second language learning, second language socialization, classroom interaction and Vietnamese applied linguistics. Her works have appeared in Applied Linguistics, The Modern Language Journal, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Language and Education, Text and Talk and Communication and Medicine, among others. She is the co-editor of Talk-in-Interaction: Multilingual Perspectives (2009, with Gabriele Kasper) and Pragmatics and Language Learning (Vol. 12) (2010, with Gabriele Kasper, Dina Rudolph Yoshimi and Jim K. Yoshioka). vii

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Simona Pekarek Doehler is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. She formerly held a Swiss National Science Foundation professorship. Her research, drawing from conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, focuses on second language acquisition (SLA), specifically within the classroom, as well as the relation between grammar and interaction. She investigates how participants use grammar as a resource to accomplish and coordinate social actions and how, in turn, linguistic and communicative resources emerge from social interaction. She is also interested in the conceptual and theoretical implications that emanate from such empirical analysis for our understanding of SLA and, more generally, of language. Arja Piirainen-Marsh is Professor of English in the Department of Languages, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Her current research focuses on the relationship between linguistic choices, structures of interaction and multimodal resources in formal and informal learning environments, in particular the classroom and video-gaming activities. Her publications include papers in the Journal of Pragmatics, Modern Language Journal, Language Policy, Journal of Computer Mediated Communication and Scandinavian Journal of Education Research. Evelyne Pochon-Berger obtained her PhD thesis in 2010 from the University of Neuchâtel. Her doctoral research was concerned with the interactional competence of intermediate classroom learners of French L2, as materalized in the learners’ turn-taking techniques, including verbal, prosodic and gestural resources, as well as their ability to manage interactional coherence. She has been a visiting researcher at the University of Luxemburg, and is now working as a Post-Doc at the Center for Applied Linguistics at the University of Neuchâtel, on the development of L2 interactional competence in non-educational settings. Emily F. Rine is an Instructor in the American English Institute within the Department of Linguistics at the University of Oregon. Her research interests include International Teaching Assistant discourse and curriculum design, conversation analysis for SLA, learner corpus analysis and intercultural pragmatics. She has presented papers at numerous conferences, including the American Association for Applied Linguistics and the International Conference on Pragmatics and Language Learning. Fritjof Sahlström is currently a University Lecturer at the Institute for Behavioral Sciences at the University of Helsinki, Finland. His research has focused on the organization of interaction in educational settings, on developing ways of conceptualizing and studying learning within conversation

Contributors

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analysis, and on developing research designs and methods for the study of interaction and learning in educational settings. Guðrún Theodórsdóttir teaches Icelandic as a second language at the University of Iceland. She recently completed her PhD study, Conversations in Second Language Icelandic: Language Learning in Real-Life Environment, from the University of Southern Denmark. Her research interests include studying second language use and learning in everyday interaction within the research framework of CA-SLA. She has collected longitudinal data (30 minutes a week for three years) of naturally occurring L2 interaction in everyday settings which she intends to use for future research. These data are partly available for researchers on Talkbank.org. Steven L. Thorne received his PhD from UC Berkeley and currently holds faculty appointments in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Portland State University and the Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. His research has been supported by the Spencer Foundation and the US Department of Education and focuses on uses of new and social media in L2 education, usage-based and socioculturally informed investigations of language learning, and revitalization of ancestral languages. Rémi A. van Compernolle is a PhD candidate in the Department of Applied Linguistics at the Pennsylvania State University. His research interests include second language acquisition and foreign language education, pragmatics and sociolinguistics, and computer-mediated discourse and interaction. His work is primarily informed by sociocognitive and cultural–historical approaches to language and learning. He is author or co-author of numerous journal articles and book chapters and co-editor (with Lawrence Williams) of Computer-mediated Discourse and Interaction in Language Learning and Language Teaching (special issue of Canadian Modern Language Review, to appear in 2012).

Preface The genesis of this volume dates back to the 13th International Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA) World Congress held in Singapore in December, 2002, and specifically, to a meeting of the organizers of two colloquia presented at the Congress. One of the colloquia drew on social theories, such as Vygotskian sociocultural theory, situated learning and language socialization to investigate language learning. The other drew heavily on ethnomethodological conversation analysis to examine language use. Although the theoretical frameworks of the colloquia differed, the studies presented across the colloquia focused on the fundamental role of social interaction and joint activity in second language use and learning. Recognizing their converging perspectives and interests in continuing the discussion with other like-minded scholars, the organizers of the colloquia, Joan Kelly Hall, Simona Pekarek Doelher and Johannes Wagner, met during the Congress and formulated initial plans for a three-day research meeting that Johnannes Wagner agreed to host at the University of Odense in Fall 2004. Twenty scholars were invited to the inaugural meeting of the Conversation Analysis/Sociocultural Theory (CA/SCT) research group. Over the three days, the participants examined empirical data and addressed some crucial theoretical questions such as how to define competence, and what methodological procedures could be used to provide evidence for the socio-interactional basis of second language acquisition. The discussions led to the planning of two colloquia for AILA 2005 and additional meetings. One was held at Portland State University in April 2006 and another was held on Long Beach Island, New Jersey in June 2008. The more recent meetings have focused on group data analysis sessions where problems involved in the analysis of language in use and language acquisition are undertaken collaboratively. The most recent gathering of the group came at the annual meeting of the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) 2009 in Denver, Colorado, where several members participated in a colloquium which addressed the ‘A’ facet of ‘SLA’ (the learning of language and other professional and cultural practices), conceptualizing this as the development of language practices for interactional competence. Several papers from that colloquium are presented in this volume along with those by researchers not in attendance (Sahlström, Theodórsdóttir and van Compernolle). xi

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Many of the ideas presented in this volume have been cultivated through the extended discussions with our peers afforded by these research meetings and through the work they have published. The list of individual research papers and monographs that have been published over the last decade and have influenced the ideas contained in these chapters is too large to mention here, but we note that many of these works are cited in the chapters of this volume. We extend special thanks to the contributors to this volume for their collegiality and inspiration in continuing with what we see as a valuable research program for applied linguistics.

Chapter 1

L2 Interactional Competence and Development J.K. HALL and S. PEKAREK DOEHLER

Introduction Socially grounded investigations of L2 interactions have been a growing focus of research over the last 15 years or so. These studies have documented the variety of interactional resources L2 speakers draw on for sense-making in their social worlds. This expanding body of research has made evident the effectiveness of conversation analysis (CA) as both a theory and method for describing the myriad resources comprising L2 users’ interactional competence (IC). However, still lingering is the question of its effectiveness for understanding how L2 users develop such competence. Contributors to this volume explore answers to this question. Drawing on data from a range of interactional contexts, including classrooms, pharmacy consultations, tutoring sessions and video-game playing, and a range of languages including English, German, French, Danish and Icelandic, the studies use conversation analytic methods to investigate the use and development of the many resources comprising L2 users’ IC.

Interactional Competence The studies in this volume take as axiomatic that interaction is fundamental to social life. In our interactions with others, we set goals and negotiate the procedures used to reach them. At the same time, we constitute and manage our individual identities, our social role relationships, and memberships in our social groups and communities. Central to competent engagement in our interactions is our ability to accomplish meaningful social actions, to respond to c-participants′ previous actions and to make recognizable for others what our actions are and how these relate to their own actions. IC, that is the context-specific constellations of expectations and dispositions about our social worlds that we draw on to navigate our 1

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way through our interactions with others, implies the ability to mutually coordinate our actions. It includes knowledge of social-context-specific communicative events or activity types, their typical goals and trajectories of actions by which the goals are realized and the conventional behaviors by which participant roles and role relationships are accomplished. Also included is the ability to deploy and to recognize context-specific patterns by which turns are taken, actions are organized and practices are ordered. And it includes the prosodic, linguistic, sequential and nonverbal resources conventionally used for producing and interpreting turns and actions, to construct them so that they are recognizable for others, and to repair problems in maintaining shared understanding of the interactional work we and our interlocutors are accomplishing together (Heritage, 2004; Hymes, 1964, 1972; Sacks et al., 1974; Schegloff, 2007; Schegloff et al., 1977). We approach our interactional activities – from everyday practices of talk such as greetings, leave-takings and joking, to more institutional situations, such as doctor–patient interactions, business meetings and instructional lectures – with these context-specific collections of knowledge, expectations, dispositions, orientations and resources, and we draw on them as we monitor ours and each other’s moment-to-moment involvement in the interactions. At each interactional moment we attend to each other’s actions, build interpretations as to what these actions are about and where they are heading, and formulate our own contributions based on our interpretations that move the interaction along, either toward or away from the anticipated outcomes of each preceding move. When we approach a service encounter for example, we have certain expectations about goals and purposes of the encounter, and anticipate the various roles and role relationships we are likely to find. We also have expectations about the sequence of interactional actions that are likely to unfold, and the linguistic and other means for accomplishing them. The utterance ‘Who’s next?,’ for example, calls to mind a set of goals and purposes and of roles and role relationships, which, in this case would be sales clerks and customers. It also calls to mind a certain way of taking turns, and expectations about the actions that likely preceded and will follow this utterance, and how these actions are preferably, expectably organized. At these moments, we use our understandings of and experience in a range of interactional activities to make sense of what is occurring. As the interaction unfolds, we continually reflect upon and revise our understandings of preceding contributions, assess the likely consequences engendered by such moves, and make decisions about how to signal our understandings to the others and to construct appropriate contributions (Goodwin & Goodwin, 1992; Sanders, 1987, 1995). In sum, when we participate in interactions, we draw on an ‘immense stock of sedimented social knowledge’ (Hanks, 1996: 238) and on a set of routinized yet context-sensitive procedures with which we reason our way


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through the moment-to-moment unfoldings of our interactions. This competence is socially grounded in that its components are constructed in interaction and shared with social group members in specific communicative contexts. It is cognitive in that it is part of people’s context-specific structures of expectations. Yet, these structures are not static, mental representations. Rather, their shapes and meanings are dynamic and malleable, tied to their locally situated uses in culturally framed communicative activities.

Disciplinary Foundations Current conceptualizations of IC owe much to two fields for theoretical and empirical inspiration. A first source is American linguistic anthropology, and in particular, the work of Dell Hymes (1962, 1964, 1972). Hymes considered social function to be the source of linguistic form and so conceptualized language as context-embedded social action. He coined the concept communicative competence to refer to the capacity to acquire and use language appropriately. It is this knowledge, Hymes argued, that shapes and gives meaning to linguistic forms. Hymes proposed the concept in response to generativists’ accounts of linguistic competence, which was defined as a historical, universally inscribed, invariant sets of internal principles and conditions for generating the structural components of language systems (Chomsky, 1965, 1966). Hymes considered this view of competence to be inadequate in that it could not account for the other kinds of knowledge individuals use to produce and interpret utterances appropriate to the particular contexts in which they occur. He noted, ‘. . . it is not enough for the child to be able to produce any grammatical utterance. It would have to remain speechless if it could not decide which grammatical utterance here and now, if it could not connect utterances to their contexts of use’ (Hymes, 1964: 110). Such socially constituted knowledge, Hymes argued, is what gives meaning and shape to language forms. Hymes further proposed the ethnography of speaking as both a conceptual framework and method for capturing such knowledge, and specifically, the patterns of language used by sociocultural group members to participate in the communicative events of their communities. Canale and Swain (1980; Canale, 1983) were among the fi rst in applied linguistics to draw on Hymes’s concept of communicative competence for the purposes of curriculum design and evaluation. Their framework contained four components: grammatical, which included knowledge of lexical items and rules of morphology, syntax, semantics and phonology; sociolinguistic, which included knowledge of the rules of language use; strategic, which included knowledge of strategies to overcome communicative problems; and, discourse competence, which dealt with the knowledge needed to participate in literacy activities. Canale and Swain argued that

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choices for what to include in a curriculum for language classrooms should be based on an analysis of the linguistic, sociolinguistic, discourse and strategic components comprising those communicative activities in which L2 learners were interested in becoming competent. The first systematic studies (for a most notable early exception see Hatch, 1978) that shed light on some aspects of communicative competence were undertaken within the framework of Interlanguage Pragmatics. Studies under this rubric focused mainly on describing speech acts such as requests, apologies and complaints, and comparing their uses across various cultural contexts (e.g. Blum-Kulka et al., 1989; Kasper & BlumKulka, 1993; Trosburg, 1994). These and other attempts to operationalize and investigate communicative competence (e.g. Bachmann, 1990, 1996; Celce-Murcia et al., 1995; Nunan, 1989) enhanced applied linguists’ understandings of various facets of communicative competence. However, as Young (2000) and others (He & Young, 1998; Lüdi, 2006; McNamara & Roever, 2006) have noted, they are limited in two respects. First, the various components of communicative competence have, by and large, been treated as static, cognitive properties of individuals, thereby rendering invisible their social foundations. Second, the focus of research has been on competence for speaking and not on competence for interaction. An early exception to this limited view is the 1986 essay by Claire Kramsch, in which she argued that, despite claiming to promote communicative abilities of language learners, the proficiency guidelines of the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), a US-based organization dedicated to language teaching and learning, were marred in that they emphasized grammatical accuracy over discourse appropriacy and thus took an ‘oversimplified view on human interactions’ (Kramsch, 1986: 367). The focus, she argued, should be shifted to IC, that is the skills and knowledge individuals employ to bring about successful interaction. By the 1990s, calls for more socially grounded, dynamic understandings of and investigations into IC were on the rise (Hall, 1993, 1995, 1999). For example, in her proposal for a more dynamic, sociocultural understanding of interaction, Hall drew on Hymes’ (1972) ethnography of speaking framework to propose a model for the study of interactive practices in language classrooms. Interactive practices, according to Hall, are ‘socioculturally conventionalized configurations of face-to-face interaction by which and within which group members communicate’ (Hall, 1993: 146). Her model consisted of seven components, which, she argued, were to be used as an analytic framework for uncovering the set of conventions by which such practices are constructed by social group members and thus are constitutive of members’ IC. This model was further elaborated upon by Young (2000, 2003). His framework consists of six components: (1) rhetorical script (i.e. knowledge of sequences of speech acts that are conventionally linked to a given type); (2) register (e.g. technical/expert


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vocabulary); (3) strategies for taking turns; (4) topic management (e.g. the rights to introduce/change topics and their placement); (5) roles and patterns of participation related to a given practice (i.e. novice–expert role–relations; speaker–hearer); and (6) boundary signaling devices (i.e. opening-, transition- and closing-procedures). While (1) and (2) are general resources valid for any interactive practice, and (5) is part of what has more classically been defi ned as socio-linguistic knowledge, points (3) turn taking, (4) topic management and (6) boundary signaling devices identify concrete interactional dimensions that can be empirically observed as indicators of interactional micro-skills. A second source of inspiration for current conceptualizations of IC is found in CA. CA began in the field of sociology over 40 years ago as an offshoot of ethnomethodology, an approach to the study of social life that considers the nature and source of social order to be fundamentally locally accomplished, and grounded in members’ real-world social practices (Garfi nkel, 1967; Heritage, 1984). Emerging from ethnomethodology’s interests in the empirical study of social order, but asserting a fundamental role for conversation as ‘the primordial site of human sociality’ (Schegloff, 2006: 70), CA narrowed its focus to the study of the organization of social interaction and took as its primary concern ‘the analysis of competence which underlies ordinary social activities’ (Heritage, 2004: 241). The first generation of CA scholars gave its analytic attention to describing the structural character of the ‘methods’ used by social group members to bring about and maintain social order in native speaker conversations. Methods, in the ethnomethodological sense of the term (Garfinkel, 1967), are systematic procedures (of, e.g. turn-taking, repairing, opening or closing conversation) by which members organize their behavior in a mutually understandable way, by which they accomplish intersubjectivity and establish and maintain social order. This body of CA work has made a substantial contribution to our understanding of the fi negrained mechanisms that pervade communicative activities in a range of settings: it has described the mechanisms of turn-taking (Sacks et al., 1974), of conversational openings and closings (Schegloff & Sacks, 1973), of manifestations of disagreement (Pomerantz, 1984), of topic management (Button & Casey, 1985), of the organization of conversational repair (Schegloff et al., 1977) and many more. Researchers with interests in talk in institutional settings have used CA’s analytic apparatus to explore the methods participants use to bring about and maintain social order in institutional talk-in-interaction. Institutional contexts of interest have included, for example, medical settings (e.g. Heritage & Maynard, 2006; Heritage & Stivers, 1999), court proceedings (e.g. Drew, 1992; Galatolo & Drew, 2006) and educational settings (e.g. Heap, 1992; Macbeth, 1994, 2000, 2004; Mehan, 1979). While

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early studies focused primarily on methods instantiated in talk, currently the scope of CA’s analytic focus encompasses other forms of conduct in addition to talk, such as body posture, gesture, eye gaze and other modes of communication used in the accomplishment of communicative activities (e.g. Goodwin, 2000, 2007). Throughout the past 40 years, CA has brought about a detailed understanding of how social interaction is organized on a moment-to-moment basis, identifying the manifold resources participants use to accomplish this organization and, thereby, uncovering the multiple facets of people’s competence for social interaction.

IC and L2 Interaction While some applied the analytic precision of CA to studies of L2 interaction in the late 1980s and early 1990s (e.g. see Bange, 1992; DausendschönGay & Krafft, 1994; De Pietro et al., 1989; Lüdi, 1991) it has been in the last 15 years or so that interest in using CA to study L2 interaction has taken firm hold of the field (e.g. Carroll, 2000; Gardner & Wagner, 2004; Lazaraton, 1997; Markee, 2000; Wong, 2000a, 2000b). This body of work has helped to increase understandings of the detailed workings of second language interactions by illustrating the wide range of interactional resources L2 speakers draw on in their interactions with other L2 speakers. Narrowing interests to L2 learner interactions, researchers in second language acquisition (SLA) have given their attention to describing the kinds of interactional activities L2 learners engage in inside and outside of the classroom and the resources they draw on to do so. Drawn together under the term CA-SLA (or CA-for-SLA), these studies have detailed the resources L2 users employ in various learning activities. For example, Mori (2002) examined the accomplishment of a classroom-based pair activity among learners of Japanese, demonstrating how the instructional design of the task affected the interactional resources learners drew on to complete the task. Markee (2004) analyzed the structural properties of the talk occurring at the boundaries of different L2 classroom interactional activities. Kasper (2004) examined the participant frameworks constructed by a learner of German and a native-speaking peer in an instructional activity held outside of the classroom. Additional studies have investigated the resources used by teachers to create different types of opportunities for student participation in classroom activities (e.g. Hellermann, 2003, 2005; Koshik, 2002; Lee, 2007).

The Development of IC Studies using CA to investigate L2 talk-in-interaction have contributed greatly to understandings of the indispensable presence of L2 users’ IC


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in second language interactions. However, with a few exceptions (e.g. Hellermann, 2008; Cekaite, 2007 for L2, and see Forrester, 2008 and Wootton, 1997 for L1), little is known about the process by which learners develop their L2 IC, nor about the stages this development goes through. Recently, it has been suggested that the development of L2 IC can be understood and studied in terms of a change in participants’ methods for accomplishing L2 talk-in-interaction (Hellermann, 2008; Mondada et al., 2004; Pekarek Doehler, 2010), and that it involves increased local efficacy of speakers’ conduct (Brouwer & Wagner, 2004). Still, the question as to whether CA, given its analytical and conceptual apparatus, is capable of addressing how one becomes interactionally competent in the L2 remains a central concern (cf. Hall, 2004; Kasper, 2006; Markee, 2008; Wagner, 2004). Major challenges for a conversationanalytic approach to development over time include the following (see Pekarek Doehler & Wagner, 2010): (a) How can an emic (participantrelevant) perspective be brought to the data when we analyze not learning processes, but the products of learning, that is more advanced competencies at a given moment in time? Speakers do not necessarily and demonstrably orient to these as object of learning; (b) What are the relevant units of analysis (actions, practices, methods, linguistic items, etc.) that allow documenting change in IC across time, and warrant comparability between interactional conduct at two different moments? (c) How can we differentiate, in the observable change between two moments in time, what is due to development over time, and what is due to a change in local context? These questions outline the extent of the challenge currently encountered by CA-SLA studies that set out to investigate the development of IC.

Contributions to the Volume The chapters presented in this volume are the first collection of studies to tackle directly these concerns. The first section of this volume, The Nature of L2 Interactional Competence, contains five studies documenting specific dimensions of L2 IC (Piirainen-Marsh, Sahlström, Steinbach Kohler & Thorne, Theodórsdóttir, van Compernolle). The studies presented in the second section, Development of L2 Interactional Competence, trace changes in L2 IC over time (Hellermann, Nguyen, Pekarek Doehler & Pochon-Berger, Rine & Hall). The first section opens with Arja Piirainen-Marsh’s study on adolescents’ playing a console-operated video-game. Piirainen-Marsh investigates how the players, whose L1 is Finnish, attend to and display their understanding of the talk produced by the game characters in English. Focusing on the players’ co-producing utterances with the characters, either by means of choral production or anticipatory completion, the study shows how,

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through such co-productions, the players sustain joint attention to the game, build and display alignments with actions and events in the game-world, express their appreciation of the narrative as it unfolds and manage shifts in attention focus and participation framework. The findings shed light on some dimensions of the participants’ L2 IC: co-productions are effective resources for getting a range of locally relevant interactional work done; because they are based on the precise fitting of utterances into the unfolding dialog, they require the participants to monitor multiple semiotic resources, including language, voice, rhythm, subtitles, as well as to closely orient to the unfolding story sequences. By identifying these dimensions of the IC that is required for participating in joint gaming activities, the study also contributes to current investigations into the dynamics of technology-mediated interaction. Fritjof Sahlström presents a study on a multilingual seven-year-old girl (Sara) who, in a series of interactions with her classmate (Hanna), is learning how to count from one to 10 in English. Although based on longitudinal data (the girls were recorded over a period of five school days), the study does not aim at investigating the outcome of their interactions, but sets out to document how the children’s orientation toward learning is inscribed in and observable throughout the moment-to-moment unfolding of their interaction. Through a series of data excerpts, Sahlström shows how Sara and Hanna orient to knowledge asymmetries, to the need to change something in how they count from one to 10, and to their mutual epistemic stances as having changed or being in need of changing. The study documents the children’s interactional competencies in how they manage their orientation to one another’s epistemic stance, which is necessary for their interacting as well as for Sara’s getting to use and practice English number counting. The study also provides evidence for learning as a participant-oriented and participant-relevant activity: it is something that is observably negotiated and treated as such by coparticipants in interaction. Fee Steinbach Kohler and Steve Thorne’s chapter reconceptualizes a phenomenon in talk usually considered in the realm of psycholinguistics – ‘private speech’. Investigating Swiss-German L1 learners of French in a secondary school, the authors show how seemingly self-directed talk maintains characteristics of ‘private speech’ (quieter, with no clear addressee). However, such talk is the result of and fits into an ongoing sequence of talk. Moreover, though seemingly self-directed, such talk may be disattended (especially when it comes out of sequential misalignment) or may be taken up by interlocutors who orient to such talk as an opportunity for collaborative problems solving. The authors show that self-directed talk is an important resource showing the participants’ IC to manage small-group task interaction in the language-learning classroom.


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Guðrún Theodórsdóttir’s analysis shows how a low-level L2 speaker, with the help of her co-participant, exploits a business interaction as a resource for L2 use and learning. The data stem from an encounter in a bakery between Anna, who is learning Icelandic, and a clerk who has Icelandic as his first language. Results show that, in the interaction, the co-habitation of foci on language and an orientation to business is made possible by a distinct division of labor between the participants, the clerk being the prime motor for attending to the business side while Anna enhances the focus on linguistic features of the L2. The data provide evidence for a change, across the few minutes of the encounter, in how the focus on language is managed: at first, Anna’s attending to linguistic features is embedded in other interactional business and only implicitly calls for the participation of the L1 speaker, while toward the end of the interaction Anna becomes ‘bolder’ in her attention to language matters. Anna’s capacity to exploit, in collaboration with the L1 speaker, the interaction as an occasion for learning, while maintaining simultaneous orientation to getting some other interactional business done, can be interpreted as one dimension of her IC in her L2, despite her minimal mastery of the linguistic features of that L2. Rémi A. van Compernolle’s study examines student responses to teacher questions in language proficiency interviews. The data consist of a set of language proficiency interviews between a teacher and intermediate-level US university learners of French L2. The author argues that features such as precision timing or conditional relevance of a response can be indicative of a learner’s IC even if the response is inappropriate in relation to the content of the question asked by the teacher. In a first step, the author shows that by providing responses to questions (i.e. second-pair parts that fit first-pair parts) and doing so at sequentially appropriate moments, students display their IC as interviewees – and they do this independently of whether the content of the response is appropriate to the question or not. The author also suggests that even if they have trouble in understanding, students demonstrate a tendency to respond rather than to initiate repair. In a second step, the study documents how such troubles of understanding a question can trigger potential learning opportunities for the learners, for instance by leading up to word repetitions or clarifications. The chapter concludes by discussing pedagogical implications of these findings and provides suggestions as to how CA can be fruitfully used in language teaching. Chapters in the second section explicitly deal with the development of IC over time. John Hellermann presents a longitudinal investigation of other-initiated repair in a classroom dyad. Following interactions between two adult learners of English across five terms of study (10 weeks), the author identifies both consistency and change in the practices of other-initiated repair.

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While the trouble sources (repairables) remain largely consistent over time (mostly lexical items, pronunciation and grammar, only action-related repair emerges later), the learners deploy different methods of other-repair at different moments in time. Over time, they show an increasingly wider range of repair initiation techniques. In particular, open-class repair initiators emerge at more advanced levels of proficiency, and so do accounts following ‘no’-initiated repair. These fi ndings, Hellermann argues, provide evidence for interactional development in terms of the learners’ changing ability to participate in social interaction, but they also reflect changes in context in more advanced language classrooms. In this sense, the changing practices, according to Hellermann, provide ‘evidence for greater interactional competence of the learners in a (. . .) reflexive way; these practices are part of what makes them more advanced learners but also part of the repertoire of practices necessitated by the communicative context of more advanced language-learning classrooms’ (Hellermann, 2011: 159). Hanh thi Nguyen’s longitudinal case study of a pharmacy intern’s consultations with patients during a two-month internship focuses on advice-giving sequences. Although not concerned with L2 learning in the classic sense, the study deals with the development of a new (here: profession-related) communicative repertoire. The study documents how the intern adapts his counseling over time in order to meet the needs and expectations of the laypersons. The intern’s talk is shown to become less technical (e.g. involving less medical vocabulary), but also more specific in providing more detailed explanations of body-internal phenomena such as allergic reactions. This evidence is interpreted as testifying to the intern’s increased capacity for recipient-designed conduct, as part of his becoming a more proficient professional. A possible explanation of this development is invoked: the author illustrates with excerpts where the intern adapts his explanations on a moment-to-moment basis to the patients’ displayed perspectives and needs. The study provides evidence for interactional development understood in terms of increasingly recipient-designed conduct, and suggests that such development may grow out of the details of mutually oriented interactional activities. Simona Pekarek Doehler and Evelyne Pochon-Berger present a cross-sectional study of disagreement sequences in French L2 classroom interaction. Two groups of students are compared: lower intermediate learners at a lower secondary school, and advanced learners at an upper secondary school. The development of IC is evidenced as implying a diversification of the methods for doing disagreement, allowing for an increased local efficacy of talk. This is reflected both in the turn-construction techniques and the linguistic resources deployed by the students. While the less-proficient learners massively use turn-initial polarity markers for accomplishing disagreements, the more advanced learners develop a range of sequential


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(e.g. yes – but type of turn architecture) and linguistic (e.g. hedges, formattying techniques) means for modulating disagreements as well as postdisagreement accounts for scaffolding these. The results are backed up by a selective comparison with L1 students from the same institutional context. The authors conclude with a discussion of implications of their findings for enhancing understandings of the development of L2 IC as involving the increased ability for context-sensitive conduct. They suggest that diversification of resources and methods, giving place to an increased ability to deal with the preference organization of talk and with projections, are core elements of interactional development over time. Emily Rine and Joan Kelly Hall present a longitudinal case study of one pre-service international teaching assistant’s (ITA) development of ‘teacherlike’ behaviors through his participation in a semester-long ITA training course. Drawing on the concept of participant frameworks (Goffman, 1974, 1981; Goodwin, 2007), the authors argue that the invocation of appropriate participant roles in a given practice is extremely important for participating both competently and recognizably in that practice. Additionally, they argue that becoming interactionally competent, and embodying the social roles to do so, include more than the incorporation of linguistic items into one’s interactional repertoire. It also includes the appropriation of nonverbal actions such as gesture, gaze and body positioning. Findings reveal how the ITA learns to build on and use the interactional resources (both verbal and nonverbal) at his disposal to become more recognizable in the role of teacher over time, thereby indexing his increasing IC in performing the role of an ITA. This is evidenced in his increasing use of teacherspecific actions and spatial and nonverbal orientation to the ‘teacher’ space. Drawing on these fi ndings, the authors conclude with implications for research on using CA to track the development of IC and for ITA pedagogy.

Summary Taken together, the chapters presented in this volume illustrate how CA methods can be fruitfully applied in investigations on L2 IC and its development over time in a variety of contexts. Rather than treating participants in L2 interactions as deficient speakers, they begin with the assumption that those who interact using a second language possess interactional competencies. The studies set out to identify what these competencies are and how they change across time. By doing so, they address some of the difficult and yet unresolved issues that come up when it comes to comparing actions or practices across different moments in time. While contributing to our understanding of the nature of IC in a L2, they also open promising paths as to how its development can be empirically evidenced.

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Kasper, G. (2004) Participant orientations in conversation-for-learning. The Modern Language Journal 88, 551–567. Kasper, G. (2006) Beyond repair: Conversation analysis as an approach to SLA. AILA Review 19, 83–99. Kasper, G. and Blum-Kulka, S. (1993) Interlanguage Pragmatics. New York: Oxford University Press. Koshik, I. (2002) Designedly incomplete utterances: A pedagogical practice for eliciting knowledge displays in error correction sequences. Research on Language and Social Interaction 35, 277–309. Kramsch, C. (1986) From language proficiency to interactional competence. The Modern Language Journal 70, 366–372. Lazaraton, A. (1997) Preference organization in oral proficiency interviews: The case of language ability assessments. Research on Language and Social Interaction 30, 53–72. Lee, Y-A. (2007) Third turn position in teacher talk: Contingency and the work of teaching. Journal of Pragmatics 39, 180–206. Lüdi, G. (1991) Construire ensemble les mots pour le dire. A propos de l’origine discursive des connaissances lexicales [Co-constructing words for speaking. On the discursive origin of lexical knowledge]. In U. DausendschÖn-Gay, E. Gülich and U. Krafft (eds) Linguistische Interaktionsanalysen [Linguistic Interaction Analyses] (pp. 193–224). Tübingen: Niemeyer. Lüdi, G. (2006) De la compétence linguistique au répertoire plurilingue [From linguistic competence to plurilingual repertoires]. Bulletin VALS/ASLA, 84 (no. spécial: la notion de compétence: études critiques), 172–189. Macbeth, D. (1994) Classroom encounters with the unspeakable: ‘Do you see, Danelle?’. Discourse Processes 17, 311–335. Macbeth, D. (2000) Classrooms as installations. In S. Hester and D. Francis (eds) Local Educational Order (pp. 21–71). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Macbeth, D. (2004) The relevance of repair for classroom correction. Language in Society 33, 703–736. Markee, N. (2000) Conversation Analysis. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Markee, N. (2004) Zones of interactional transition in ESL classes. The Modern Language Journal 88, 583–596. Markee, N. (2008) Toward a learning behavior tracking methodology for CA-for-SLA. Applied Linguistics 29, 1–24. McNamara, T. and Roever, C. (2006) Language Testing: The Social Dimension. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Mehan, H. (1979) Learning Lessons: Social Organization in the Classroom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mondada, L. and Pekarek Doehler, S. (2004) Second language acquisition as situated practice. The Modern Language Journal 88, 501–518. Mori, J. (2002) Task-design, plan and development of talk-in-interaction: An analysis of a small group activity in a Japanese language classroom. Applied Linguistics 23, 323–347. Nunan, D. (1989) Designing Tasks for the Communicative Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pomerantz, A. (1984) Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: Some features of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes. In J. Atkinson and J. Heritage (eds) Structures of Social Actions (pp. 57–101). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pekarek Doehler, S. (2010) Conceptual changes and methodological challenges: On language and learning from a conversation analytic perspective on SLA. In


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P. Seedhouse, S. Walsh and C. Jenks (eds) Conceptualising Learning in Applied Linguistics (pp. 105–127). Baskingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pekarek Doehler, S. and Wagner, J. (2010) Analyzing change across time: Conceptual and methodological issues. Paper presented at the International Conference on Conversation Analysis, Mannheim, July 4–8, 2010. Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. and Jefferson, G. (1974) A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language 50, 696–735. Sanders, R.E. (1987) Cognitive Foundations of Calculated Speech. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Sanders, R.E. (1995) A retrospective essay on the consequentiality of communication. In S.J. Sigman (ed.) The Consequentiality of Communication (pp. 216–222). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Schegloff, E. (2006) Interaction: The infrastructure for social institutions, the natural ecological niche for language, and the arena in which culture is enacted. In N.J. Enfield and S. Levinson (eds) Roots of Human Sociality (pp. 70–96). Oxford: Berg. Schegloff, E. (2007) Sequence Organization in Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schegloff, E. and Sacks, H. (1973) Opening up closings. Semiotica 8, 289–327. Schegloff, E.A., Jefferson, G. and Sacks, H. (1977) The preference for self-correction in the organization of repair in conversation. Language 53, 361–381. Trosburg, A. (1994) Interlanguage Pragmatics: Requests, Complaints and Apologies. The Hague: Mouton. Young, R. (2000) Interactional competence: Challenges for validity. Joint Symposium on Interdisciplinary Interfaces with Language Testing. Annual Meeting of the American Association for Applied Linguistics and the Language Testing Research Colloquium, March 11, 2000, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Young, R.F. (2003) Learning to talk the talk and walk the walk: Interactional competence in academic spoken English. North Eastern Illinois University Working Papers in Linguistics 2, 26–44. Wagner, J. (2004) The classroom and beyond. The Modern Language Journal 88 (4), 612–616. Wong, J. (2000a) Delayed next turn repair initiation in native–nonnative speaker English conversation. Applied Linguistics 21, 244–267. Wong, J. (2000b) The token ‘yeah’ in nonnative speaker English conversation. Research on Language and Social Interaction 33, 39–67. Wootton, A.J. (1997) Interaction and the Development of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Part 1

The Nature of L2 Interactional Competence

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Chapter 2

Enacting Interactional Competence in Gaming Activities: Coproducing Talk with Virtual Others A. PIIRAINEN-MARSH

Introduction Although games and gaming have long been recognized as key sites for learning (see e.g. Gee, 2003, 2007; Thorne, 2008; Thorne et al., 2009), detailed studies of situated interactions with specific games are scarce. A small number of studies using ethnography and discourse analysis have described how games provide virtual spaces for developing new social networks, communities and relationships (Cassell & Jenkins, 1999; Steinkuehler, 2006; Steinkuehler & Williams, 2006). Recently, several studies have examined how players coordinate between virtual and real spaces and build social play through practices such as response cries (Aarsand & Aronsson, 2009), code-switching (Piirainen-Marsh, 2010) and otherrepetition and animation of game characters’ turns (Piirainen-Marsh & Tainio, 2009a, 2009b). This chapter aims to contribute to research in this area by examining the players’ joint production of talk with the game characters. Practices of coproduction make visible how the participants attend to and analyse talk that unfolds in the mediated setting, enacting – and also testing – their interactional competences (Gardner & Wagner, 2004; Heritage, 1984; Markee, 2008). The data come from a collection of interactions where Finnish adolescents get together informally to play console-operated video games in one of the players’ homes. The language of the games is English, making the play activity a specific kind of bilingual environment in which the speakers voluntarily engage with a second language while participating in informal social activity. Participation in game-playing requires constant monitoring and analysis of continually evolving situations that the game presents and which unfold through multiple communicative modes. The game’s narrative and choices in game-play are presented through English texts (e.g. text bubbles, 19

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Part 1: The Nature of L2 Interactional Competence

menus, subtitles of dialogue) and talk (voiced dialogue by characters). Building on recent research using conversation analytic methodology to investigate learning contexts and activities (see e.g. Firth & Wagner, 2007; Gardner & Wagner, 2004; Hellermann, 2008; Lerner, 1995; Mondada & Pekarek Doehler, 2004; Sahlström, 2009; Seedhouse, 2004), this chapter describes how the players coordinate their participation through coproducing turns and utterances with the virtual characters. Coproduction of talk is approached as one type of component in the interactional competences through which the players can put available resources to use creatively in order to participate in the technologically mediated social activity. From a conversation analytic viewpoint interactional competences are understood as available in the talk, embodied activity and interactional work that participants do to make sense of each other and to accomplish orderly social interaction while attending to relevant features of the surround (Gardner & Wagner, 2004; Markee, 2008; Mehan, 1982). These competences cover a range of skills including the ability to establish and maintain joint attention to a common task and the coordination of action to accomplish such tasks (Goodwin, 2000, 2007; Nishizaka, 2006). Coproduction of talk with others is a key component of everyday interactional competence. It involves the skilled use of structures available in prior talk as well as interpretation of different semiotic resources (e.g. gesture, gaze, body orientation, objects) in order to display understanding of the activity under way (Bolden, 2003; Lerner, 2002). In the context of gameplaying such displays of understanding require detailed monitoring of and adjustment to the continually changing contexts and situations that the game presents. Carefully timed utterances designed to share in the production of talk by game characters enable the players to sustain joint attentional focus and negotiate their alignments with respect to changing game situations, allowing them to build a shared view of the tasks and activities under way.

Practices for the Joint Production of Talk: Turn Completion and Turn Sharing In everyday talk, joint production of talk builds on the possibility of shared understanding between copresent participants. Like copresent speakers who fit their talk together to display that they know ‘what’s on each other’s mind’ (Sacks, 1992: 147), players as recipients of talk in the mediated setting can fit their utterances together with game characters’ turns to show that they recognize or are able to project how the turn is completed. As demonstrated by previous studies (Lerner, 1989, 1991, 1996, 2002, 2004), recipients of talk can accomplish conditional entry into talk in a number of ways including choral coproduction or utterances or pre-emptive or anticipatory completion of a turn in progress. Choral

Enacting Interactional Competence in Gaming Activities

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coproduction refers to utterances designed to produce a turn component in unison, sharing a turn through ‘voicing the same words in the same way at the same time’ (Lerner, 2002: 226–227). Anticipatory or pre-emptive completions involve taking over and completing a turn in progress. These partially distinct but related practices are a powerful way of displaying understanding of turns in progress as they involve careful monitoring of the syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and sequential aspects of unfolding talk. Co-construction of talk can be used to accomplish a number of different types of conversational action including demonstrating agreement, pre-empting disagreement, coproducing explanations or heckling a storyteller (Lerner, 1996, 2002). The practices are sensitive to the interactional environments in which they are produced and contribute to the courses of action in which they are embedded. Recent studies also demonstrate how speakers use multiple semiotic resources, for instance, visual features of the surround, gesture, posture and gaze direction to coordinate their contributions and to collaboratively accomplish turns or utterances (Bolden, 2003; Lerner, 2002; see also Goodwin, 2000, 2003, 2007). This chapter examines how participants engaged in a technologically mediated gaming activity make use of semiotic resources at their disposal in order to accomplish entry into talk produced by virtual others (the game characters). Most of the cases analyzed in this chapter involve turn sharing, that is, choral production of utterances with virtual, and sometimes with copresent, participants. Players draw on both visual and vocal resources in the surround and recognizably attempt to match the words, voicing and tempo of the game character’s talk to produce utterances in unison with the game character whose talk they attend to. Occasionally they also project how a turn may be completed through anticipatory completion. Unlike everyday talk, interaction with virtual others does not allow for collaborative turn sequences, that is, sequences where the first speaker – in this case the virtual character – accepts, confirms or rejects the proffered completion (Lerner, 1996, 2004). The game dialogue generally takes its course regardless of the players’ activities (although on occasion players are able to silence the dialogue). The pace of the dialogue is relatively slow, allowing space for the players to enter into talk. Further, in addition to voiced dialogue, written subtitles displayed on the screen serve as important resources that the players can make use of in designing their talk while adjusting to evolving situations in the game. The dialogue offers not only clues about the game’s narrative and plot, but also linguistic, pragmatic, textual, vocal and visual resources that players can draw upon in responding to a specific scene. It also provides an inbuilt mechanism for feedback. The player can examine the adequacy of his version of the character’s utterance by monitoring the progress of the dialogue. Crucially, turn sharing and candidate completions of game characters’ turns are produced to be heard by copresent participants allowing them to monitor each other’s

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behaviors and build their own alignments toward the courses of action under way. In what follows I examine instances where players coproduce utterances with virtual characters to explore what kinds of locally available resources the players draw upon in order to accomplish entry into the game’s narrative or dialogue, and how turn-sharing and candidate completions are used; that is, what are the interactional circumstances that occasion co-construction and what kinds of functions it may serve. The analysis suggests that the joint accomplishment of an utterance or turn unit serves as the players’ resource for sustaining joint attention to the game and building specific alignments with actions and events in the game world.

Data The empirical data for this study come from a larger collection of interactions (ca. 15 hours) in which two to four Finnish adolescents (aged 6–14) are engaged in playing console-operated video games.1 The data were recorded with two video cameras, one focused on the players, and the other on the video screen, to enable detailed analysis of the different modalities shaping interaction. The data analyzed for this chapter comprises gaming sessions that took place between two 13-year-old boys at the home of one of the players. The boys are involved in playing Final Fantasy X, a Japanese fantasy role game translated into English.2 The game involves several playable characters (i.e. characters controllable by the player), as well as a number of nonplayable ones. The players navigate the playable characters through different areas and locations in the game world, where they interact with a number of other characters and objects, seeking information, purchasing equipment or gaining other available special features that help them succeed in action and battle scenes. The plot is set in a fantasy world (‘Spira’) and centers around a group of adventurers passing through various adventures in order to defend their world against an evil force, ‘Sin’. The game unfolds in English: the players’ choices are guided by English texts, which appear on the screen in the form of menus, lists of options and lines of narrative and dialogue, which give information about the plot and guide the players’ choices when managing the trajectory of the game. In Final Fantasy X the narrative is also presented by voice-over actors. As the characters speak, lines of dialogue appear on the screen as subtitles, timed to occur simultaneously as the line is spoken. While scenes with extended dialogue do not offer many opportunities for intensive game-play, they have an important role in giving the players clues about the characters and the plot. The players’ first language, and the main language of interaction in the data, is Finnish. Both have studied English as a foreign language for approximately four years. One of the players (P) has learnt English as a


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second language also through an extended stay (one year) in an Englishspeaking country (US). However, the participants cannot be simply categorized as foreign language learners. As recent sociolinguistic research on new media and peer interaction show, gaming activities form one of the key sites where members in societies where English is a foreign or second language come into contact with and appropriate English as a communicative resource (see e.g. Androutsopoulos, 2006; Leppänen, 2007). The participants in this study, like most Finnish adolescents, have regular and considerable contact with English through popular culture and media, which has an influence on their repertoire of resources. Recent studies using both quantitative and qualitative methods (e.g. interviews, ethnographic observation) show that social media and gaming are appreciated by both young people and their parents for the opportunities they present for learning English (e.g. Noppari et al., 2008). The physical setting is a living room, where the boys are seated side by side on a sofa, facing the video screen and their bodies aligned toward the screen. The seating arrangement enables a shared visual and cognitive focus on the game as the central cognitive artifact (Hutchins, 1999, 2006; see also Goodwin, 2000, 2006) which the players orient to in their own actions. The interactions were transcribed using the conventions of conversation analysis paying attention to both the verbal and relevant nonverbal actions of the players.3 The transcript shows both unfolding game dialogue and the players’ interaction with each other. In the excerpts below, players are indicated with their initials in upper case (P = Pete and K = Kapa). For clarity, the game characters’ turns are marked with their initials in lower case (e.g. t = Tidus, w = Wakka, y = Yuna). The representation of nonverbal activity and visual information that is displayed on the screen is necessarily selective. An attempt has been made to transcribe in some detail the players’ embodied activities that occur simultaneously with their own utterances or during unfolding game narrative, when relevant to the courses of action in focus.

Organizing Participation in Social Game Play Like all use of technical equipment, managing a video game involves complex inferential and sequential work through which the user interacts with the technology (Arminen, 2005). The game provides the material and semiotic structure which players orient to in their activities. In order to operate the game and make progress with the game’s trajectory, the players must attend to multiple, temporally unfolding semiotic resources (e.g. animation, visual design, talk, text and sound) to make sense of what is going on (Goodwin, 2000, 2007). The players are continually making inferences about the possibilities for action that are available at any particular point in the structure of the game. Their moment-by-moment orientations to

24


unfolding objects of interaction are made public through their verbal and nonverbal actions, through which they ‘recontextualise the sense of ongoing action’ (Arminen, 2005: 201). Players organize their participation through a range of actions which are achieved in a reflexively indexical way as they adjust to the continually changing contexts that a particular game presents (Mondada, forthcoming). When two or more players are playing a video game, at least two different participation frameworks are relevant (Goodwin & Goodwin, 1992a; Raudaskoski, 2003): the one between the player(s) and the game and the one between the copresent participants. Through talk and embodied activity, the participants display their changing alignments with respect to ongoing activities. In these data, turns addressed to the coparticipant (e.g. comments about a particular scene or event) are mostly (although not exclusively) in Finnish. Turns which accomplish shifts in the type of activity and participation framework, recurrently deploy codeswitching. The players also occasionally address their turns (in English or Finnish) directly to the game characters as a way of responding to a specific event or action in the game world. Recent studies of gaming interactions highlight the way that some vocal, embodied and verbal practices make public the players’ cognitive and affective orientation to unfolding events in the game world. Aarsand and Aronsson (2009), for example, show that response cries are used as interactional resources through which players sustain joint attention. In gaming interactions involving young players, other related practices have been found: repetition and animation of game characters’ talk, sound making, humming along the music and code-switching serve to display the players’ heightened involvement with specific events (Aarsand & Aronsson, 2009; Piirainen-Marsh & Tainio, 2009a, 2009b). Excerpt 2.1 illustrates how the player (P) is monitoring the progress of the dialogue while he is simultaneously attending to other matters and collaboratively completes a game character’s turn in progress to display his orientation to the scene. The excerpt occurs approximately three minutes from the beginning of a game session, at a point where the players have been quietly viewing a narrative scene, which unfolds at a slow pace. The display shows four of the main characters traveling in a boat, passing an underwater city (Machina City). The narrative unfolds through a jointly accomplished story-telling activity occasioned by talk about ‘machinas’ (special equipment available for use in battle). The character Lulu initiates a story about a war, telling how the use of ‘machinas’ led to destruction by the evil force Sin. In lines 1–3, two other characters participate in the telling: Wakka adds to the story and Tidus asks a question, which is answered first by Yuna and then Lulu. In line 5, the player (P) enters the collaborative activity by repeating the beginning of Yuna’s prior turn in overlap with Lulu. In line 6, Lulu continues her turn, which is designed to bring the


25

story to a close. At this point, P uses the one second pause in the middle of the turn unit as an opportunity to enter into talk (line 7). Excerpt 2.1 (characters: w = Wakka, t = Tidus, y = Yuna, l = Lulu) 1 w but the war did not stop, 2 t ↑wh-↑ what happened then. 3 y Sin came and it destroyed the cities and their machina 4 l [the war en]ded 5 P [<Sin came>] ((touching his face)) ((glances at screen; then gaze down)) 6 l and our re↑wa:rd (1) [↑was Sin.]

7

P→

8

w

[↑was Sin.]

so Sin’s our punishment for lettin’ things get out of hand eh

The timing of P’s entry into talk is closely fitted to the progress of the dialogue: it occurs at an opportunity space and matches the slow pace of talk by game characters. Both of P’s utterances (lines 5 and 7) also closely follow the prosody (high pitch) and voice quality (soft voice) of the game characters. Interestingly, for most of the time P’s gaze is not focused on the screen. He only momentarily glances toward it while simultaneously attending to something else: he touches his nose and puts his hand in his pocket to fi nd

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a tissue. However, the brief glances to the screen allow him to see the written lines of dialogue that appear on the screen as the characters speak. The interplay of visual and vocal resources enables the player to enter into talk and share in the production of an utterance, and hence be involved in the story-telling activity.

The Interplay of Co-available Resources Previous studies of turn-sharing and anticipatory completions have highlighted a variety of turn-constructional resources that make it possible for the recipient of a current talk to complete that talk (Bolden, 2003; Lerner, 1991, 1996, 2004). These include compound turn-constructional units (e.g. formats such as if X-then Y or when X-then Y), quotations, parenthetical inserts, list structures and turn final elements, which recipients often project in order to offer candidate completions. In conversation between copresent participants, recipients use the syntax of the turn in progress, as well as semantic and pragmatic cues to project what it takes to complete an utterance. The gaming activity provides additional resources that enable the players to foresee the turn’s construction and accomplish coproduction. The most important of these are the vocal (voice over) and visual representation (emerging subtitles) of the dialogue. In the following, I examine how players draw on these and other co-available resources, such as knowledge built through prior occasions of game play, in accomplishing choral or anticipatory completions. The availability of the text as visual representation of the dialogue allows the players to recognize parts of the turn constructional unit (TCU) in progress, or a whole TCU and use these to anticipate how the turn is completed. This is highlighted by Excerpt 2.2, where the player brings to completion a turn that is seen on the screen, but not heard in full. At certain points in the game, the players can make choices which silence the dialogue in order to proceed faster to the next scene. The fact that the players make such choices shows that they are familiar with the game and its possibilities; and that they do not treat the information provided by the dialogue as crucial to the activity under way. Skipping parts of the dialogue also seems to indicate the players’ preference for more active gameplay (e.g. battle scenes). Yet the players may orient to the dialogue in progress, as shown in Excerpt 2.2. In Excerpt 2.2 both players are closely attending to the unfolding scene, which shows the main character, Tidus, meeting two other characters in order to buy equipment. One of the characters is O’Aka, a nonplayable character who is a traveling merchant prone to cheating his customers. Tidus stops to talk to the characters telling them he is need of ‘some stuff’ and also comments on the high price of things. The lines of dialogue are displayed on the screen, but not voiced: the player silences them to move forward. In this excerpt the active player (P) controls


27

O’Aka’s voiced turns by using his control to cut them short, but draws on the written lines of dialogue displayed on the screen as resources to bring one of the turns to completion himself (line 4). Excerpt 2.2 (character: o = O’Aka) 1 2 3

o K o

monopoly’s a great thing (.) things are sellin’ no matter what the pri(hh[hh)] [oo]ps sorry- =

4 5

P→

= I [↓forgot,] ((chooses got any weapons))

6

K

[(hh hh hh)] (0.5) go’ any weapons,

At the beginning of the excerpt, O’Aka is heard speaking: he responds to Tidus’s complaint on the prices by referring to his monopoly over items which allows him to charge whatever price he chooses (line 1). However, the player (P) uses his control to cut his turn short (line 1). The co-player (K) appreciates the cutoff turn with quiet laughter. In line 3, the player (P) again cuts short O’Aka’s utterance, which is displayed on the screen in full. The player then brings the turn to completion himself (line 4). P’s verbal participation is enabled by the line of text visible on the screen. The texts emerge on the screen in rapid succession. In this case, a menu appears on the screen while O’Aka’s line is still visible, providing further visual

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resources. The menu presents the players with a choice: the player needs to decide whether to ask for weapons, items or to leave the scene. P immediately selects the first option and the co-player (K) acknowledges his choice by reading it aloud (line 5). The interplay of vocal and textual resources enables the players to enter into talk at opportunity spaces that occur mid-turn in the characters’ speech and animate the completion of the turn simultaneously or even before the game character. In the following example, K enters into talk during a pause in the character’s utterance and initiates the next TCU (already available on the screen) just before the character continues. This results in overlap, with K whispering the end of the turn (indicated with * * in the transcript), and withdrawing from talk so that the character’s turn is completed in the clear. Excerpt 2.3 (se = Seymour) 1 P se halus ne kai:kki (.) Cruseiderit eestä po:is. et se pystys tota:. = he wanted a:ll those (.) Crusaders out of the w:ay so he could li:ke, = 2 se = anyone else (0.3) [would be expected] to show [their sorrow] 3 P [et sillä ei ois ketään,] [°vastassa.° ] so he would have no-one °against him° 4 K °hmm (1.5) that is quite true° = 5 se = but you are a summoner 6 K → @↑you [are Spira’s *hope*@ 7 se [you are Spira’s hope

8

P

°oo hiljaa Seymour. ° °be quiet Seymour. °

K orients to the game characters’ talk already at line 4 with his response which seems to comment on the character Seymour’s (se) utterance in line 2. In line 6, K voices the second TCU in the character Seymour’s turn demonstrating his orientation to the unfolding text. Production features of his utterance show that his completion is designed to imitate the


29

character’s speech. The utterance is produced in slightly higher pitch than K’s prior talk and it is fitted to the rhythm of the turn in progress. The excerpts described above illustrate how different local resources are brought to play in accomplishing turn-sharing. However, players have at their disposal resources that go beyond the local context. They may, for example, invoke expertise gained through prior experience of playing the same game to accomplish an anticipatory completion of a game character’s turn. Excerpt 2.4 shows how a player viewing a narrative scene uses the syntactic structure of the game character’s unfolding turn and his own prior knowledge about the scene to project a continuation which brings the turn into completion and advances the story the turn is embedded in. In this case, the projected utterance is not yet visible for the player, but emerges on the screen after he has entered into talk. This enables the player to compare his candidate completion to the form that the turn takes in the character’s narrative. Excerpt 2.4 (m = Maechen) 1 m [finally] the travelle:rs were able to cross: in safety. 2 (1) Bilghen was building that towe::r over the::re, ((soft voice)) 3 (0.8) 4 K → when the powerful lightning struck him. ((soft voice)) 5 m when he was struck and kill:ed by >lightning< . ((soft voice)) 6 K melkein $oikein?$ hhh almost $ right $ hhh The player’s candidate completion provides the latter part of a compound turn-constructional unit (a subordinate ‘when’-clause) which advances the story that the character Maechen is telling. K thus assumes the role of co-teller, displaying this footing shift also through his voice: he adjusts the rhythm of his speech to the slow pace of the dialogue and uses a soft voice imitating the teller’s voice quality. While the candidate completion successfully projects the lexical content of the projected unit, its syntactic form is different from the character’s utterance that is heard and also displayed on the screen after K’s turn. K orients to this discrepancy in his actions: in line 6 he evaluates his own prior completion as ‘almost right’ in a laughing voice (line 6). This excerpt evidences that the players orient to the unfolding game dialogue as an opportunity to not only display, but also test their interactional competence. The examples described above highlight the interplay of different resources in accomplishing co-construction through turn-sharing and anticipatory completion. While the subtitles displayed on the screen provide crucial linguistic resources for building utterances fitted to the unfolding narrative or dialogue, the players also closely attend to the

30


rhythm of the dialogue as well as the voices of the characters in timing their entry into talk and bringing their utterances off as choral completions. Anticipatory completion of an utterance in progress, on the other hand, involves knowledge that goes beyond the locally available resources, providing opportunities for testing one’s interactional competence.

The Use of Completions: Building Alignment Shifts in attentional focus and participation framework Coproduction of utterances in unison with game characters is one resource through which the players can reorganize the participation framework of the moment by adjusting their own position with respect to the game as the focus of shared activity. At different stages of play one or both of the players sometimes disengage from the game and occupy themselves with other activities. Excerpt 2.5 illustrates how the players’ turns make public their orientations to ongoing events and accomplish a shift from one type of activity to another. The excerpt shows how the player switches from talk addressed to a participant in the physical setting to interaction with the game, deploying collaborative completion as one resource. The player (P) momentarily shifts his attention away from the game in order to briefly engage with his mother (S), who is in another room. He then reestablishes his orientation to the progressivity of the game through shifting his body and gaze toward the screen and producing the final element of the game character’s turn in unison with the character (j) (line 10). Excerpt 2.5. (t = Tidus, j = Sir Jecht) 1 P ÄI:T[I:,]      MO:[M,

2 3

t S

[wh]y not today °niih,° ((from a distance)) °yea,°


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4

P

PISTÄ SAU[NA PÄÄLLE] PUT THE SAU[NA ON]

5 6

j P

7

S

[why do today] what you can leave for tomorrow = HÄH? HUH? o↑n jo, it’s on already,

8

P

9

j

10

P→

ai? se on jo oh? it’s on already there he goes again (0.8) [cry:ing.]

[cry:ing.]

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Just prior to this excerpt the players have been viewing a narrative scene involving several characters. Narrative scenes in general do not involve active game-play, and so players frequently engage in game-related talk or other activities. In this excerpt, P shifts his attention away from the game in order to ask his mother to switch the sauna on (lines 1–4). He displays his disengagement from the gaming activity through his body as well as talk, and remains oriented to the competing interaction with his mother until he has heard his mother’s response (line 7). The turn in line 8 accomplishes a receipt of the mother’s answer. At the same time, the player shifts back into engagement with the game through his body: he turns around and shifts his gaze back toward the screen indicating his renewed attention to the ongoing dialogue. Continuing to gaze directly at the screen, he then produces the final element of a turn currently in progress in the dialogue (line 10), bringing it to completion. In doing this action, he draws on multiple co-available semiotic resources: the line of dialogue, which is visible on the screen, and the character’s verbal utterance, which is produced in a slow pace, with a long pause prior to the final element. While attending to the text on the screen, the player does more than simply read aloud the final word. His completion is carefully timed to accomplish entry into talk during the opportunity space provided by the pause, leading to overlap with the game character’s speech. It has the characteristics of an affiliating utterance (Lerner, 2004): it is built to be contiguous with the first part of the TCU in progress; it is designed to sound like the character’s speech (note the stretching of the vowel sound); and it displays an orientation to the progressivity of talk, bringing the turn to completion in unison with the character. The following example shows how the players coordinate their attentional focus while managing a simultaneously occurring activity during a narrative scene. A coproduced completion (lines 6–7) of a game character’s utterance by both players allows them to realign themselves after focusing on a material object and to display joint attention to the unfolding scene. Excerpt 2.6 (character: t = Tidus) ((K holds a key ring with light in his hand; P’s gaze is directed at the key ring)) 1 t = I thought I sens[ed my old man in there] 2 K [kato tulee violettia. ] [look it turns purple ((K switches on light on key ring; both players’ gaze at key ring)) 3

t

somewhere (1)


4

5 6 7 8

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or maybe it was just Sin’s toxin

(2 s) t P→ K→

((K drops key ring in P’s hand)) playing [tricks on my mind ] (1) uhuh [°playing on my mind°] [° ( ) mind ° ]

In this excerpt the competing activity involves handling a small key ring with a light on it. At the start of the excerpt the key ring is held by K, and both players are focused on it. In partial overlap with a game character’s turn, K calls P’s attention to the key ring switching its light on (line 2). Both players then focus on the object instead of the unfolding game scene. After handling the key ring for a while, K passes it over to P and drops it in his hand (line 5). While handling the object, both players momentarily attend to the unfolding dialogue: P’s gaze is directed toward the screen at line 4, enabling him to see the line of dialogue which the character voices in lines 4 and 6. At lines 6–8 both players glance at the screen and attend to the unfolding turn verbally by jointly completing the character’s utterance. Through a coordinated entry into talk in progress as well as alignment of their bodies, the players display a shared focus on the unfolding scene.

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As these excerpts illustrate, coproducing utterances in unison with game characters is one resource through which the players can realign themselves in relation to ongoing action in the game during or after one or both of them have been engaged in a competing activity. The visual and vocal resources available at specific moments in the game’s trajectory provide lexical, syntactic and prosodic resources that players can draw on to accomplish a successful choral completion of a turn in progress. The verbal co-construction of an unfolding line in dialogue, along with gaze and alignment of the body, signals the speaker’s orientation to the game as the central focus of their activities also to the co-participant. Displaying affective stance Previous research (Lerner, 1989, 1996, 2004) shows how joint completion of turns in progress enables recipients of talk to accomplish both affiliative and disaffi liative actions. In these data, coproduction of talk in the form of turn completion has an important function in displaying the player’s stance toward the unfolding game scenes or situations. Completions contribute to courses of action through which the players construct the meaning of the game’s narrative and events for themselves through verbal commentary, assessments and different types of recipient action. Often the units that players draw upon in their utterances are idiomatic constructions or clauses that carry an important function in the dialogue or emerge as meaningful for the players. In Excerpt 2.7 the players are viewing a narrative scene in which a female character (s = Shelinda) comments on news she has heard about Yuna, another female character, intending to marry. The recipient and the main protagonist in the game, Tidus, is not happy about this news. In the excerpt, one of the players (K) uses a turn-final, affect-laden exclamation to bring the turn to completion in unison with Shelinda. Excerpt 2.7 (s = Shelinda) ((Shelinda reports to Tidus about having heard about Yuna getting married to master Seymour. Tidus challenges this.)) 1 s hey (1) it will not do to joke about a thing like that 2 K °(vinkuintiaani) ° (1) °ei se hiilannukaan° = (whinging indian) (1) °it didn’t heal° 3 s = Maester Seymour and Lady Yuna ↑h[ow wonderful ] 4 K [@↑how wonderful@] ((high voice)) ((tips back head; shakes head))


35

While seemingly forwarding the turn’s progress, the player’s utterance (line 4) does not seem affiliative; rather, prosodic features and nonverbal activity suggest that it displays a critical stance toward the character’s speech. In order to produce the completion, the player changes his voice and adopts a high pitch, hearably imitating the voice of the female character. At the same time he tips his head back slightly and does several small head shakes. These together create the impact of mimicry (see CouperKuhlen, 1996), which serves to display a critical stance. Mimicking the character thus accomplishes mockery: doing the action in a nonserious, but competent way and at the same time displaying a negative stance toward it (Sacks, 1992). In the following example, the player (K) completes the character Yuna’s utterance by uttering the directive in the character’s turn. Again, production features of the player’s utterance suggest that the completion serves to display affect: the player uses creaky voice and extends the vowel sound (u:p) in a manner that can be heard as exaggerating certain features of the character’s speech. The anticipatory completion occurs within a larger assessment activity in which the players jointly appreciate the character, in particular the fact that he is about to talk in this scene. After an initial comment anticipating what is going to happen in the scene, the players evaluate a central character through a series of assessments (Goodwin & Goodwin, 1992b). The focal character is Kimahri Ronso, a young, coldblooded and reticent character, who rarely speaks. He has taken on the role of protecting the female character Yuna in her role of a ‘summoner’ leading the fight against the evil force Sin. As Kimahri is known to only talk to those he can trust, the fact that he will talk to Tidus in this scene is a remarkable development, which arouses the players’ interest. Excerpt 2.8 (k = Kimahri, y = Yuna) 1 P >no nii nyt se puhuu< >okay now he’s going to talk< 2 K @↓rauwauwauwauwau@ (0.3) (hhhhhh)

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3

$seon niin hyvä$ [(hhhh) $he’s so good$ [Kimari on nii aito = [Kimahri is so real = = hmm (0.3) seon vähän siisti = hmm (0.3) he’s so cool hey you two hu[rry up] . [#hurry? u]:p# gaze: screen she’s awfully cheerful nyt Khimari ↑luottaa. Tiittukseen, °sen takia [se puhuu sille°] Now Kimahri trusts. Tidus,, °that’s why he [talks to him, °] [vähä:n ene: ]män [a little mo: ]re niih yea in dark times she must be (0.5) she must shine bright huh °so you talk,°

4 P 5

K

6 7

y K→

9 t 10 P 11

K→

12

P

13 14 15

k t K→

The excerpt begins with actions through which the players position themselves as viewers of the scene which is about to begin. Drawing on his knowledge about the game world and the plot, P informs the coplayer that Kimahri is soon going to speak, thus prospectively orienting to a meaningful event (line 1). In his response the co-participant, K, displays both knowledge about the character and his affective stance by jokingly imitating Kimahri’s low and gruff voice (line 2). The affect display is enhanced by laughter and an assessment evaluating the game character (lines 2–3). In the next turns the players build a shared perspective on the scene through another assessment sequence which appreciates the character (lines 4–5). The anticipatory completion produced by K of the character Yuna’s turn (line 7) allows K to display his appreciation of the talk currently in progress. As it happens, the turn that K completes is the target of evaluation also in the game dialogue, as is seen in the following turn where Tidus assesses Yuna’s upbeat behavior (line 9). In lines 10–11, the players co-construct an explanation for the observation that Kimahri will speak more than in earlier scenes. K’s preemptive completion in line 11 is designed to advance P’s turn by suggesting a possible turn final description. Although P’s turn takes a different course, he accepts the candidate completion (line 12). In line 13, Kimahri finally begins talking. In the next turn, K responds to the utterance by addressing the character in English: ‘so you talk’ (line 14). With this utterance K accomplishes a footing shift, which allows him to highlight the meaningful aspect of the scene.


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Excerpt 2.9 is somewhat more complex than the preceding ones. Here the player (K) does more than voice the completion of a turn in progress. He shares in the production of talk with the central character in the game, Tidus, by ‘putting words in his mouth’ and thus intervening in the narrative. The unit that the player contributes is a pragmatic one: it is similar to cases where tellers use reported speech in certain conversational activities (e.g. jokes and amusing stories) (Holt & Clift, 2007). In terms of its function it contributes to the players’ commentary through which they position themselves as knowing and critical recipients of the narrative. The players are following a scene which is highly meaningful in the game’s plot. The scene involves the main characters Yuna and Tidus reminiscing about the past. In the game’s narrative, the act of remembering dead relatives allows the characters to make them appear so that they can speak with them. In this scene, Tidus finds out that Jecht, his father, is not dead, and that he is the evil force Sin. This realization causes him to start worrying about how to explain the situation to the others. It is this problem that K addresses in his insertion (line 10) that offers a possible completion for Tidus’s utterance. Excerpt 2.9 (t = Tidus; y = Yuna) 1 t trying not to think about my old man 2 (.) made me th↓ink about him of course. 3 Y see, told you. 4 t he isn’t here becau:se (.) he’s not dead (.) he’s Sin. 5 Y eheh eh(.) that means he’s alive you know, = 6 K = you [know 7 t [what if my old man really is Sin = 8 P no se on: = well he i:s = 9 t = what could I say Yuna (.) 10 heck to everybody [in Spira] 11 K → [>hey< ] (.) Sin is my dad = 12 t = wait [why] should I have to apologize for him anyway (1) 13 K [(hhh)] 14 t I’d rather never see him again Lines 1–4 show how Tidus forms the new understanding of his connection with Sin through his own narrative. Yuna’s comment (line 3) refers to earlier talk as well as the visual development of the scene: Yuna has encouraged Tidus to call his father, but Jecht does not appear. The scene is rich in dramatic irony: both Yuna and the players seem to understand the truth before it reveals itself to Tidus. While the narrative shows Tidus reasoning why his father does not appear (‘he’s not dead’, line 4), Yuna spells

38


out the logical conclusion (‘he’s alive you know’; line 5), occasioning an appreciative partial repetition by K (line 6). As Tidus continues to consider the possibility that his father is the evil force Sin (line 7), the other player, P, displays his knowledge of the game’s plot by emphatically confirming the assumption in Finnish (line 8). K’s entry into talk in line 11 similarly displays his detailed understanding of the scene. It addresses Tidus’s selfreflective turn (‘what could I say to Yuna (.) heck to everybody in Spira’, lines 9–10) by formulating the plain truth (‘Sin is my dad’) from Tidus’s own perspective. K’s utterance begins in overlap with the final words of Tidus’s utterance and seems designed as a continuation of it. The use of ‘hey’ as an attention getting device and the first person accomplish a footing shift, making Tidus the author of the utterance and animating what he might say to the others. Inserted into Tidus’s turn it becomes a self-quotation, which can be used by story tellers to portray their own words in real or hypothetical situations (cf. Holt, 2007). In this case the utterance enacts a hypothetical situation where Tidus would announce the truth to Yuna and the others. K’s laughter (line 13) suggests that the candidate completion is delivered in a joking mode. The utterance is occasioned by the dramatic irony built into the scene. Both players display more detailed knowledge of the situation than the game character. The carefully timed footing shift and borrowing of Tidus’s voice seem to portray the character’s dilemma in a ridiculous light and critically comment on his inability to grasp the reality. This builds an ironic stance contributing to a course of action through which the players evaluate the scene and position themselves as knowing, competent participants.

Conclusion This chapter has examined the coproduction of talk as one type of interactional activity through which individuals competently participate in a gaming activity. As research in conversation analysis has shown, the joint production of utterances enables recipients of talk to demonstrate their understanding of unfolding talk and claim ‘ownership’ of this talk, either affiliating or disaffiliating with it. Semiotically rich computer and video games both structure social interaction and offer specific kinds of opportunities and resources for participation. The fantasy role play game at the focus of this chapter includes narrative scenes which are central to the development of the plot and which unfold through story-telling activities and dialogue between game characters. The players attend to the dialogue in a variety of ways in their talk, jointly recontextualizing its sense moment by moment. Turn-sharing, choral production and anticipatory completions emerge as recurrent practices through which the participants engage with talk produced by the game characters. The analysis has attempted to demonstrate how utterances fitted into the unfolding dialogue display the players’ emerging alignments toward the activities in progress.


39

Participation in any social activities requires ongoing monitoring and analysis of how the sequential organization of the activity unfolds. In the gaming activities analyzed here, the participants are required to attend to multiple, simultaneously available semiotic fields, to adjust their actions to the often rapidly changing situations and events in the game, and to manage participation frameworks associated with different activities (e.g. managing gaming moves vs. commentary on scenes). The analysis shows that entry into talk with the virtual characters is one resource through which players signal their cognitive and affective alignment (Goodwin, 2007) with evolving scenes. Turn-sharing, along with orientation of the body and direction of gaze are used to accomplish a shift of attentional focus, for instance to reengage with the game after orienting to other activities. Sustaining focus on the game thus emerges as a public activity enabling the players to display their orientations to emerging objects of interaction and make sense of the events under way. The joint production of talk often occurs in environments where players (prospectively) orient to particular scenes as meaningful, and engage in evaluative commentary on characters, the plot or particular events. In these contexts, turn-sharing and candidate completions of game characters’ turns provide special kind of practices for recipient activity. They allow the participant not only to display understanding of a turn-in-progress, but also a detailed, and often critical analysis of the action and its import within a particular scene. Players can, for example, use mimicry to mock a character or intervene in the narrative by putting words in a character’s mouth, as way of accomplishing an ironic or critical stance. Turn-sharing and anticipatory completions are just one of many different types of actions through which players can display their orientations to talk by the virtual characters. Other resources for this are various recipient actions ranging from vocalizations and response cries, repetition and turns addressed to the game characters (see Aarsand & Aronsson, 2009; Piirainen-Marsh & Tainio, 2009a, 2009b). These actions are central in the process through which the players co-construct the meaning of the game’s events for themselves and build shared experience. The goal of this study has been to demonstrate how participants in a technologically mediated L2 setting employ the array of resources available to them in making sense of the local social world created through a collaborative gaming activity. Findings suggest that generic practices of turn-sharing and coproduction of talk are used to manage shifts from one type activity to another, to sustain common focus and to display the participants’ analyses of and stances toward unfolding scenes. The players enact their interactional competences through responding to talk produced by virtual others in timely, meaningful, competent and critical ways. The players’ ability to respond to unfolding game dialogue through carefully timed utterance or turn completion sheds light on the multiple competences implicated in the joint management and enjoyment of the complex task. The findings highlight the participants’ capacity for

40


coordinating attentional focus, which is crucial to managing competing participation frameworks, maintaining a common focus and building a shared understanding of the changing situations of the game. Verbal coproduction of a turn unit in progress provides evidence – also to the co-participant – that the speaker is (re)orienting himself to the current situation in the game and monitoring the progress of the dialogue. The details of utterance and turn completions show that players pay close attention to the multiple linguistic, turn-constructional and other interactional resources available through the different semiotic fields of the game and are able to draw on these multiple modalities in anticipating how the virtual characters’ turns or utterances may be completed. The precise timing of completions indicates that the players are able to not only competently follow the real-time development of the dialogue, but also grasp the organization of larger activities, for example stories. Completions provide a means for displaying recognition and understanding of meaningful aspects of the scene so that these can be shared with the co-participant. Through coproducing utterances with virtual characters players can display an analysis of the actions accomplished in the game world, express their appreciation of them and also build their own meanings that go beyond the game’s narrative. Coproduction of game characters’ turns emerges an important practice for building alignments toward ongoing scenes. The possibility of producing a candidate completion for a character’s turn-in-progress in anticipation of it also allows the participants to display knowledge that goes beyond the local resources, providing opportunities for testing their interactional competence. The analysis also sheds light on the specific kinds of resources for participation and learning afforded by gaming activities. Gee (2003, 2004), for example, argues that (good) video games can enhance learning through enabling active and critical engagement with the game. The analytic lens of CA makes visible the detailed ways in which players consciously attend to, notice and appreciate the semiotic domain of the game, including the resources through which the game’s narrative and discursive meanings are constructed. More generally, the study also adds to the growing body of work on specific discursive and interactional practices through which second language users accomplish social action in a variety of settings. Previous studies in the field known as CA for SLA have identified several different types of behaviors which may enhance learning. These include expressions of noncomprehension or understanding, changes of epistemic state and practices of repair. As Markee (2008) points out, these are analyzable as collaborative behaviors that evidence socially distributed cognition (see Firth & Wagner, 2007; Kasper, 2009; Markee, 2008; te Molder & Potter, 2005). The findings of this study suggest that joint production of talk is another resource which allows participants to build their cognitive and


41

affective alignment (Goodwin, 2007) with the activity in progress. As such it provides one of the interactional resources through which the players sustain interaction and assemble the social activity of game-playing. As noted by previous research on learning settings (e.g. Kasper, 2009; Nishizaka, 2006; Seedhouse, 2004), the same organizations that enable the building of intersubjectivity and orderly interaction in specific social activities, also enable learning. Finally, the study adds to previous research on joint construction of utterances in CA by offering an initial description of how the generic practices employed in collaborative turn sequences may be adapted in interactions shaped by the social, material, semiotic and temporal structuring of a video game. Transcription conventions . Falling intonation , Level or slightly rising intonation ? Rising intonation Cut-off ↑ Change in pitch height: higher than preceding speech ↓ Change in pitch height: lower than preceding speech >< Faster tempo Slower tempo : Sound stretch never Stressed syllable hey Emphasis theWord is cut off YES Loud voice ° ° Quiet voice $ Laughing voice @@ Animated voice * hope * Whispering (.) Pause, less than 0.3 s. (0.5) Length of pause hh .hh Out-breath / in-breath j(h)oo Laughing production [] Overlap = Latching of turns ((soft voice)) Researcher’s comment Acknowledgements I am very grateful to Joan Kelly Hall and Simona Pekarek Doehler for their detailed and helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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Notes 1.

2.

3.

I am deeply indebted to the young players and their parents for agreeing to take part in this study. This work would not have been possible without the help of the participants who agreed to have their interactions video recorded and gave their consent for the use of these materials for research purposes. Detailed information on the Final Fantasy series can be found on several (unofficial) websites (see e.g. Final Fantasy online http://www.ffonline.com/, eyesonff http://www.eyesonff.com/ and Wikipedia). See also Burn and Schott (2004) for an analysis of the characters in Final Fantasy. I am grateful to Ari Häkkinen for his invaluable help with the transcription and editing of visual images.

References Aarsand, P. and Aronsson, K. (2009) Response cries and other gaming moves – Building intersubjectivity in gaming. Journal of Pragmatics 41, 1557–1575. Androutsopoulos, J. (ed.) (2006) Sociolinguistics and computer-mediated communication. Theme issue. Journal of Sociolinguistics 10. Arminen, I. (2005) Institutional Interaction: Studies of Talk at Work. Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate. Bolden, G. (2003) Multiple modalities in collaborative turn sequences. Gesture 3, 187–212. Burn, A. and Schott, G. (2004) Heavy hero or digital dummy? Multimodal player– avatar relations in Final Fantasy 7. Visual Communication 3, 213–233. Cassell, J. and Jenkins, H. (eds) (1999) From Barbi to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Couper-Kuhlen, E. (1996) The prosody of repetition: On quoting and mimicry. In E. Couper-Kuhlen and M. Selting (eds) Prosody in Conversation ( pp. 366–405). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Firth, A. and Wagner, J. (2007) Second/foreign language learning as a social accomplishment: Elaborations on a ‘reconceptualised’ SLA. Modern Language Journal 91, 800–819. Gardner, R. and Wagner, J. (2004) Second Language Conversations. London: Continuum Gee, J.P. (2003) What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. New York: Palgrave and MacMillan. Gee, J.P. (2004) Situated Language and Learning: A Critique of Traditional Schooling. London: Routledge. Gee, J.P. (2007) Good Video Games + Good Learning. Collected Essays on Video Games, Learning and Literacy. New York: Peter Lang. Goodwin, C. (2000) Action and embodiment within situated human interaction. Journal of Pragmatics 32, 1489–1522. Goodwin, C. (2003) Embedded context. Research on Language and Social Interaction 36, 323 –350. Goodwin, C. (2006) Human sociality as mutual orientation in a rich interactive environment: Multimodal utterances and pointing in aphasia. In N.J. Enfield and S. Levinson (eds) Roots of Human Sociality. Culture, Cognition and Interaction (pp. 97–125). Oxford: Berg. Goodwin, C. (2007) Participation, stance and affect in the organisation of activities. Discourse & Society 18, 53–73. Goodwin, C. and Goodwin, M. (1992a) Context, activity and participation. In P. Auer and A. di Luzio (eds) The Contextualization of Language ( pp. 77–99). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.


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Goodwin, C. and Goodwin, M.H. (1992b) Assessments and the construction of context. In A. Duranti and C. Goodwin (eds) Rethinking Context ( pp. 147–185). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hellermann, J. (2008) Social Actions for Classroom Language Learning. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Heritage, J. (1984) Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Holt, E. (2007) ‘I’m eyeing your chop up mind’: Reporting and enacting. In E. Holt and R. Clift (eds) Reporting Talk ( pp. 47–80). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holt, E. and Clift, R. (eds) (2007) Reporting Talk. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hutchins, E. (1999) Cognitive artefacts. In R. Wilson and F. Keil (eds) The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences ( pp. 126–127). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hutchins, E. (2006) The distributed cognition perspective on human interaction. In N.J. Enfield and S. Levinson (eds) Roots of Human Sociality. Culture, Cognition and Interaction (pp. 375–398). Oxford: Berg. Kasper, G. (2009) Locating cognition in second language interaction and learning: Inside the skull or in public view? IRAL 47, 11–36. Leppänen, S. (2007) Youth language in media contexts: Some insights into the functions of English in Finland. World Englishes 26, 149–169. Lerner, G. (1989) Assisted storytelling: Deploying shared knowledge as a practical matter. Qualitative Sociology 15, 247–271. Lerner, G. (1991) On the syntax of sentences in progress. Language in Society 20, 441–458. Lerner, G.H. (1995) Turn design and the organization of participation in instructional activities. Discourse Processes 19, 111–131. Lerner, G. (1996) On the ‘semi-permeable’ character of grammatical units in conversation: Conditional entry into the turn space of another speaker. In E. Ochs, E. Schegloff and S. Thompson (eds) Interaction and Grammar ( pp. 238–276). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lerner, G. (2002) Turn-sharing: The choral co-production of talk-in-interaction. In C. Ford, B. Fox and S. Thompson (eds) The Language of Turn and Sequence ( pp. 225–256). Oxford: Oxford University Press . Lerner, G. (2004) Collaborative turn sequences. In G.H. Lerner (ed.) Conversation Analysis. Studies from the First Generation ( pp. 225–256). Amsterdam: John Benjamins . Markee, N. (2008) Toward a learning behavior tracking methodology for CA-for-SLA. Applied Linguistics 29, 404–427. Mehan, H. (1982) The structure of classroom events and their consequences for students’ performance. In P. Gilmore and A. Glatthorne (eds) Ethnography and Education: Children In and Out of School ( pp. 59–87). Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Mondada, L. (forthcoming) Coordinating mobile action in real time: The timed organisation of directives in video games. In P. Haddington, L. Mondada and M. Nevile (eds) Interaction and Mobility. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Mondada, L. and Pekarek Doehler, S. (2004) Second language acquisition as situated practice: Task accomplishment in the French second language classroom. Modern Language Journal 88, 501–518. Nishizaka, A. (2006) What to learn: The embodied structure of the environment. Research on Language and Social Interaction 39, 119–154. Noppari, E., Uusitalo, N., Kupiainen, R. and Luostarinen, H. (2008) ‘Mä oon nyt online!’ Lasten mediaympäristö muutoksessa. [‘I’m online now!’ Children’s changing media environment]. University of Tampere, Department of Journalism, Publication series A 104.

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Piirainen-Marsh, A. (2010) Bilingual practices and the social organisation of video gaming activities. Journal of Pragmatics 42 (11), 3012–3030. Piirainen-Marsh, A. and Tainio, L. (2009a) Prosodic repetition as a resource for participation in the activity of playing a video game. Modern Language Journal 93, 153–169. Piirainen-Marsh, A. and Tainio, L. (2009b) Collaborative game-play as a site for participation and situated learning of second language. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research 53, 167–183. Raudaskoski, P. (2003) TV-reception as a resource for developing TV programmes and new media. Manuscript. [Danish version published in In Asmuβ and J. Steensig (eds) Samtalen på arbejde. Copenhagen: Samfundsliteteratur.] Sacks, H. (1992) Lectures on Conversation. Oxford: Blackwell. Sahlström, F. (ed.) (2009) Conversation analysis as a way of studying learning. Special Issue of the Scandinavian Journal for Educational Research 53. Seedhouse, P. (2004) The Interactional Architecture of the Language Classroom. A Conversation Analysis Perspective. Oxford: Blackwell. Steinkuehler, C. (2006) Massively multiplayer online videogaming as participation in a discourse. Mind, Culture, & Activity 13, 38–52. Steinkuehler, C. and Williams, D. (2006) Where everybody knows your (screen) name: Online games as ‘third places’. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 1, article 1. On WWW at http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue4/steinkuehler. html. Accessed 1.6.10. Te Molder, H. and Potter, J. (eds) (2005) Conversation and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thorne, S. (2008) Mediating technologies and second language learning. In D. Leu, J. Coiro, C. Lankshear and M. Knobel (eds) Handbook of Research on New Literacies (pp. 417–449). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Thorne, S.L., Black, R.W. and Sykes, J. (2009) Second language use, socialization, and learning in internet interest communities and online games. Modern Language Journal 93, 802–821.

Chapter 3

Learning as Social Action F. SAHLSTRÖM

Introduction At the very least, a basic and minimalist understanding of the possible relevance of conversation analysis (CA) research for learning studies is that if learning is understood as situated and constituted in interaction, research on interaction will provide for better understanding of learning. As CA is all about interaction, the understandings of interaction provided for by CA will also, in this basic view, be of relevance for the field of learning studies. Despite differing views on many issues, there is a general agreement on the fact that learning is inherently longitudinal; that it involves changes in the practices of individuals occurring over time. Hence, CA researchers arguing for the relevance of their findings for learning research are, in a growing fashion, examining new and existing data sets for evidence of longitudinal change. In this body of research (which will be presented in short below), CA researchers have presented compelling evidence for how the ways individuals take part in interaction change over time. However, conceptualizations of learning and change are most commonly brought in from the learning sciences, rather than being developed within CA itself. In this chapter, I will argue, relying on recorded data, that it is both feasible and of value to attempt to formulate ‘learning’ as something conceptualized within CA. This in addition to the insights provided for by the line of work, which relies on CA for the empirical demonstration of learning having occurred, but where learning is understood as changes in doing, rather than as a doing in itself. To do this, I will briefly present some core aspects of CA, and briefly present how learning has been studied using CA. This will be followed by an analysis of videorecordings of face-to-face interaction, where I argue that the participants are carrying out learning. To the readers of this book, CA is most likely a quite well-known enterprise of the social sciences (and if not, the introduction to this volume 45

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provides some background). Although there are differences in approaches, one can say that at the core of any CA work is the study of embodiments of human sociality: action, activity and conduct in interaction, through use of the language and the body, as Schegloff (1996) argues in an elaborately crafted introduction to CA as a social science. The sociology of action, or practice, Schegloff argues, has been lacking serious empirical theorizing of the social use of language and the body. He writes: Several strands of contemporary theorizing (most notably those associated with the names of Bourdieu and Habermas) have sought to put language, communication, and ‘practice’ in a position of comparable theoretical ‘gravity’; still, none has yet provided a clear depiction and exemplar of how the prima facie, observable embodiment of sociality – action, activity, and conduct in interaction – as effectuated through the deployment of language and the body can be put at the center of theorizing about the social and can be grounded and elaborated in detailed, empirical analysis of that conduct. (Schegloff, 1996: 162) This focus, Schegloff (1996) writes, has been surprisingly non-frequent in current sociological understandings of ‘practice’, but is the core business of CA. Charles Goodwin, another of the leading researchers within the field (cf. Goodwin, 2000, 2006) argues that the ‘primordial site’ for the study of human sociality can be found in situations in which multiple participants are carrying out courses of action together, thus setting a research agenda with an explicit focus on embodied social action in itself (rather than as an expression of the individual mind, or as an expression of external determining structures). Thus, while CA certainly has contributed to disciplines such as sociolinguistics and interactional linguistics (Ochs et al., 1996), not least with respect to the seminal insights in turn-construction and turn-allocation, it is here primarily viewed as a research paradigm for understanding the social organization of human interaction. In its pursuit of the organization of human sociality, CA takes up a radical participant’s perspective. What is to be studied is what participants in social interaction are oriented to, and the description of these phenomena is to be controlled by empirical findings, situated in naturally occurring settings (Schegloff, 1996). Through the way participants display to each other their orientation to the interaction, they provide both to each other and to analysts resources for checking and elaborating on how the unfolding actions are to be understood. This provides what Sacks et al. (1974) call a ‘proof procedure’ to participants and analysts alike. The materiality within which the resources for understanding reside are presented in transcripts, as text, drawings or other graphics. The use of detailed

Learning as Social Action

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representations, such as in this volume, enables readers to understand and judge the interpretations of the analyst. As a consequence of its theoretical points of departure and its practices, CA is seemingly ‘surface oriented’, aiming at studying what is out there in the material world, as it is perceived and oriented to by participants (see Schegloff, 1996: 165 for a more extended discussion of what he calls ‘ordinary actions in the first instance’). It is not about unveiling, uncovering or showing what ‘really’ goes on, beneath presumably innocent exchanges of turns at talk. Conversation analysts do not claim to know better than the participants they study what they ‘actually’ do, think, know, but aim at describing their embodied doing, thinking and knowing, but concerns itself with theorizing about human action in a way that allows for the complexities of social situations to be represented and understood in the way they are by the participants studied. In approximately the same time period within which CA has developed, the understandings of ‘learning’ have been undergoing quite substantial development, not least within what is often referred to as a socio-cultural perspective. Embracing different ways of approaching learning, a common point of departure is the emphasis on the human being as a social being, acting within different contexts (Lave & Wenger, 1991). This acting is captured in the concept of participation, leading to what Sfard (Sfard, 1998; Sfard & Lavie, 2005) has argued as a ‘participationist’ view of learning. She writes ‘to put it differently, learning a subject is now conceived of as a process of becoming a member of a certain community. This entails, above all, the ability to communicate in the language of this community and act according to its particular norms’ (Sfard, 1998: 6). In the introductory chapter to the much referred to Understanding Practice (Chaiklin & Lave, 1993), Lave writes that: there is no such thing as ‘learning’ sui generis, but only changing participation in the culturally designed settings of everyday life. Or, to put it the other way around, participation in everyday life may be thought of as a process of changing understanding in practice, that is, as learning. (Lave, 1993: 5–6) Formulations such as these put social interaction at the centre, in ways that in their extended implications quite radically challenge many established notions of learning. The ways CA research on social interaction can contribute empirically to the learning sciences have been, and currently are being, explored in a rapidly growing body of research (although generally speaking, it is fair to say that learning and development is something that has not historically been at centre stage of CA research). In sum, one can argue that in this work, there are three different approaches, all of them with different advantages. The first of these is the

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most straightforward: CA researchers study classroom interaction (or interaction in other educational settings), to find out the organization of interaction in these settings. The findings from these studies, most often focused on turn-taking and turn-allocation, can then be used as a basis for studying learning. However, the studies themselves do not make any claims on learning. A seminal example is Hugh Mehan’s (1979) study ‘Learning lessons.’ Other examples are Cekaite (2006), Kääntä (2010), Macbeth (2004), Sahlström (1999, 2002) and Slotte-Lüttge (2005). A second approach has been to rely on CA for studying longitudinal change in a certain CA action – often repair – in one participant’s interaction over time (e.g. Hellermann, 2008; Martin, 2004; Nishizaka, 2006; Wootton, 1997). The focus in these studies is on changes over time in a participant’s use of a structural-sequential phenomenon, thus exploring the possibilities of relying on core sequential findings within CA for studying development and change. The conceptual view of what is viewed as learning, such as changing participation, changing understanding, increased competence, is based on theories of learning rather than on theories of interaction. Learning is not argued as a literal action in itself, as something done there-and-then demonstrably oriented to as such, for the participants, but as an outcome of empirically demonstrated changes in action. This line of reasoning has been further developed, within the almost explosive growth of CA studies of learning a second language, reflected also in this volume. This ‘CA for learning’ resembles the way that CA has been applied for studying other social concepts, which have their primary origins outside CA itself. In an article from 1991, Emanuel Schegloff discusses this issue in relation to social structures, arguing that CA as such does not rule out the existence of structures such as class and gender, but that the task of CA itself is not, in Schegloff’s view, to provide evidence at a micro-level for what is presumed to exist at a macro-level. According to his view, it is possible that CA methods and findings can contribute to the understandings of class and gender, but this pursuit should be understood as something different than working within CA on class and gender (as two examples). Finally, a third approach, focused in this chapter, is to study longitudinal change as content-integrated literal doing, constituted by certain oriented-to aspects of social interaction. A prior example of work like this is Melander (2009) and Lee (2010). In line with their arguments, the attempt here is to consider the possibility that among the many things people do, learning can be considered one, in addition to treating learning as an outcome of changes in the ways people do things, other things, and while doing so, learn. Lee writes, in an article that came to my knowledge only during the very last revision of this chapter, ‘we want to recover the evidence of learning in and as the parties’ undertaking of the interaction’ (Lee, 2010: 410) rather than having to rely on pre-formulations of change. Doing so does not in any way


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claim that that the detailed and elaborated demonstrations of learning afforded by the other approaches are less valid or less fruitful – what I want to claim is that the ways are different, and make different things visible. As a final hedge, I would like to point out that no perspective or understanding ever will be able to fully describe learning, and that the forthcoming claims that participants are doing learning are not intended to be read as claiming that that is all the learning anyone ever can do.

Counting in English: The Empirical Material The empirical material used consists of longitudinal video recordings, collected over one week, of the everyday interaction of Sara, a seven-yearold multilingual child.1 Sara was born in Finland to African parents. She went to a Swedish-language kindergarten in a Swedish-dominated part of Finland (Swedish Ostrobothnia). Before she started preprimary education (a one-year program prior to beginning primary school at the age of seven) the family moved to the Finnish-dominated Helsinki metropolitan area, where the video recordings were made. She mainly uses Swedish with her parents, who speak Swahili, but also some Swedish and English, with her. At the time of data collection, Sara was attending a Swedish-language preprimary class, where teachers always use Swedish. As a consequence of the Swedish–Finnish bilingual background of almost all children, the children also use Finnish in the preprimary class. This is done in two ways, (1) some of the children choose Finnish as their common language in many peer interactions; (2) almost all of the children use (certain) Finnish words in their Swedish. Thus, competence in Finnish can be described as everyday competence among the children. There is explicit emphasis on the support of Swedish in the preprimary class, Swedish being regarded as the weaker language for many children. Sara was recorded for five whole school days, at post-school programs and for large parts of the day at home from a Thursday to a Tuesday in the spring of 2008. The recordings at the preschool and during post-school programs were administered by researchers and include all interactions involving Sara at school: classrooms, breaks outside, school lunches as well as all activities during post-school programs. The camera was focused on Sara, who was wearing a wireless microphone, and on her peers and teachers. On the same days, and over the weekend, the parents administered recordings in the family at home (cf. Hummelstedt et al., 2008). In the data, consisting of 32 hours of video recordings from preschool and post-school programs and about 10 hours from the home, we have traced trajectories of situations where the children are oriented to the same topical content (cf. below; Melander & Sahlström, 2008, 2009). Some of these topics are language related, such as discussions about language competence or teaching English; some are, for example, about a TV-program or a game

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(cf. Slotte-Lüttge et al., accepted). Here, all the situations are concerned with learning how to count from one to 10 in English. All of the analysed situations below are from child to child interactions in the preschool setting. Results The first situation in which an orientation to learning to count from one to 10 in English is found in the preschool class, when the children are getting ready to go outside for a break. Right before the beginning of Excerpt 3.1, one of the children, Hanna, has taken out a piece of paper from her pocket. In line 1, she announces the presence of the note. Lines 3–11 are concerned with the English equivalents of the numbers, and lines 12–24 are concerned with claiming knowledge to Hanna’s parents. In this and the subsequent excerpts, there are many aspects of interaction, which for reasons of space are not discussed. The intent is to cover aspects of the situation relevant for the analysis of learning. Excerpt 3.1 Re-introducing the English note 1 Hanna: ja ha:r den hä engelskalappen. I have here the English note 2 (1.2) 3 Hanna: ja kommer int ihÅ:g va va tie å åtta. I don’t remember what was ten and eight 4 Sara: tie å åtta. ten and eight 5 (1.0) ((they unfold the note)) 6 Sara: tie å åtta e eight och (.) de e ten. ten and eight is eight and (.) that is ten 7 Hanna: va e de dä då. (.) nie. what is that then (.) nine. 8 Sara: va hh¿ what¿ 9 Hanna: va e ni:e då, what is ni:ne then, 10 Sara: ni:ne nine 11 (2.3) ((Hanna folds the note and they begin to walk toward the door)) 12 Sara: men vi- ha du visa ti dina föräldrar. but shhave you shown to your parents 13 Hanna: nä:, no 14 Sara: bra:, good:, 15 (0.8)


16

Sara:

17 18 19

Hanna:

20

Sara:

21

Hanna:

22

Sara:

23

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hej. hej. du kan säga (.) hej. ja vet ja ha en hey hey you can say (.) hey. I know I have one bra idé. du kan säga att du: till dina föräladrar att good idea you can say that you: to your parents that ti:tta du ha skrivi di här (.) första f- engelska. loo:k you have written these (.) first f- English. jo ja lurar dom. yes I fool them. jo du ska- ha du lura dom igår. yes you shall did you fool them yesterday. nä:. ja måst ida ta hem den. no:. I must today take it home. jo men (.) du måst säga att du ha skrivit dig yes but (.) you must say that you have written you själv de it yourself

In line 1, Hanna introduces the note written in English. She does so in a way which shows that the note is known to both participants prior to the situation, by using the definite article, and by making so little of the announcement. In the 1.2-second silence, Hanna unfolds the note, before proceeding to ask about the word. In lines 3–10, Hanna asks Sara about eight, nine and 10, while intently looking at the note with the written words. A core resource for establishing longitudinal relationships is the talkedabout content. In an article from 2008, Helen Melander and I show how children in a classroom use the size of the blue whale as a topical resource for establishing the talk as related to prior interaction (Melander & Sahlström, 2008). The analysis does not restrict interactional change to changes in sequential patterns, but includes content changes as an integrated aspect of interaction. This development is building on work in CA by Charles Goodwin (e.g. 2000), who strongly has argued for an integrated, embodied understanding of social interaction. In Hanna’s very first line, the verbal content, the English note and the actual artefact, function as resources for establishing the talk about to come forth as something longitudinally tied to a prior, shared situation. The formulation ja kommer int ihå:g, ‘I don’t remember,’ in line 3 positions Hanna epistemically as someone who accountably should remember the letters and numbers, thus adding to the topicalization of the understanding of the English words for the number letters. Following Kärkkäinen here, epistemic stance is defined as: marking the degree of commitment to what one is saying, or marking attitudes toward knowledge. This definition also includes evidential distinctions, or how knowledge was obtained and what kind of evidence the speaker provides for it. (Kärkkäinen, 2006: 705)

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Epistemic positioning, that is the way participants in interaction claim and demonstrate their ways of knowing and understanding, is found frequently in many turns at talk, in different situations. They seem to be particularly frequent in teaching situations, as indicated by preliminary findings in classroom interaction (Melander & Sahlström, 2010). In the initial 10 turns, one can also observe how the participants, relying on epistemic stance (line 3), the relationship between talk and the orientedto artefact (lines 3, 6, 7), and explicit questions (lines 7, 9) establish and sustain knowledge asymmetries with respect to the topicalized understanding of number words in English. Hanna positions herself as knowing less than Sara, and Sara aligns with this proposal, acting as someone more knowledgeable than Hanna, throughout lines 4–10. Explicit longitudinal orientation (as in ‘I don’t remember’ in line 3 in Excerpt 3.1), topicalized understanding (also in line 3, Excerpt 3.1) and orientation to knowledge asymmetries (as in lines 3–7 in Excerpt 3.1) have been shown to be frequent in other situations of explicit peer teaching and learning. As an example, in an analysis of pilot training, Helen Melander (2009) demonstrates how the students and the teachers rely on these means for constituting the situations in question as learning situations, by situating their talk as part of a trajectory, by talking about their understanding of situations such as ‘unusual situations’, and by orienting to their roles as students and teachers. In Martin and Sahlström (2010), a physiotherapist and her patient act in a similar way, with explicit orientation to the longitudinality of their actions, with understanding being topicalized and with a distinct orientation to expertise. In this chapter, these three aspects of action will be relied upon for analysing the subsequent situations in which Sara and Hanna continue, and return to, their talk on number words in English. In the very next turns, lines 12–23, the explicitly longitudinal aspects and the epistemic accountability of the number words in English are returned to. In line 12, Sara says men vi- ha du visa ti dina föräldrar, ‘but shhave you shown to your parents’. This is responded to with a ‘no’, followed by a ‘good’. Then Sara says she has an idea: Hanna should tell her parents that it is she herself who has written the words in English, and that she should show the note to them at home. Here, the number words in English are not only set in relation to prior situations (as in line 1), but also in relation to projected and expected future use. Thus, the longitudinal aspects of the topical content are oriented to and extend both backwards, in relation to prior use, but also forward, in relation to expected future use. In both cases, this longitudinal relationship is beyond the relationships CA most often has concerned itself with, based on and carried out in relation to the adjacency pair. Further, the participants in lines 12–24 also orient explicitly to epistemic stance, in that the gist of Sara’s proposal is that Hanna should claim mastery of something, writing words in English, which Hanna has not really


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mastered. She asks Hanna to cheat. This proposal is related to the actual note, because Sara asks Hanna to show the writing and claim that it is her own. Sara is asking Hanna to claim knowledge as well as demonstrate that knowledge with the artefact of the note. In the next situation, later the same day, Sara and Hanna are outside in the school yard. In transcript 2, Sara and Hanna are discussing about whether to continue with de dä engelska, ‘that English’. The discussion is initiated by Hanna, who asks Sara in line 1 whether they can continue with the English. She receives no initial response, but eventually she succeeds in soliciting a response from Sara. The excerpt ends at line 28, where they begin looking for a pencil. Excerpt 3.2 Negotiating about learning 1 Hanna: kan vi nu titta (nu) på de dä engelska. can we now look now at that English? 2 (2.0) 3 Hanna: plea:se. 4 (1.5) 5 Hanna: kan vi. (.) pleah(se). can we (.) pleah(se) 6 Sara: va blir de om ja säger nä. what will it be if I say no. 7 Hanna: >ingenting.< >nothing.< 8 Sara: VA BLIR DE OM JA SÄGER NÄ. what will it be if I say no. 9 Hanna: ingenting. nothing. 10 Sara: ja sku villa lära dig ALLA snabbt så snabbt I would like to teach you all fast so fast 11 engelska. English. 12 (1.0) 13 Sara: (vet du) fast du int låter mig å gö de. (you know) although you don’t let me do so. 14 Hanna: du fÅr (.) lära mig engelskan. you can (.) teach me English. 15 Sara: ända tills du går hem¿ all the time until you go home¿ 16 (0.8) 17 Sara: lova? promise? 18 (1.0)

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19


Hanna:

20 21 22

Sara:

23

Hanna:

24 25 26

Hanna:

27

Sara:

28

okej. men (.) bäst mesta in- mest- men om vi OK but (.) best- most in most- but if we går allti in då måst- då måst du- då måst du go always in then must then must you then must you skriva ner på ett papper engelska. write down on a paper English. jo me– yes butmen ja- ja kommer int mera ihåg dom där but I- I don’t any more rememember those enkla sakerna. = så kom. Emelin kom ut. simple things so come Emelin came out (0.8) kan du li:te lära mig någå nu. can you a little teach me something now. ja men om du hämtar (din) krita. (.) eller (.) yes but if you get (your) crayon(.) or om du hämtar din blyertspenna eller nånting. if you get your pencil or something.

In the same way as in Excerpt 3.1, Hanna’s way of introducing the subject situates it as previously known, by the way she phrases it as ‘look at that English’. Thus, the explicit longitudinal orientation argued for above also seems to be present here. The way Hanna pursues her request using please in lines 3 and 5 further situates their talk as being about the English. Following the talk about possible consequences of saying no (lines 6–9), Sara says ja sku villa lära dig ALLA så snabbt så snabbt engelska, ‘I would like to teach all of you so fast so fast English.’ In the Swedish Here, as in Excerpt 3.1, Sara explicitly positions herself as someone both willing and able to teach others, all the others, English. Thus, she positions herself epistemically, and claims a more extensive knowledge of English than the rest of the class. This claim is recognized by Hanna, who first in line 14 and later in line 26 asks Sara to ‘teach her’ English. Further, Hanna in lines 23–24 says she does no longer remember even the simple things, thus once again topicalizing her epistemic stance, and further establishing the English note as something situated in a longitudinal trajectory, as something once remembered. On the basis of this second excerpt, one can argue that the features introduced in relation to Excerpt 3.1 also are present here. Longitudinal orientation, topicalized epistemic stance and recognized and oriented-to knowledge asymmetries are also featured here. The two children not only say that they are going to do learning, but they competently negotiate whether it will take place (lines 1–19), and discuss the requirements for it to happen, such as writing (lines 19–21), and ‘a pencil or something’ (line 27). The extensive argumentation between the participants about whether


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or not to carry out the learning/teaching activity suffices as a base for arguing that in this situation, learning is not only something that might or might not happen to Sara and Hanna as a consequence of their really doing something else, but rather the activity itself, recognizable to Hanna and Sara in such a way that they actually can argue about how it should be done. Immediately following the discussion, Sara and Hanna continue talking about the number words, and about other words in English. Excerpts 3.3 and 3.4 are two examples of how the teaching activities initiated in Excerpt 3.2 take place. As the general subject of English already is in place, there is not the same initial longitudinal orientation as in Excerpts 3.1 and 3.2. In the first situation, Hanna asks Sara what is said in the note, va står här one? (What is written here one?). Sara responds to this by saying one, with a slightly rising intonation, invoking a listing of numbers one to 10. In a slightly delayed fashion, Hanna repeats in overlap the numbers two to 10. Excerpt 3.3 One, two, three 39 Hanna: jå bakom. (.) va står här. (.) one? yes behind. (.) what is written here. (.) one? 40 Sara: >one¿ 41 Sara: t[wo, 42 Hanna: [two, 43 Sara: t[hree, 44 Hanna: [three, 45 Sara: f[our, 46 Hanna: [four, 47 Sara: f[ive, 48 Hanna: [five, 49 Sara: s[ix, 50 Hanna: [six, 51 Sara: s[even, 52 Hanna: [seven, 53 Sara: e[ight, 54 Hanna: [eight, 55 Sara: n[ine, 56 Hanna: [nine, 57 Sara: t[en, 58 Hanna: [(ten,) 59 Sara: ↑hej he- e (0.5) ↑hi ↓hej ↑hey he- is (0.5) ↑hi ↓hey 60 (1.0)

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Here, the epistemic topicalization and oriented-to-knowledge asymmetries argued for as constitutive of learning situations also can be found. In line 39, Hanna asks Sara what it says in the note. She positions herself as someone not knowing what it says. The try-marked one in line 39 asks for confirmation, which she also gets. Sara positions herself as someone knowing more. In the subsequent listing, she takes the lead and Hanna follows, in a fashion which can be found in classrooms, where repeat with a slightly delayed onset is a common way of teaching lists of different kinds. Thus, something that at first sight might seem as a simple reading of one to 10 in English also seems to contain an orientation to learning how to do this. In relation to the argument suggested in this chapter, learning is done as such. Some 10 minutes later, Hanna again asks Sara to read the words. In Excerpt 3.4, both children read first in English and then in Swedish from one to 10. Excerpt 3.4 Reading through the list again 91 Hanna: kan du läsa en gång till. can you read one time more. 92 Sara: >one two th[ree four five 93 Hanna: > [three four five 94 Sara: six seven (.) eight nine ten< 95 Hanna: six seven enine ten< 96 Sara: >ett två [tre fura fem sex sju åtta nie ti:e< one two [three four five six seven eight nine ten< 97 Hanna: [>tre fyra fem sex sju åtta nie tie< [three four five six seven eight nine ten< 98 Hanna: ja för den här hit. I bring this one over here. As in Excerpts 3.1 and 3.2, Hanna’s fi rst turn explicitly situates the requested reading in relation to prior talk about English, in this case using the phrase ‘one more time’. She asks Sara to read, acknowledging her own epistemic claims on knowing, and orienting to the asymmetry between herself and Sara. As in Excerpt 3.3, there is a slight delay in the onset of Hanna’s use of the English terms, in lines 93–95. Hanna also finds eight problematic, shown in her cut-off in line 95. When Sara switches to Swedish, however, the children read in unison from tre, ‘three’, in lines 96–97. One can argue, then, that Excerpt 3.4 is evidence of the differences between counting in Swedish and counting in English. When counting in English, Hanna finds the counting more difficult, whereas the same activity in Swedish runs smoothly, in perfect overlap. The following day, Sara and Hanna are playing in the woods. In the middle of a Harry Potter-inspired play, Sara asks Hanna whether she has a pencil and the English note. This is followed by another extensive


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discussion about the words one to 10 in English, where the already discussed themes reappear. The excerpt is included in its entirety, despite its length. It begins with a presequence in lines 1–4, where Sara and Hanna establish the possibilities for counting in English. This is followed by a request directive from Sara that Hanna should count the numbers, in lines 6, 8 and 10. This is followed by a negotiation of how to carry out the reading of the numbers, interspersed with several tries at reading, beginning in line 22, ending in a shared reading of the numbers in lines 60–62. As above, the discussion of the excerpt will deal with longitudinality, epistemic topicalization and oriented-to knowledge asymmetries. Excerpt 3.5 Counting in the woods 1 Sara: har du bly:ertspenna me. did you bring a pencil 2 Hanna: °nä° °no° 3 Sara: har du din engelskapapper. have you got your English note 4 Hanna: jå. yes. 5 (2.4) 6 Sara: du kan räkna nu. you can count now 7 (0.5) 8 Sara: du kan nu räkn- försöka nu räkna utan de. you can now country to now count without it 9 (0.2) 10 Sara: du kan läsa. you can read 11 Hanna: nej du får lä:sa. fö ja säger efter okej no you can read because I say after okay 12 (.) sådär som (0.7) som (.) Marina sa. (0.2) (.) the way as (0.7) as (.) Marina said. (0.2) 13 ( [ ) 14 Sara: [alltså de där ga- när ga:tan gick sönder. [that one where st- when the street broke 15 Hanna: ((brings out the note)) ja så kan du nu gör de yes then can you now do this 16 här att vi räknar också samma sak. here that we count also the same 17 Sara: °(okah)° (okey) 18 (2.8) 19 Sara: ja måst först gör den här ti att dofta brinn.

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20 21

Hanna:

22 23 24 25 26

Sara: Hanna: Sara: Hanna: Sara:

28 29 30 31

Hanna: Sara: Sara:

32 33 34

Hanna:

35

Sara:

36

Hanna:

37

Sara:

38 39 40 41 42 43 44

Hanna: Hanna: Hanna: Hanna:

45

Sara:

46 47

Hanna: Sara:

48 49

Hanna: Hanna:

I must first make this to smell of burn ((pounds with a rock)) ja för de där va va de blir (.) >nu säg.< yes because that what what it is now say one. one. two. two. vänta du måst säga efter mej ja säger wait you must say after me I say se- (.) one. the- (.) one. t[wo ] [tw-] three feiku du ska va tyst. (.) >one. two. three. no but you should be quiet four. five. six. seven. eight. nine. ten¿ okej. din tur.< okay. your turn. nununu säger vi tisammans. nownownow say we together nä du får försöka. no you can try nä, (0.2) ja kan b [ara lite.] no I only know a [little ] [försö:ka.] [try ] one. two. (0.5) three. (0.6) four. (0.7) five. längre kan ja int. five I can’t any further o[kä:j. o[kay [°s-° seven. si- okej okej du kan [ba de. ] si- okay okay you know [only that.] [(iti) ] ja kan [ba- ] I know [on- ]


50

Sara:

51 52 54 55

Sara: Hanna:

56

Sara:

57 58

Sara:

59 60 61 62 63

Hanna:

Hanna: Sara: Hanna: Sara:

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[okej ]säg one. two. three. four. five. [okay ]say six. seven. eight. nine. ten. e ight. eight. nite. (1.0) va kommer sen. what comes next. >ja kan- ja kan- ja kan<säga. >I can- I can- I can<say. (0.4) one. du får börja också. one. you can begin too. one. two. three. four. five. six. seven. eight. our. five. six. seven. ni(ght). ↑ten. (2.0)

The questions about the pencil and the English note in lines 1 and 3 are similar to the beginnings of Excerpts 3.1 and 3.2, in that it explicitly situates the activity to come as part of something that has already happened. Thus, lines 1 and 3 are not only designed as something projecting a forthcoming activity, but also establishes that activity as longitudinal, with a relationship to prior situations (Excerpts 3.1–3.4). Further, these prior situations are not only prior to the current counting, but they are expected to have caused a change in the practice. The ‘now’ in the formulation du kan räkna nu, ‘you can count now,’ in line 6, situates this counting as one preceded by prior ones (‘now’ is also found twice in line 8), indicating that what then was not possible now should be. With respect to longitudinality, it is also again evident that it not only is the verbal turns at talk that establish the longitudinal character of the situation. The note and the pencil are also semiotic resources with an inscribed material remembering of the prior activity. Invoking and orienting to the note is not only a matter of orienting to the written words, but a matter of remembering together something that has been done in the past, in this case the writing of the numbers one to 10 the day before. Explicit orientation to a shared prior experience can also be found in lines 11–14, where Hanna uses the way a song is sung in circle time as a way of ordering the allocation of turns at talk in the projected listing. The song has a turn-taking format, where the lead singer sings his or her lines first, followed by the rest of the group repeating the sung lines. What Hanna is suggesting is that their reading should be done the same way, with Sara going first and Hanna repeating what Sara has said.

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The seemingly straightforward character of reading the words one to 10 together turns out to be quite challenging. In line 6, Sara proposes that Hanna should count, repeated in line 8 in a slightly modified form. Hanna refuses, they talk about how to do it, Sara returns to the play frame for a couple of turns (lines 18–19), and then they try, without success at first to read the list out loud. Following several elaborations, they come to an agreement at the end of the excerpt. In the excerpt, there are many examples of epistemic topicalization. The first are found in lines 6–8, where Sara argues that Hanna kan räkna nu, ‘knows how to count now’. Sara argues that Hanna ‘knows’. The ‘now’ at the end of the turn at talk where the ‘know’ is found indicates that the knowing not only is a matter of fact, but that it is presented by Sara as a consequence of prior activities. The claim is also specific with respect to content, in that it specifies what Hanna knows is ‘how to count’. Here, Sara claims that Hanna has learned a specific content, and that claim is accomplished through situating that content within a longitudinal trajectory. In line 8, Sara proposes that Hanna should try to count without reading, implying that Hanna possibly could do this, but also that she possibly could not. Following the already mentioned refusal and the subsequent discussion, the situation continues with several more examples of how epistemic stance is topicalized. In line 35, Sara asks Hanna du får försöka, ‘you should try’, answered by nä, (0.2) ja kan bara lite (‘no I only now a little’, line 34). In line 44, Hanna says five. längre kan ja int, ‘five I can’t any further’, responded to with si- okej okej du kan ba de. (‘si- okay kay you only know that’, line 45), and another ja kan ba- (‘I only know’, line 47). Finally, in line 56, Sara says >ja kan- ja kan- ja kan< säga (‘I can- I can- I can say’). In lines 34, 44 and 47 Hanna assesses her own competence, and in line 45, Sara assesses Hanna’s competence. As in the previous excerpts, the ascription of epistemic stance is one of the resources for establishing and sustaining knowledge asymmetries in relation to the subject matter. In this final excerpt, Sara requests Hanna to count, or at least to try to do so, in lines 6, 8 and 10. In so doing, Sara is encouraging Hanna to do something that both she and Hanna know that Sara herself knows how to do. Hanna aligns with this proposed asymmetry, and positions herself in this way throughout the excerpt. In lines 35–37, Sara asks Hanna to try again, in lines 44 and 48 Hanna says that she cannot count any further, in line 47 Sara says to Hanna you only know that, implying that this lack of knowledge is Hanna’s only, and in line 50 Sara asks Hanna to repeat. In line 55 Hanna asks what comes next, suggesting that she does not know, and that Sara knows. Based on these observations, it seems fair to say that the situation is characterized by recognized asymmetries, and by efforts to try to get Hanna to know more.


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As was the case in Excerpt 3.2, there is extended negotiation about how to carry out the discussion about the letter words. In Excerpt 3.2, the discussion concerned wanting or not wanting to do it. In Excerpt 3.4, what proves to be challenging is how to organize the talk itself, with respect to turn-taking and turn-allocation. The way Sara and Hanna are able to negotiate the activity, relying on explicit reference to prior shared activities, again underlines that the on-going activity is recognizable to them as something to negotiate about, as something one can be discursively aware of.

Discussion The four situations discussed above constitute a longitudinal data set. The data demonstrate that in social interaction, there are recognizable and oriented-to pursuits that extend beyond turn exchanges and episodes. Sara and Hanna seem to have practices available that enable them to situate what they are about to do within a longitudinal trajectory. This trajectory is not only about the past, but also about projecting future action, in other settings and situations. The relationship between past, present and future situations is not yet fully explored within CA, and in comparison with the by-now substantial knowledge on the relationship between units within a turn at talk, or between different turns at talk, what has been shown here is but a beginning. With respect to the different approaches to learning within CA, recordings like the ones studied here form the basis of studies of longitudinal change (the second approach outlined in the chapter introduction). For such purposes, this data set could be relied on for trying to find ways in which the reading of one to 10 in English changes over time. The thing to do would be to identify comparable practices in the situations, assemble them longitudinally, and then compare and contrast. One would then find, possibly, that there are some changes, such as the shortening of onset delay when comparing Excerpts 3.3 and 3.4. But most likely one would also conclude that Hanna has not yet learned, that, by the end of the last excerpt from the woods, she does not yet know how to count from one to 10 in English. For the line of analysis attempted here, the issue of whether Hanna’s ways of counting actually have changed or not is not the prime concern. What I have been interested in is whether it would be possible to understand what Sara and Hanna are doing as learning, not on the basis of an analysis of the possible outcome, but on the basis of analysis of actions ‘in the first instance’, as Schegloff (1996) puts it. Arguing in a similar way, Lee (2010) presents the notion of learning as a member’s task. In support of such an understanding I have argued that, in the data I have analysed, the explicit oriented-to longitudinal character, the

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topicalized epistemic stance and the oriented-to knowledge asymmetries are constitutive of the activities in which Sara and Hanna are doing learning. I claim that within the activities studied here, both Sara and Hanna hold each other accountable for that, for example through explicit negotiation about whether to pursue the activity or not, and through negotiation of how to carry out the activity. However, the occasional use of the word ‘learning’ is not a sufficient basis for arguing that learning literally can be understood as action, rather than as an outcome. More convincing is the fact that in all of the three discussed features, change seems to be a central aspect. When Sara and Hanna situate the subject of the words one to 10 in English in relation to prior use, they do so not only to remind themselves that they are doing the same thing. Rather, they do so, so as to be able to change that very thing. When epistemic stance is topicalized, Sara and Hanna not only make explicit their stance. Rather, they do so in order to change in particular the epistemic possibilities for Hanna. This in turn is related to the oriented-to knowledge asymmetries. They too are also oriented to not as static and solid, but as something to be both relied on and changed. Several researchers in fields outside CA, among them most recently the psychologists György Gergely and Gergely Csibra, have argued that humans are intrinsically pedagogical. Their basic argument is humans have evolved into a communicative species, with ‘an intrinsic inclination to teach and learn new and relevant cultural information to (and from) conspecifics’ (Gergely & Csibra, 2006: 241). According to this line of research, pedagogic situations, which occur in many different settings, are characterized by things not just being done, but being ostentatively done. People seem to be doing things in ways, which make available and demonstrates these things as something to be seen and learned. The work by psychologists on general traits of human sociality differs from CA in many ways, and the possibilities to use findings across perspectives are often constrained by the different ways of pursuing the empirical work. However, the findings within this body of psychological studies of human sociality seem to me to encourage further investigation by CA researchers into processes of teaching and learning, with an interest in these as doings in themselves (or, as Lee, 2010: 418, puts it, ‘how participants come to find their learning objects, problematize and act on them in the course of interaction through their situated language use’). The data provided here, limited in scope, seem to suggest that at least for the studied children, teaching and learning are parts of their interactional competence. Further, the results also demonstrate that teaching and learning is something not limited to adult–child relationships, or classrooms or other formal educational settings, but seem to be part of the interactional repertoire used and relied upon in a number of different settings, none of them in this case in classrooms.


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Obviously, there are many issues, which need to be addressed, discussed and eventually modified in the argumentation presented in this chapter. For those who are convinced by prior results of CA research on interaction, where the collective efforts of a large number of researchers have produced convincing and empirically sustained descriptions of how social action is carried out, the possibility of similar work on learning seems promising. Further study of learning as process would also be a contribution to the CA understanding of human sociality. For CA itself, empirically substantiated analysis of relationships between action occurring at different times and in different settings is a possibly relevant expansion of the current body of knowledge within CA. And if CA in time could contribute to the learning sciences with accurate and precise descriptions of learning actions, there would be openings for carrying out research on learning in ways which are not currently available. Note 1.

I want to acknowledge the pivotal contributions of colleagues to my understandings of the data and the issues, especially Cathrin Martin and Helen Melander (Martin & Sahlström, 2010; Melander, 2009; Melander & Sahlström, 2009) at Uppsala University, and the FLIS-project team at Åbo Akademi University (Lotta Forsman, Ida Hummelstedt, Michaela Pörn, Fredrik Rusk and Anna Slotte-Lüttge). An argument in Swedish along the same lines and relying on the same data set as presented in this chapter can be found in Sahlström, Hummelstedt, Forsman, Pörn and Slotte-Lüttge (forthcoming). Melander and Sahlström (unpublished manuscript), also in Swedish, develop and expand some of the arguments, to a slightly broader audience, and with the addition of another data set. Liisa Tainio, Anna Lindström and the volume editors Joan Kelly Hall and John Hellermann have all provided comments, which have substantially helped me to improve the analysis.

References Cekaite, A. (2006) Getting Started. Children’s Participation and Language Learning in an L2 Classroom. Linköping: Linköping University. Chaiklin, S. and Lave, J. (eds) (1993) Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gergely, G. and Csibra, G. (2006) Sylvia’s recipe: The role of imitation and pedagogy in the transmission of cultural knowledge. In N. Enfield and S. Levinson (eds) Roots of Human Sociality. Culture, Cognition and Interaction (pp. 229–255). Oxford, NY: Berg. Goodwin, C. (2000) Action and embodiment within situated interaction. Journal of Pragmatics 32, 1489–1522. Goodwin, C. (2006) Human sociality as mutual orientation in a rich interactive environment: Multimodal utterances and pointing in aphasia. In N. Enfield and S. Levinson (eds) Roots of Human Sociality. Culture, Cognition and Interaction (pp. 97–125). Oxford: Berg. Hellermann, J. (2008) Social Actions for Classroom Language Learning. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

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Hummelstedt, I., Sahlström, F., Forsman, L., Pörn, M. and Slotte-Lüttge, A. (2008) Datainsamling och inledande datahantering, FLIS-projektet våren 2008. FLISrapport 1: 2008. On WWW at http://www.abo.fi/pf/flis. Accessed 3.6.09. Kääntä, L. (2010) Teacher turn-allocation and repair practices in classroom interaction: A multisemiotic perspective. Jyväskylä Studies in Humanities 137. University of Jyväskylä. On WWW at http://urn.fi/URN. Accessed 16.3.11. Kärkkäinen, E. (2006) Stance taking in conversation: From subjectivity to intersubjectivity. Text & Talk 26, 699–731. Lave, J. (1993) The practice of learning. In S. Chaiklin and J. Lave (eds) Understanding Practice. Perspectives on Activity and Context (pp. 3–32). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lee, Y-A. (2010) Learning in the contingency of talk-in-interaction. Text & Talk 30, 403–422. Macbeth, D. (2004) The relevance of repair for classroom correction. Language in Society 33, 703–736. Martin, C. (2004) From other to self. On learning as interactional change. PhD thesis, Uppsala University. Martin, C. (2009) The relevance of situational context in studying learning as changing participation. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research 53, 133–149. Martin, C. and Sahlström, F. (2010) Learning as longitudinal interactional change: From other-repair to self-repair in physiotherapy treatment. Discourse Processes 47, 1–30. Mehan, H. (1979) Learning Lessons. Social Organization in the Classroom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Melander, H. (2009) Trajectories of learning. Embodied interaction in change. PhD thesis, Uppsala University. Melander, H. and Sahlström, F. (2008) In tow of the Blue Whale. Learning as interactional changes in topical orientation. Journal of Pragmatics 41, 1519–1537. Melander, H. and Sahlström, F. (2009) Learning to fly: The progressive development of situation awareness. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research 53, 151–168. Melander, H. and Sahlström, F. (2010) Lärande i interaction [Learning in interaction]. Stockholm: Liber. Melander, H. and Sahlström, F. Lärande som samtalsanalytisk aktivitet [Learning as an activity within conversation analysis], Unpublished manuscript. Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. Nishizaka, A. (2006) What to learn: The embodied structure of the environment. Research on Language and Social Interaction 39, 119–154. Ochs, E., Schegloff, E. and Thompson, S. (eds) (1996) Interaction and Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sacks, H., Schegloff, E.A. and Jefferson, G. (1974) A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language 50, 696–735. Sahlström, F. (1999) Up the hill backwards: On interactional constraints and affordances for equity-constitution in the classrooms of the Swedish comprehensive school. PhD thesis, Uppsala University. Sahlström, F. (2002) The interactional organization of hand raising in classroom interaction. Journal of Classroom Interaction 37, 47–55. Sahlström, F., Hummelstedt, I., Forsman, L., Pörn, M. and Slotte-Lüttge, A. (2010) Samma innehåll – olika sammanhang: mikro-longitudinellt lärande i sjuåringars vardag [Same content – Different contexts: Micro-longitudinal


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learning in the everyday lives of seven-year old children]. Språk och interaktion, 2 (Nordica Helsingiensia 19). Helsinki: University of Helsinki. Schegloff, E.A. (1996) Confirming allusions: Toward an empirical account of action. The American Journal of Sociology 102, 161–216. Sfard, A. (1998) On two metaphors for learning and the dangers of choosing just one. Educational Researcher 27, 4–13. Sfard, A. and Lavie, I. (2005) Why cannot children see as the same what grown-ups cannot see as different? Early numerical thinking revisited. Cognition and Instruction 23, 237–309. Slotte-Lüttge, A. (2005) ‘Ja vet int va de heter på svenska.’ Interaktion mellan tvåspråkiga elever och deras lärare i en enspråkig klassrumsdiskurs [‘I Don’t Know How to Say it in Swedish.’ Interaction between Bilingual Students and their Teachers in a Monolingual Classroom Discourse]. Åbo: Åbo Akademi University Press. Slotte-Lüttge, A., Pörn, M. and Sahlström, F. (forthcoming) Learning how to be a tähti: A case study of language development in everyday situations of a sevenyear-old multilingual Finnish child. International Journal of Bilingualism. Wootton, A. (1997) Interaction and the Development of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chapter 4

The Social Life of Self-Directed Talk: A Sequential Phenomenon? F. STEINBACH KOHLER and S.L. THORNE

Introduction So a rule: Not talking to oneself in public. But of course, the lay formulation of a rule never gets to the bone, it merely tells us where to start digging. In linguistic phrasing, Not talking to oneself in public is a prescriptive rule of communication; the descriptive rule – the practice – is likely to be less neat and is certain to be less ready to hand, allowing, if not encouraging, variously grounded exceptions. (Goffman, 1981: 88) The Goffman quotation above makes two astute observations. The first is implied in the stated rule, ‘Not talking to oneself in public,’ which indirectly suggests that it is commonplace for people to talk to themselves when out of the public eye. The second observation comes in the form of critical commentary of this ‘lay formulation of a rule’ and acknowledges that talking to oneself does happen in public, and may, in fact, even be a necessary part of the achievement of everyday social interaction. This chapter examines cases of audible speech occurring in multiparty interaction that appear to be self-directed, that is to say, utterances that at first glance seem to be produced with oneself as the target interlocutor. In nonpathological cases, self-directed talk, the label used in this chapter, is a phenomenon that includes both the vernacular notion of ‘talking to oneself’ as well as more technical and theoretically specific concepts such as ‘self-talk’ (Goffman, 1981) and ‘private speech’ (Flavell, 1966). Drawing upon conversation analysis and its emphasis on the sequence organization of talk-in-interaction, this study investigates the interactional dynamics within which self-directed talk is a constitutive element, including both the sequential position of self-directed talk in social interaction and the ways that interactional dynamics relate to the

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The Social Life of Self-Directed Talk

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emergence of self-directed talk. With respect to the volume’s overarching topic, self-directed talk might at fi rst glance seem peripheral to ‘interactional competence’ as a way of doing things through languagein-action in concert with others. However, our research on small group interaction shows that self-directed talk recurrently occurs as part of speech events involving peer interaction and task accomplishment, contributing to the interactional flow and architecture of the encounters. We have evidence and analyses to support three phenomena related to sequence and participatory organization: (1) self-directed talk provides the option for potential recipients to disattend its producer and her actions, momentarily reconfiguring the participation framework, for example opening a space for working out a problem at one’s own pace. (2) (Simultaneously) self-directed talk can act as a publicly available resource for co-participants as they attend to the ‘private speech’ of others. In these instances, participants can treat others’ self-directed talk as a display of task- and group-relevant problem-solving procedures that makes visible the foci of attention, such as cognitive processes and linguistic and performance-based problems, and thus becomes a resource for maintaining intersubjectivity. (3) Self-directed speech can emerge as a result of sequential organization, typically following sequential misalignment, which makes visible co-participants’ (non)availability at a particular moment in time. Self-directed talk has been discussed from two distinct perspectives, one rooted in the work of the micro-sociologist Erving Goffman and the other as part of Vygotskian sociocultural theories of human development. While Goffman (1981) offers an interactional account and a typology of self-directed talk, describing its forms and implications in the public sphere, the sociocultural tradition following Vygotsky (e.g. Luria, 1981; Vygotsky, 1978, 1986) has produced an extensive body of research focusing on its self-regulatory functions in both L1 and L2 learning contexts (e.g. Lantolf, 1997, 2003; Ohta, 2001; see Lantolf & Thorne, 2006, for a review). However, consideration of the sequential and multimodal dynamics within which self-directed talk occurs is largely missing in both literature. In what follows, we attempt to provide detailed microinteractional analyses that take the next step of outlining the ways in which self-directed talk contributes to the flow and organization of joint activity at the level of procedural relevance and action sequencing (see Schegloff, 1992a). Questions that have guided this research are informed by the general query, ‘why this now?’ (Schegloff & Sacks, 1973), and more specifically include the following: When and why does self-directed talk occur? What behaviorally visible interactional work does self-directed talk serve in multiparty interaction? What sequential slots for next action does selfdirected talk make available?

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Approaches to Self-Directed Talk Goffman’s writings, while primarily based on constructed prototypical scenarios, outline with considerable lucidity the principled and patterned organization of human conduct. As he describes it, ‘[t]alk is socially organized, not merely in terms of who speaks to whom in what language, but as a little system of mutually ratified and ritually governed faceto- face actions . . .’ (Goffman, 1964: 136). In later work, Goffman (1981: 116) includes an exposition on uses of ‘self-talk’ in a chapter titled ‘response cries’, the latter defined as ‘signs meant to be taken to indicate directly the state of the transmitter’. Goffman’s analysis of self-talk in public places emphasizes its role as a kind of conventionalized ‘display’ that predominantly functions to shore up credibility in face-threatening situations. We find confirmation of this function of self-directed talk in the analyses presented below. Psychological and self-regulatory aspects of self-directed talk have been investigated by researchers working within cultural–historical activity theory and sociocultural research on L2 learning (e.g. Frawley, 1997; Vygotsky, 1987). This research supports the view that human mental functioning is a mediated process that is organized by cultural tools and activities, the primary of which involve language. In this theory, self-directed talk, or ‘private speech’, is defined as an individual’s externalization of language for purposes of maintaining or regaining self-regulation, for example to aid in focusing attention, problem solving, orienting oneself to a task, to support memory-related tasks, to facilitate internalization of novel or difficult information (e.g. language forms, sequences of numbers and mathematical computation), and to objectify and make salient phenomena and information to the self (e.g. DiCamilla & Anton, 2004; Frawley, 1997; Frawley & Lantolf, 1985; McCafferty, 1992; Ohta, 2001). Such talk shares empirical features that include averted gaze, lowered speech volume, altered prosody, abbreviated syntax and multiple repetitions, among other descriptors. Sociocultural research on private speech has been investigated primarily in noninteractive and controlled research conditions. As evidence of this, in a review article of L2 private speech research, only one of the nine studies included analyzed private speech in an interactive setting (McCafferty, 1994). In a recent article that is more congruent with our interests here, Smith (2007) analyzed video recordings of English language learners playing a board game and elaborated a much needed and expanded conception of private speech, arguing that ‘there is a mutually interacting relationship between the social and cognitive functions of speech for intermental activity and the self-regulating, metacognitive function of private speech for intramental activity’ (Smith, 2007: 353). Later in the article, she makes the stronger claim that ‘all speech uttered aloud in the presence of another person has the potential to be perceived as an


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intermental act, even if one’s intention is primarily private’ (Smith, 2007: 354). We note, however, that in a summary table listing the ‘function of private speech utterances across the games’ (Smith, 2007: 352), Smith includes only individual and self-regulatory functions of private speech. This limitation aside, Smith’s private speech research is the first that we are aware of that seriously attends to the social and interactional dimensions of self-directed talk. While sociocultural research has certainly produced an extensive body of findings with respect to ‘private speech’ in language learning contexts, we find a number of issues to be problematic, namely that a clear-cut boundary between ‘private’ and socially oriented functions of speech is generally assumed, that ambiguous cases are often excluded from consideration (e.g. Lantolf, 2003; Ohta, 2001), and most relevant to this research, that the interactional dynamics within which ‘private speech’ occurs are by and large not taken into account (with the notable exception of Smith, 2007).

Cognitive Functions and the Social Architecture of Interaction and Intersubjectivity The presumed intramental or cognitive functions of self-directed talk present a challenging topic for empirical investigation and one that is controversial within ethnomethodological and conversation analytic research. Sacks, for example cautioned against analyses of talk-in-interaction that project cognitive states and processes, proposing instead that analysts worry less about ‘thinking’ and rather should focus on ‘how it is that persons go about producing what they do produce’ (Sacks, 1992: 11). Heritage (2005) has proposed that cognitive processes may be represented and embodied in talk-in-interaction, particularly in the form of interactional displays, but he, too, warns that verbalizations may present only partial traces of psychological and cognitive activity. In a recent article, Kasper has acknowledged the importance of addressing cognition in CA informed research on development, stating that, ‘a key question in the debate on conversation analysis as an approach to SLA concerns the role of cognition in interaction and learning’ (Kasper, 2009: 11). In this vein, promising (and explicitly oppositional) explorations into the interface between talk and cognition have emerged in volumes such as the one edited by te Molder and Potter (2005), which brings into dialogue theorists working within the traditions of ethnomethodology/conversation analysis, discursive psychology and situated action. It is with these issues and challenges in mind that we explore particular forms of talk that, from a sociocultural or ‘private speech’ perspective, appear to serve as cognitive affordances for the speaker. However, the cognitive processes that self-directed talk may or may not facilitate are not our primary concern here. Rather, we examine self-directed talk as an

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interactional display integrally interwoven with patterns of social interaction, and more specifically, to sequence and participatory organization (e.g. Goodwin & Goodwin, 2004; Schegloff, 2007) and the procedural infrastructure of talk-in-interaction (Schegloff, 1992b) in an institutional foreign language (L2) learning context (e.g. Hellermann, 2008; Lerner, 1995; Seedhouse, 2004). In the remainder of this chapter, we employ close analysis of participatory and sequence organization to examine instances of talk that meet the sociocultural criteria for ‘private speech’. In doing so, we attempt to show how such talk is fundamentally indisassociable from broader processes of social interaction and the maintenance of intersubjectivity and joint activity.

Data and Procedure Our analysis concentrates on two sets of excerpts taken from two peergroup interactions in a French foreign language (FFL) classroom at a lower intermediate level (8th grade, 4th year of FFL) in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. Each group includes three adolescents, aged 14–15, working together to accomplish a given pedagogical task. The first set of excerpts (Excerpts 4.1–4.3) is drawn from a role-play rehearsal; the second set (Excerpts 4.4 and 4.5) is drawn from a task involving descriptions of a travel itinerary. All excerpts are part of a larger corpus of 31 audio- and video-taped lessons from three FFL classes at the same level.1 In what follows, we use sequential and multimodal microanalysis to investigate the ways in which self-directed talk is integrally bound up with the procedural infrastructure of social interaction, and in so doing, we explore the intertwined social and cognitive dimensions of language practices in this L2 educational context. The first set of excerpts describes the effects of an individual’s self-directed talk as it relates to subsequent interactional dynamics on the social plane, with the conclusion that selfdirected talk embedded in social interaction is a hybrid cognitive-social phenomenon that serves as a constitutive component of the sequential organization of multiparty interaction. The second set of excerpts illustrates the inverse trajectory, from the social to the individual plane, and illustrates how self-directed talk can emerge as a consequence of sequential misalignment in social interaction.

The Hybrid Nature of Talk-in-Interaction and its Sequential Conditions This first set of excerpts (Excerpts 4.1–4.3) focuses on audible language production that displays features that have been associated with private speech (e.g. averted gaze and bodily orientation, lower volume). The instances of what we assess to be self-directed talk occur in the context of


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Figure 4.1 The Homework

peer-group interaction, and thus allow us to observe how co-participants treat self-directed talk as a resource for, or obstacle to, task management and mutual alignment. More specifically, these interactions show how selfdirected talk can act as a publicly available resource for maintaining intersubjectivity through its display of task- and group-relevant problem-solving procedures. In Excerpts 4.1–4.3, Olivia, Lorena and Michelle2 are rehearsing a previously prepared written dialogue. The instructions read: ‘You meet before school; ask each other questions about what you have been doing the night before/going to do later today.’3 The three girls do several runs of their rehearsal, rearranging their orientations and gestures for dramatic purpose while periodically referring to the written script in a notebook and focusing on L2-related issues (see Figure 4.1). During their second rehearsal run, Olivia encounters problems with one of her dialogue lines (lines 3–4), which eventually leads to a first instance of talk displaying features of self-directedness (line 13), an orientation that remains consistent throughout the two subsequent excerpts: Excerpt 4.1 Les devoirs: The Homework I 1

MIC: trans

2 3

trans OLI: trans

4 -> 5

trans LOR: trans

(et;äh)=olivia qu’est-ce que yesterday evening j’ai regardé la télé, (.) à la maison, °h:m° I have-AUX watched-PP TV at home uhm °und°=e::t (0.8) f- (1.0) j/E/ f/ε:/ (l-) and and fI do;have-AUX done-PP4 (th-) °°> (les) dévoirs 14

Part 1: The Nature of L2 Interactional Competence OLI: trans OLI:

OLI: LOR: trans OLI: trans LOR: trans OLI: trans MIC: trans

j/E/ f/ε:/=tu as:: I have done you have (1.1) ((produces a high-pitched noise, that goes over into laughter, while throwing her hands in the air and turning away, moving outside the visual field of the camera; her laughter is joined by Lorena)) (xx[x) [(j/E/ f/ε/) les DEVOIRS I do;have-AUX done-PP the homework (oh gottxx; oh camera) (oh godxx; oh camera) j/E/ f/ε/ les devoirs I do;have-AUX done-PP the homework ((OLI moves back into the I do;have-AUX done-PP the homework visual field of the camera)) [SCHNITT ((towards camera)) cut

At the beginning of the excerpt, Olivia has problems delivering one of her dialogue lines in answer to Michelle’s question (lines 1–2). From the end of line 3 forward, Olivia exhibits a series of trouble signs, displaying ‘a variety of non-lexical speech perturbations’, typically accompanying the initiation of self-correction (Schegloff et al., 1977: 367). In order of appearance, we see a hesitation marker uttered in a quieter voice ‘h:m’ at line 3; then in line 4, a switch to L1 with a quieter voice ‘und’ (and), vowellengthening ‘e::t’ (and), pause, cut-off ‘f-’, (d-) pause, vowel lengthening ‘f/ε:/’ (do or done) and another cut-off ‘l-’ (th-). At line 5, Lorena reacts to these trouble signs, potentially interpreting them as a word-search or memory issue as she proffers a candidate element ‘les devoirs’ (the homework). We know from the preceding rehearsal that ‘les devoirs’ is the appropriate item to be produced at this point. In sequential terms, the rather late onset of Lorena’s other-repair attempt seems to respect the preference for self-correction (Schegloff et al., 1977), together with the fact that interlocutors tend to let the current speaker go through a search-cycle before providing other repair (Goodwin & Goodwin, 1986). Also, Lorena delivers her turn at line 5 in a very quiet voice as she looks toward the camera rather than at Olivia. This potentially indicates that she is mindful of maintaining the play frame in front of the audience (the camera in this case) so as not to disrupt the performance. Olivia, however, does not pick up on Lorena’s proffer, nor does she display any acknowledgment of it until line 13. At line 6, she repeats parts of line 4, and then does a restart producing a second form of another verb paradigm. In lines 7–8, the play frame is finally disrupted, as Olivia first produces a gesture with both hands, palms facing upward, while her gaze seems to move from Michelle to Lorena (on the video, we only see her


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head move from behind) before producing a high-pitched noise, a response cry (Goffman, 1981) seemingly voicing frustration, that eventually transitions into laughter, at which point she throws her hands in the air and turns away, moving outside the visual field of the camera. Her laughter is joined by Lorena, but not Michelle. Lorena reiterates her initial proposition two more times, expanding the full noun phrase she used the first time (line 5) into a full sentence spoken at a normal volume (lines 10 and 12), while Olivia continues to engage in displays of self-deprecation (lines 9 and 11). In line 13, Olivia finally acknowledges Lorena’s reiterated attempts to provide help and takes up the offered formulation and repeats it. In this sense, there is a socio-interactional component to Olivia’s action at line 13. We acknowledge Schegloff’s reminder that within any given ‘actionformation resource pool’, there exists the analytic danger of presuming a ‘one-to-one practice/action pairing’ (Schegloff, 1997: 505), and indeed, demonstrating the potential for externalized talk to serve multiple functions is the superordinate goal of this research. In illustration of this point, Olivia’s visual orientation to her notebook and the prosodic features of her turn, such as an alteration in pace and a decrease in volume that is typically associated with talk used as a tool for self-regulation (e.g. Vygotsky, 1987), can be analyzed as indicative of the dual or hybrid nature of talk as both acknowledging and ratifying the interlocutor’s (Lorena’s) contribution while simultaneously serving to mediate the speaker’s (Olivia’s) engagement with the stretch of talk that causes her some trouble. As we continue to follow the focus lines (Excerpt 4.1, lines 3, 4 and 6, above) through the interaction, a similar pattern emerges, with respect to the dual nature of talk-in-interaction in FL contexts, which corroborates our analysis of Excerpt 4.1. Excerpt 4.2 constitutes the immediate continuation of Excerpt 4.1. The analytical focus continues to be on Olivia and the focus lines (here, transcript lines 13, 17 and 19, 30 and 31): Excerpt 4.2 Les devoirs: The Homework II 13 -> 14

OLI: trans MIC: trans

15 16 17 -> 18

LOR: trans OLI: trans LOR: trans

((OLI moves back into the I do;have-AUX done-PP the homework visual field of the camera)) [SCHNITT ((looking toward camera & cut performing a large cut-gesture with both arms, imitating a clapperboard)) (2.0) ((all three join in the performance of a series of ample cutgestures with both arms, orienting to the camera and laughing)) (stop) UND NOMOL= ((to OLI, pointing towards a spot stop and again outside the visual field of the camera)) = j’ai regardé: la tél[ é, (.) à la& ((starts to return to her initial I have-AUX watched tv at position, then stops)) [ GANG NOMOL go again

74 19 -> 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 -> 31 ->

Part 1: The Nature of L2 Interactional Competence OLI: trans LOR: trans OLI: trans LOR: trans OLI: trans LOR: trans OLI: trans LOR: trans OLI: trans

&maison, (et x) = ((approaches the table)) home (and x) =JE REGARDE, (.) la télé [et je fais mes devoirs. °à la& I watch tv and I do my homework at [(>°wart schnell°j’ai regardé la télé à la maison< et I have watched tv at home and j’ai fait mes devoirs. ((OLI is reading in the notebook; LOR seems to I have done my homework be mouthing the text in sync while observing her))

In line 14 at the beginning of Excerpt 4.2, Michelle intervenes for the first time. She slightly overlaps Olivia’s turn with her interjection and visibly orients to the camera while producing an exaggerated ‘cut’ gesture associated with the culture of movie-making. In doing so, she officially interrupts the rehearsal, and treats the previous sequence – initiated by Olivia in line 4 – as closed. At line 15, Lorena and Olivia visibly align with this trajectory by joining in Michelle’s cut gesture and laughter. Lorena then orders Olivia back to her starting position (line 16 – at the beginning of their play, Olivia moves in from outside the ‘scene’, that is the camera’s visual field, to greet the other two, who are seated on top of a table). Olivia complies and begins moving toward her initial position. In parallel, she repeats the part of her dialogue that had caused her troubles (Excerpt 4.1, lines 3–4). She eventually stops her movement (line 17) all the while continuing to reiterate her part (lines 17 and 19). What we find interesting here is that Olivia’s turns (lines 17 and 19) again combine both self-directed and social elements that the group orients to and addresses. As regards the social features: Olivia orients her body toward Lorena who in turn is visibly oriented toward her (the angle of the camera does not show Olivia’s gaze). Also, Olivia delivers her turn at a normal and fully audible speech level which might potentially serve to elicit approval or help from her interlocutor. As regards its


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self-directedness: Rehearsing fragments of one’s part in a play without being explicitly instructed to do so, in the presence of ones coactors, is reasonably analyzed as self-directed in its orientation. In addition, Olivia accompanies her turn with rhythmic beat gestures:

Excerpt 4.2a (lines 17–19) 17

->

OLI: trans oli oli

->

oli

18 19 ->

LOR: trans OLI: trans oli oli

+=j’ai +regardé: la +tél[é, (.) à la& I have-AUX watched tv at +starts to return to her initial position, then stops +accompanies the first syllable with a beating gesture of her hand +accompanies the first syllable with a beating gesture [GANG NOMOL go again &+maison, (et x) += home (and x) +accompanies the first syllable with a beating-gesture +moves toward the table

Within sociocultural studies of L2 learning and drawing on McNeill’s gesture continuum (McNeill, 2005), beat gestures have been associated with self-directed attempts to regain self-regulation and focus attention (Haught & McCafferty, 2008; McCafferty, 2006). Olivia’s gesticulation may serve such a self-regulatory function. By the same token, it has the wider social impact of stalling the projected course of action (redoing the rehearsal of the play from the start) for the whole group. Olivia’s rehearsal is interrupted by Lorena (line 18), indicating that rehearsing individual lines in the common interactional sphere is not an appropriate action at this point in time. Lorena even raises her voice, as indicated by the capital letters, a procedure commonly used in competitive conversational environments, while ordering Olivia a second time to return to her starting position. Olivia stops her rehearsal activity, but instead of returning to her starting position, she moves toward the table and grabs the notebook (lines 19 and 21). From line 20 on, Lorena eventually suspends her orientation to redoing the play, adjusts her actions and contributes to Olivia’s attempt to locate the problematic line in the notebook (lines 20–31). To summarize, Olivia’s ‘private’ rehearsals and display of a problem with one of her dialogue lines stalls the group’s enterprise of collectively rehearsing their play. This orientation is in part realized through actions that oscillate between social talk, addressed to others, and private or selfdirected talk, which is also visible and audible to the group.

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The last excerpt in this set is the continuation of Excerpt 4.2. Again, we observe an instance of audible language production that displays features associated with private speech. As it resonates in the public sphere, we can observe how this talk acts at the same time as a publicly available resource for task- and group-relevant problem-solving procedures. Excerpt 4.3 starts with Olivia reading the line in question from the notebook while Lorena closely follows her actions: Excerpt 4.3 Les devoirs: The Homework III 30

OLI: trans

31

32 33 34 35 36 - >

37 38 39

OLI: trans LOR: trans OLI: trans LOR: trans MIC: trans OLI: trans

> j’ai regardé la télé à la maison< et I have watched tv at home and j’ai fait mes devoirs. ((reading in the notebook; LOR I have done my homework seems to be mouthing the text in sync while observing OLI)) (.) mes? oder (.) les ((OLI looking up from notebook at LOR)) my or the (1.0) ((LOR makes ‘thinking face’)) °jo- isch-° (.) >sag le:s (.) °°devoirs°°< (well nev-) say the homework °et j’ ai fait mes- <et j’ai fait °°mes- (.) devoi:rs,°°°> and I have done my and I have done my homework ((oriented to the notebook)) > okay sag mes devoirs < ((grabs notebook from OLI, puts it okay say my homework back on table)) °(okay mache mers nomol)° ((sits up straight)) okay let’s do it again okay ((claps hands and bouncily returnsto her starting position)) okay

Olivia has found the focus line in the notebook and reads it aloud, with Lorena silently mouthing the text in sync (lines 30–31). The stress in line 31 ‘fait mes’ (done my), as indicated by the underlining, identifies the current problem area. Going back to the initial focus line in Excerpt 4.1 (lines 3–4), we see that the cutoff element ‘l-’ presumably was the beginning of the determiner ‘les’ (the): 4

OLI: trans

°und° = e::t (0.8) f- (1.0) j/E/ f/ε:/ (l-) and and fI do;have-AUX done-PP (th-)

We cannot know for sure whether this actually was the issue Olivia had been wrestling with from the start. However, it clearly is displayed as the focal issue at this point in their interaction. After a short pause, Olivia addresses Lorena (lines 32–33) in order to ask whether the appropriate


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linguistic form should be the possessive determiner ‘mes’ (my), as the previously written text in the notebook seems to indicate, or the definite article ‘les’ (the). In line 34, Lorena displays a thinking face (Goodwin & Goodwin, 1986: 57) in response to this question and then goes on to verbally respond to it in line 35, first starting out with something that looks like the beginning of ‘never mind’ in Swiss German. Lorena then cuts herself off and self-repairs, proposing the article ‘les’ (the). Sequentially, assessment of Lorena’s proposition is the relevant next social action for Olivia, that is acknowledging or rejecting the candidate solution she has been offered. Olivia’s turn at line 36 does reject Lorena’s proposition as Olivia reiterates the segment in question, using the possessive determiner ‘mes’ (my) instead of the proposed article ‘les’ (the). More significantly for our purpose here, Olivia’s turn at line 36 again provides empirical evidence of self-directed talk: her body position displays orientation to the notebook rather than to Lorena, her speech is more slowly paced, she produces two cutoffs at the same syntactic position (the same one already in play at the very beginning of Excerpt 4.1, line 4), she repeats the element in question, pauses, then produces lengthening and continuing (but not rising) intonation, all produced in a soft voice that gradually fades throughout the turn. From a sociocultural perspective, this cluster of features is typically assessed as self-directed talk serving functions of self-regulation and focusing on problematic L2 forms. In addition to these potentially selfregulatory functions, Olivia’s turn also resonates in the public sphere, evidence for which is Lorena’s reaction in line 37. Here, Lorena acknowledges Olivia’s alternative choice to the candidate form she proposed, the determiner ‘les’ (the), by changing to the possessive ‘mes’ (my). At the same time, Lorena grabs the notebook from Olivia and puts it back on the table, presumably in order to close the matter and to finally get back to the business of resuming the rehearsal as a whole. Lorena’s action of putting the notebook back on the table coincides with Michelle’s change of posture (line 38): She straightens up from her slumped position and verbally addresses, once again, the issue of task management, thus suggesting that the side sequence focusing on Olivia’s trouble with one of her lines is closed. Olivia aligns with an ‘okay’ (line 39) and another round of rehearsal begins. This fi rst set of excerpts has attempted to make visible the hybrid nature of ostensibly self-directed talk in social interaction and to show that copresent interlocutors can and do treat such talk as a resource for managing interaction. To summarize the analysis of these 39 turns, Olivia’s difficulty with one of her dialogue lines stalled the projected course of action, which was to redo the rehearsal from the beginning. Olivia tried to work through her problem partially through social interaction, soliciting her interlocutors, particularly Lorena, but partially also

78


through the use of audible self-directed talk. This resulted in Lorena eventually orienting to Olivia’s self-directed talk as a resource for pinpointing Olivia’s linguistic problem and to manage task- and grouprelevant problem-solving procedures. As a fi nal point that relates to the interaction we discuss below, Michelle’s stance in this interaction suggests that self-directed talk appears to sanction the option of disattending self-talk producers. We turn now to a second set of excerpts that deals with the question of how sequential and participatory misalignment serves as a catalyst for self-directed talk.

Sequential Misalignment as Emergent Ground for Self-Directed Talk The following set of excerpts (Excerpts 4.4–4.5) illustrates how selfdirected talk can emerge as a result of breakdowns in sequential and participatory organization, in particular in the context of misalignments in action sequencing in relation to co-participants’ nonavailability at certain moments in time. In Excerpts 4.4 and 4.5, Olivia, Raul and Aurélien have been given the task of preparing three itinerary descriptions, with the help of a city map of their hometown, in order to prepare for a future role play. Each participant is using an instruction sheet with identical instructions and for taking notes (see Figure 4.2). In Excerpt 4.4, the three participants are concluding the discussion of who is in charge of which itinerary – a subtask not specified by the instructions – and are about to launch into task accomplishment. The

Figure 4.2 The Tramway


79

transition from task management to its accomplishment sparks problems of coordination between the participants. This misalignment gives rise to self-directed talk as part of the realm of social interaction. Lines 4 and 8, below, are the focal lines with respect to the question of selfdirected talk: Excerpt 4.4 Le tram: The Tramway I 0

AUR: ich nimms erschte trans I take the first (itinerary) . . . ((8 lines omitted)) 1 AUR: >u[nd du s zweite aso mache mer das:& trans and you the second so let’s do this 2 OLI: [aso trans so 3 AUR: & [ (h) (ding) (h) trans (h) (thing) (h) 4 -> OLI: [ sie nehmen=°vous prenez,° ehm ((to AUR who is oriented to you take

5 6

AUR: trans OLI: trans

7 8 ->

OLI: trans

9

AUR: trans

10 11

12

RAU: trans OLI: trans

you

take

uhm

instruction-sheet before him; as he turns to her, she turns to the instruction-sheet before her))

jo wart=wart=wa[rt ((orients back to his instruction-sheet)) ey wait wait wait [was heisst tram?=train:? ((to AUR who is how do you say tramway train oriented to instruction-sheet before him))

(.) ((OLI still oriented to AUR how is still looking down at his instruction-sheet and has started to write on it)) °la train, le train, numéro°°= ((orients back to the-FEM train the-MASC train (number) instruction-sheet before her and gives a small shoulder-shrug))) = le t(h)(rain) (h)=°°le t(h)ra(in) (h)(h)°° ((looking briefly up from his the t(h)(train)(h) the t(h) ra (in) (h) (h) note-taking towards OLI, who is oriented to instruction-sheet before her, and covering his mouth with his left hand))

[°le tra(m)° ((orienting to AUR who is back at writing)) le tra(mway) [WAS HEISST TRAM ((orienting first to AUR who is writing and how do you say tramway oriented to his notes, then to CHE who is passing by)) (..) ((OLI orients from CHE again to AUR who is still writing and oriented to his notes))

80 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Part 1: The Nature of L2 Interactional Competence CHE: trans AUR: trans CHE: trans OLI: trans CHE: trans OLI: trans

le tram the tramway °tr[am° ((oriented to his instruction-sheet, smiling and continues writing)) tramway [LE TRA[M ((OLI orients to CHE)) the tramway [LE TRAM? the tramway mhm? uhu (..) ((OLI orients back to her notes, then to RAU)) °ts° äh was heisst >vierzäh< ((addressing RAU)) ts uhm how do you say fourteen

Lines 1–6 of this exchange constitute the transition from task-management, that is who is in charge of which itinerary, to actually doing the task, that is formulating the itineraries in French according to the instructions. Audio-visual clues from the video recording reveal sequential misalignment between Olivia and Aurélien. Even though they physically orient to and verbally address one another during the first six lines (totalling six seconds of interaction), they do not do so at the same moments in time: Their gazes and bodily orientations alternate between one another and their respective instruction sheets (see Figure 4.3 and the multimodal comments in the transcript below): Excerpt 4.4a (lines 4–9) 4 OLI: + [#1 sie nehmen=+°vous prenez,°#2 ehm trans you take you take uhm -> oli&aur +OLI turns towards AUR who is oriented to his instruction-sheet -> oli&aur +OLI turns towards her instructionsheet; AUR turns to look at OLI 5 -> AUR: jo wart=wart=wa+[rt ((orients back to his notes)) trans ey wait wait wait 6 OLI: + [#3 was heisst tram?=train:? trans how do you say tramway train -> oli&aur +OLI looks up from her instruction-sheet towards AUR who is oriented to his own instruction-sheet again and has started to write 7 (.) ((OLI still oriented to AUR how is oriented to his instruction-sheet)) 8 OLI: °la train, le train, + numéro°°+=


->

9

trans oli oli AUR: trans

81

the-FEM train the-MASC train number +orients back to instruction-sheet before her + small shoulder-shrug

=le t(h)(rain) (h)=°°le t(h)ra (in) (h) (h)°° ((looking briefly the t(h)(train)(h) the t(h) ra (in) (h) (h) up from his note-taking towards OLI, who is oriented to the instruction-sheet before her, and covering his mouth with his left hand))

In addition to alternating gaze and body orientation, we note a series of verbal cues, in the form of multiple overlaps (lines 1–2, 3–4 and 5–6) that hint at sequential misalignment. We will look at these overlaps in some detail before coming back to the question of self-directed talk in order to establish sequential misalignment as the catalyst for an instance of selfdirected talk in line 8: (1)

(2)

The first overlap, between Aurélien and Olivia (lines 1–2), involves two discourse markers that have divergent orientations. Aurélien starts his turn (line 1) with the marker ‘und’ (and), linking back to his previous turn (as well as to the immediately preceding turns of his interlocutors, not reproduced for the sake of space), signaling continuation of an ongoing action, in this case task management to confirm who is responsible for which itinerary. Olivia on the other hand uses ‘aso’ (so), a marker that typically prefaces next actions and which raises the possibility of a new agenda item (Bolden, 2006), in this case, moving toward task accomplishment in the form of formulating itinerary descriptions in L2 French. The second overlap occurs at lines 3 and 4. Given the point of onset of the overlap, a cursory glance might suggest that Olivia is not actually entering Aurélien’s turn space, as his second turn construction unit (TCU) at line 1 ‘asomachemer das’ (so lets do this) appears complete

Figure 4.3 Syncopated embodied orientations

82

(3)


from the perspective of grammatical constituency. Launching the next relevant action, that of accomplishing the task through formulating the necessary L2 constructions, could be seen as the appropriate thing to do, and the overlap between lines 3 and 4 would simply be the result of Aurélien expanding the TCU beyond a possible transition relevance place, retrospectively converting a demonstrative pronoun ‘das’ (this) into a determiner ‘das ding’ (this thing). However, if we take into account the lengthening of the final sound that projects more to come ‘das::’ (this, line 2), the picture changes (see Ford & Thompson, 1996; Ford et al., 2002). It corroborates the assumption that Olivia is indeed entering an ongoing turn space and prematurely launching a new activity sequence (i.e. formulating an itinerary, the action she assigned herself earlier), before the current course of action (i.e. task management and transition to task accomplishment) is properly and collectively brought to closure. The third overlap occurs in lines 5 and 6 and follows Olivia’s attempt to start a new sequence of action in line 4. Aurélien’s reaction at line 5 ‘jo wart=wart=wart’ (hey wait wait wait) is designed to stall this new action. Aurélien’s turn at line 5 is overlapped by Olivia’s turn at line 6, the latter a turn that continues Olivia’s new course of action as she sets out to gather adequate material to formulate the itinerary in French.

Although no further overlaps occur between Olivia and Aurélien in this excerpt, there are further cues indicating continued misalignments, for example lack of response and disaffi liative laugh tokens. Olivia’s information-gathering request and the try-marked candidate solution she produces (line 6) are (paradoxically) directed at Aurélien and do not get a response nor any acknowledgment of having been produced at all as Aurélien is oriented to his instruction sheet and engaged in writing (lines 6 and 7). Olivia then tries to work things out herself (line 8) and this time, she does get a reaction from Aurélien. Aurélien’s turn at line 9 is a (partial) repeat of Olivia’s preceding turn, containing particles of ‘withinspeech-laughter’ that construe the preceding turn or parts of it as ‘laughables’ (Jefferson, 1979). Such ‘laugh token repeats’ can and do enact ‘laughing at’ (rather than ‘laughing with’), a disaffi liative action that orients to the ‘troublesomeness’ of the prior turn and calls ‘for some remedial work’ (Jefferson, 1972: 300). Olivia reiterates her request for a lexical item in line 11. The addressee of her request serially shifts from Aurélien, who is not orienting to her, to the researcher who happens to pass by. Her request overlaps with Raul’s turn (line 10), which provides the lexical item, probably as much in reaction to Olivia’s reiterated request as in reaction to Aurélien’s behavior and laughter (line 9), evidence for which is Raul’s embodied orientation to the latter, rather than to Olivia.5 At line 13,


83

the researcher provides the sought for lexical item and after a confirmation sequence (lines 15–17), Olivia continues with a request for a next item, this time addressing Raul (line 19). In this excerpt, Olivia produces talk that has features of self-directedness at lines 4 and 8. We base this claim on features of turn shape and delivery as well as on sequential and participatory features: The fi rst part of Olivia’s turn at line 4 is accompanied by an embodied orientation to Aurélien, who is looking down at his instruction sheet. In the second part of her turn, she switches languages, translating the first part, while turning to gaze at the instruction sheet in front of her, with a marked drop in voice volume. In line 8, Olivia at fi rst maintains orientation toward Aurélien following her question in line 6. However, Aurélien is again not orienting to her, and we notice lower speech volume and a slight difference in rhythm (not visible in the transcript, but perceivable when listening to the tape) and voice quality as Olivia transitions from a question-marked to a try-marked intonation directed at Aurélien (line 6) to a continuing, hesitating intonation, accompanied by a small shoulder shrug (line 8), as she eventually brings her gaze back to her instruction sheet and drops her speech volume even further at the end of her turn (as indicated by the increasing degree signs . . .). In these two instances (lines 4 and 8), Olivia does not obtain her intended recipient’s gaze nor the projected reactions, as the first one displays misalignment with her course of action (line 5), while the second instance is delayed and comprises disaffiliative elements, that is Laugh token repeats, instead of the sought for lexical item (line 9). Both times, Olivia ends up orienting back to the space before her, continuously lowering her voice while continuing to work on her own. Excerpt 4.5, below, is a continuation of Excerpt 4.4 and illustrates further instances of self-directed talk emerging from divergent orientations. At this point, the group has transformed into three ‘singles’ in Goffman’s terms: ‘a party of one [i.e. three parties of one] present among other parties’ (Goffman, 1981: 79), each one oriented to preparing his or her itinerary as an individual activity. Excerpt 4.5 Le tram: The Tramway II ((continuation of ex. 4, 4 lines omitted)) 20 OLI: pren[ ez, (..) le tram ]°°& trans you take the tramway take the tramway 21 RAU: [ eh: : : : : : : : :]: : ((oriented towards map, then looks down hat instruction sheet before him)) 22 OLI: &°quator(ze)°, ((oriented to instruction-sheet before her)) trans fourte(en) 23 RAU?: > (oha mann) < ((orienting from instruction-sheet before him again to map)) trans gee

84 24 25

26

Part 1: The Nature of L2 Interactional Competence OLI: trans RAU: trans oli OLI: trans oli

27 28

trans RAU: trans

29 30 31 32 - >

OLI: trans OLI: trans oli&rau

33 34 35

RAU: trans Oli: trans

°jusqu’[à,°& till [OH HALT=>muess vo do obe +bis do unt+[e < oh wait I have to go from up here to down here + casts a quick glance on the map where Raul is moving his hand + [°sankt saint + two beats on the syllables of sa(nkt) and ja(kob) jak[ob,° ((city’s soccer stadium with integrated mall, one of the itinerary jacob destinations)) [also so (2.0) ((all three are silently oriented to the instruction-sheets in front of them; AUR is still writing; the two others do not have a pen, yet)) >was heisst sie< fahren ((turning to RAU who remains how do you say you drive oriented to the map)) (.) sie allez °(à voit-) (.) +(à voiture)°° °(x)° you go (with the ca-) ( with the car) (x) +withdrawing gaze from RAU who has not changed position and is still not reacting/orienting to OLI (1.0) ((OLI continues to articulate silently, her lips moving repeatedly from a rounded labial to an unrounded aperture position)) > (mh) was hesch gfrogt< ((lifting his head turning to OLI)) (uhm) what did you ask sie fahren you drive

This excerpt provides a clear example of one task realized through three different types of activity. Aurélien is silently writing notes throughout the excerpt and he is the only one to have a pencil at this time. In contrast, Raul and Olivia engage in different types of self-directed talk (lines 20–33). Raul resorts to his L1 while gesturing at the map, presumably in order to conceptualize his itinerary (lines 21, 23, 25, 28)6 while Olivia continues working on the French formulation of her itinerary, the very activity she had attempted to complete in the previous excerpt (Excerpt 4.4, line 4). What empirical evidence warrants our analytic claim that we are in the presence of three singles and two varieties of self-directed talk? Looking at the discourse produced in these excerpts, we note that Olivia’s talk (lines 20, 22, 24, 26–27, 32) shows the cluster of features typically associated in sociocultural research with the phenomenon of ‘private speech’, namely reduced volume, slower pace, repetition and, most strikingly, no obvious


85

physical orientation to a potential addressee as she looks down at her instruction sheet throughout this episode. Additionally, Olivia’s turns do not sequentially project a response from a co-participant as relevant next action.7 There is a transition in line 30, however, where we observe a notable change in Olivia’s body orientation, pace, volume and language choice, which co-occur with speech that appears to be other, rather than self, directed. As for the talk produced by Raul, his voice volume remains high and his utterances are produced at a rhythm and rate associated with socially directed speech. However, Raul does not visibly orient to his co-participants, nor does he display awareness or concern that his clearly audible speech receives no acknowledgement or response. As shown in Figure 4.4, each participant, Aurélien included, is oriented to an individual activity space that is restricted to objects they are manipulating: Olivia is oriented to her instruction sheet, Raul is pointing on the map, Aurélien is writing on his instruction sheet. We note the absence of mutual gaze and bodily orientation between the participants (however, we acknowledge that when manipulating objects during social interaction, mutual gaze is not at all times necessary or possible). Up to line 30 there is only one oblique embodied display of orientation to a co-participant, Olivia’s glance toward Raul’s gesticulation (line 25). Also, Raul’s talk arguably has some elliptical features that are associated with the use of L1 within L2 problem-solving tasks (Centeno-Cortés & Jiménez, 2004; DiCamilla & Anton, 2004; Lantolf, 2003).8 It is interesting to note that Olivia seems to react to the voluble self-directed talk that Raul produces. In lines 26–27, Olivia accompanies her discourse with two gestural beats just after she casts a very short glance toward Raul’s hand hovering over the map (line 25). The function of focusing attention has been linked to gestures synchronized with speech, typically up-and-down

Figure 4.4 Three ‘singles’ or one task, three activities

86


movements of the hand that parse discourse into syllables, as a means to ‘gain control over the rhythmic pulse of the L2. . . . [G]esture, like speech, can serve as a “private” mediational means for individual learners, which in turn, may help in the development of L2 proficiency’ (Haught & McCafferty, 2008: 143). In Olivia’s case, we argue that the beats functioned as a focusing tool to counter the distraction of Raul’s loud, albeit primarily self-directed, verbalizations. Thus far, Excerpt 4.5 has shown how self-oriented talk in the presence of others in part indexes an agreement to disattend copresent parties and reconfigures the participant framework, allowing each participant to focus on procedures and materials that most serve their immediate personal goals. The last part of Excerpt 4.5 (lines 29–35) brings us back to the issue of self-directed talk emerging out of participatory and sequential organization and presents us with a case similar to the ones observed in Excerpt 4.4. At line 29, the participants are silently oriented to the respective papers in front of them. At line 30, Olivia addresses Raul with a request for a lexical item. As in the instances in Excerpt 4.4 (lines 4, 6 and following), there is no immediate physical or verbal reaction acknowledging her request (lines 30–31). Unlike Excerpt 4.4, there is not a preceding sequential misalignment context at play, but rather the participatory framework that would minimally ensure recipiency of some sort is not established as each participant is engrossed in his or her own activity and activity space (see Figure 4.4 above). Subsequently, we see Olivia produce talk that shows the typical cluster of features associated with ‘private speech’ (line 32): slower pace, decreasing volume, repetitions without an intonational contour or bodily orientation that would suggest active pursuit of a reaction from her co-participants, before it eventually becomes subvocal (line 33). We suggest that this illustrates an instance in which self-directed talk serves to adjust to participatory circumstances, that is it functions as an adaptation to lack of recipiency and shifts in the participatory framework. As this second set of analyses has attempted to show, self-directed talk can and does emerge out of sequential and participatory organization in social interaction. By the same token, self-directed talk also resonates with and feeds back into the public sphere, as demonstrated in Excerpt 4.4, with Aurélien’s reaction and laughter (line 9), and in Excerpt 4.5 with Olivia’s gestural ‘response’ to Raul’s voluble self-directed talk (lines 25–27). To summarize, the second set of analyses described how self-directed talk emerges as a consequence of sequential and participatory misalignments, and is thus a critical resource for achieving and maintaining interaction. In Excerpt 4.4, we observed arrhythmia in visual and bodily orientation and disjunctive actional sequencing as preparatory ground for the emergence of self-oriented talk. In three instances, the next-positioned turn did not accomplish the action potentially projected by the one


87

preceding it (lines 4–5, 5–6 and 6–7 for Excerpt 4.4; lines 30–31 for Excerpt 4.5). In three instances (lines 4 and 8 for Excerpt 4.4 and lines 32–33 for Excerpt 4.5), some sequential misalignment, or lack of response or display of recipiency, preceded the emergence of self-directed talk, with the result that initially socially oriented talk was transitioned into self-directed talk.9 In addition, in Excerpt 4.5, we observed how the dissolution of the participatory framework into three singles with divergent foci of attention and activity allowed co-participants to treat hearable talk produced by others as self-oriented, and hence to disattend it, giving them space and time to work on their own and at their own pace.

Discussion and Conclusion We began this chapter with the observation that self-directed talk is ubiquitous in everyday social interaction. We then continued with an exploration of self-directed talk occurring in task-induced multiparty interactions among peers in an L2 learning context. In our analyses of two sets of excerpts of peer-group interactions in an FFL classroom, we have attempted to illustrate that self-directed talk is contingent upon social and situational dynamics of mutually oriented and jointly coordinated courses of action, and is intricately linked to the sequential and participatory organization of talk-in-interaction. The first set of excerpts (Excerpts 4.1–4.3) addressed the issue of the dual nature of self-directed talk in social contexts. We acknowledged the sociocultural claim that self-directed talk can facilitate cognitive functioning in areas such as focusing attention, rehearsing difficult utterances, and experimenting with possible language forms. Our primary focus, however, was to describe instances of self-directed talk, serving as publicly available displays, that enabled collective attention to group-relevant problems and issues. Like other and better-documented interactional phenomena such as repair (Hall, 2007; Kasper, 2009; Schegloff et al., 1977), self-directed talk is not a threat to intersubjectivity (Goffman, 1981), but rather acts as a resource for its maintenance, opening up slots for group problem solving and interactional achievement. Inversely, the second set of excerpts (Excerpts 4.4 and 4.5) allowed us to focus on the ways in which self-directed talk emerged as a result of sequence and participatory organization, specifically as a function of sequential misalignment linked to co-participants’ interactional nonavailability at particular moments in time. These latter examples also demonstrated that participants transitioned into extended displays of self-directed talk as a face-saving strategy in response to nonrecipiency. More generally, we hope to have modestly contributed to long-standing questions concerning the distinction between social and self-directed uses of language, in part by empirically demonstrating that any rigid

88


distinction between the two is equivocal. In this sense, our analyses support the notion that externalized linguistic signs, with self-directed talk as perhaps an exemplar variety, simultaneously operate as constituents of social interaction and as tools for thinking and doing (Prawat, 1999). Additionally, the notion that self-directed talk serves to display aspects of orientation and cognition aligns with contemporary research which describes language use as a complex type of ‘joint attentional skill’ (Tomasello, 2003: 21) that involves the species-wide capacity for sharing attentional frames and for attuning to the intentions, cognitive and emotional states, and conceptual perspectives exhibited by humans in one’s environment. Finally, our emphasis on the social functions and interactional embeddedness of self-directed talk contributes to a wide array of research that situates cognition as fundamentally collective and distributed across individuals and artifacts. As Kasper recently phrased it, cognition has been ‘relocated from its Cartesian habitat in the privacy of the individual mind to the public sphere of social life, where it becomes visible to members throughout their observable and reportable (“accountable”), practical, situated reasoning methods’ (Kasper, 2009: 13). Independent of its putative intrapersonal functions that cannot be assessed from an emic perspective, and based on the analyses presented above, we propose that self-directed talk in social settings is always implicated in the turn economy and the participatory organization that comprises a given interaction. As such, self-directed talk does not simply emanate from and relate to an individual mind, but is observably tied up with, and has consequences for, the broader organization of social interaction such as task-induced joint activities in a language classroom. Selfdirected talk and its social functions are part of the resources that language learners use to establish and maintain intersubjectivity, display and ascribe current foci of attention, and to organize their individual and collective actions in mutually recognizable ways. In this sense, the social functions of self-directed talk may be one of the central building blocks of interactional competence in an additional language, serving as fundamental a role to interactional achievement as more widely discussed semiotic actions such as story openings, repair or disagreement (Pekarek Doehler & Pochon-Berger, this volume). Transcription conventions [ = & (.) (. .) (. . .) (1.5) coul-

onsetof overlap latching continuation after overlap unmeasured pauses up to ca. 1sec measured pauses cut-off

The Social Life of Self-Directed Talk ti:me kostet? oridnateur. j’achète, und ça fait nei und NON °ça fait tout° ell(h)e f/ε/, f/ε:/ >et ça ça< (du;de) (xx) EBR? + ((to ANI))

89

lengthening of preceding sound rising intonation falling intonation continuing intonation dotted underlining indicates talk in (Swiss) German stress louder soft voice laughter particle phonetic transcription in case of dubious pronunciation; information on stress, lengthening, etc. might be added faster slower alternatives in case of dubious hearing unidentifiable stretch of talk dubious speaker identification references in the verbal transcription line the action described in the following comment line transcriber’s comment

Notes

2. 3.

4.

The corpus is part of a larger database of two research projects: Emotions and foreign language learning in the classroom, University of Basel, Switzerland and Discourse organizational competence in L2, Swiss NSF Grant No. 405640108663/1, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, http://www2.unine.ch/codi. Accessed 23.7.10. All names are pseudonyms. There are no recordings of the preparation as the rehearsal lesson is the fi rst time recordings that took place in this class. On the teacher’s suggestion, the groups pass one after another into an adjacent room where the camera is installed to rehearse their dialogue while the teacher continues working with the whole class in the adjacent classroom. Once the students feel ready, they call the researcher, working as teacher aid, and do their fi nal performance. The fi nal performances of all groups are later assessed and graded by the teacher. From an observer’s, or etic, perspective, the pronounciation is ambiguous and does not allow the transcriber or analyst to decide what tense Olivia, and later also Lorena produces, the present, “je fais = I do’, or the present perfect ‘j’ai fait = I have done’. From an emic perspective, however, there is no overt indication that the perceived ambiguity is a problem for the participants at this point in the interaction. Despite the troubles Olivia displays from line 3 on, the tensepronounciation issue does not seem to constitute the trouble source (neither can we impute her problems simply to a memory issue, as we will see later (Excerpt 4.3, lines 31 et seqq). The sign /E/ that we use in our transcript, usually serves to indicate an archiphoneme where the distinguishing trait, open (/ε/) vs. closed (/e/), is neutralized. In absence of an established alternative notation, the /E/ is used here to indicate an ambiguous pronounciation systematically oscillating between the French schwa / / (e.g. je = I) and the closed vowel /e/ (e.g. j’ai = I have). e

1.

90 5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

Part 1: The Nature of L2 Interactional Competence As we learned later, French is one of Aurélien’s L1s, spoken at home with his parents. The use of the L1 is a procedure commonly observed in other studies examining ‘private speech’ within sociocultural research, according to which it fulfills self-regulatory functions for managing cognitively demanding tasks (cf. Brooks & Donato, 1994; Frawley & Lantolf, 1985). See also Goffman: ‘In no immediate way do such utterances belong to a . . . a ritually ratified state of talk embracing ratified participants . . . or to a summoning one. First speaker’s utterance does not officially establish a slot which second speaker is under some obligation to fill: there is no ratified speaker and recipient.’ (Goffman, 1978: 799–800) Raul’s self-oriented talk stops, or ‘goes underground’ in sociocultural terms, after his ‘also = so’ at line 28 – a marker typically used to preface next actions (cf. Bolden, 2006). In this case, the next action, presumably formulating the itinerary in L2, is carried out without the use of audible speech as Raul is silently oriented to his instruction sheet. At some later point, we see him getting a pen and then taking, silently, notes. Still later, within the ensuing role play, we hear him verbalizing his itinerary in French L2. In addition to their sequential embeddedness, these instances of self-directed talk may be characterized as serving face-saving functions since they offer an alternative to nonrecipiency and the resultant talking into a void.

References Bolden, G.B. (2006) Little words that matter: Discourse markers “so” and “oh” and the doing of other-attentiveness in social interaction. Journal of Communication 56, 661–688. Brooks, F.B. and Donato, R. (1994) Vygotskyan approaches to understanding foreign language learner discourse during communicative tasks. Hispania 77, 262–274. Centeno-Cortés, B. and Jiménez, A.F.J. (2004) Problem-solving tasks in a foreign language: The importance of the L1 in private verbal thinking. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 14, 7–35. DiCamilla, F.J. and Anton, M. (2004) Private speech: A study of language for thought in the collaborative interaction of language learners. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 14, 36–69. Flavell, J.H. (1966) Le langageprivé. Bulletin de Psychologie 19, 698–701. Ford, C.E., Fox, B.A. and Thompson, S.A. (2002) Constituency and the grammar of turn increments. In C. Ford, B.A. Fox and S.A. Thompson (eds) The Language of Turn and Sequence (pp. 14–38). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ford, C.E. and Thompson, S.A. (1996) Interactional units in conversation: Syntactic, intonational, and pragmatic resources for the management of turns. In E. Ochs, E.A. Schegloff and S.A. Thompson (eds) Interaction and Grammar (pp. 134–184). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frawley, W.J. (1997) Vygotsky and Cognitive Science: Language and the Unification of the Social and Computational Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Frawley, W.J. and Lantolf, J.P. (1985) Second language discourse: A Vygotskyan perspective. Applied Linguistics 6, 19–44. Goodwin, C. and Goodwin, M.H. (2004) Participation. In A. Duranti (ed.) A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology (pp. 222–243). Oxford: Blackwell. Goodwin, M.H. and Goodwin, Ch. (1986) Gesture and coparticipation in the activity of searching for a word. Semiotica 62, 51–76. Goffman, E. (1964) The neglected situation. American Anthropologist 66, 133–136.


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Goffman, E. (1978) Response cries. Language 54 (4), 787–815. Goffman, E. (1981) Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: Philadelphia University Press. Hall, J.K. (2007) Redressing the roles of correction and repair in research on second and foreign language learning. The Modern Language Journal 91, 510–525. Haught, J.R. and McCafferty, S.G. (2008) Embodied language performance: Drama and the ZPD in the second language classroom. In J.P. Lantolf and M.E. Poehner (eds) Sociocultural Theory and the Teaching of Second Languages (pp. 139–162). London: Equinox. Hellermann, J. (2008) Social Actions for Classroom Language Learning. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Heritage, J. (2005) Cognition in discourse. In H. te Molder and J. Potter (eds) Conversation and Cognition (pp. 184–202). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jefferson, G. (1972) Side sequences. In D.N. Sudnow (ed.) Studies in Social Interaction (pp. 294–338). New York: Free Press. Jefferson, G. (1979) A technique for inviting laughter and its subsequent acceptance/declination. In G. Psathas (ed.) Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology (pp. 79–96). New York: Irvington Publishers. Kasper, G. (2009) Locating cognition in second language interaction and learning: Inside the skull or in public view? IRAL 47, 11–36. Luria, A.R. (1981) Language and Cognition. New York: Wiley. Lantolf, J.P. (1997) The function of language play in the acquisition of L2 Spanish. In W.R. Glass and A.T. Perez-Peroux (eds) Contemporary Perspectives on the Acquisition of Spanish (Vol. II) (pp. 3–24). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. Lantolf, J.P. (2003) Intrapersonal communication and internalization in the second language classroom. In A. Kozulin, B. Gindis, V.S. Ageyev and S.M. Miller (eds) Vygotsky’s Theory of Education in Cultural Context (pp. 349–370). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lantolf, J.P. and Thorne, S.L. (2006) Sociocultural Theory and the Genesis of Second Language Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lerner, G.H. (1995) Turn design and the organization of participation in instructional activities. Discourse Processes 19, 111–131. McCafferty, S.G. (1992) The use of private speech by adult second language learners: A cross-cultural study. The Modern Language Journal 76, 179–189. McCafferty, S.G. (1994) The use of private speech by adult ESL learners at different levels of proficiency. In J.P. Lantolf and G. Appel (eds) Vygotskian Approaches to Second Language Research (pp. 117–134). Norwood, NJ: Ablex. McCafferty, S.G. (2006) Gesture and the materialization of second language prosody. International Review of Applied Linguistics 44, 195–207. McNeill, D. (2005) Gesture and Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ohta, A.S. (2001) Second Language Acquisition Processes in the Classroom: Learning Japanese. London: Lawrence Erlbaum. Prawat, R.S. (1999) Social constructivism and the process-content distinction as viewed by Vygotsky and the pragmatists. Mind, Culture, and Activity 6, 255–273. Sacks, H. (1992) Part 1, Fall 1964–Spring 1965, lecture 1. In G. Jefferson (ed.) Lectures on Conversation (Vol. 1). Oxford: Blackwell. Schegloff, E.A. (1992a) On talk and its institutional occasions. In P. Drew and J. Heritage (eds) Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings (pp. 101–134). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schegloff, E.A. (1992b) Repair after next turn: The last structurally provided defense of intersubjectivity in conversation. American Journal of Sociology 97, 1295–1345.

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Schegloff, E.A. (1997) Practices and actions: Boundary cases of other-initiated repair. Discourse Processes 23, 499–545. Schegloff, E.A. (2007) Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schegloff, E.A., Jefferson, G. and Sacks, H. (1977) On the preference for selfcorrection in the organization of repair in conversation. Language 53, 361–382. Schegloff, E.A. and Sacks, H. (1973) Opening up closings. Semiotica 8, 289–327. Seedhouse, P. (2004) The Interactional Architecture of the Language Classroom: A Conversation Analysis Perspective. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Smith, H. (2007) The social and the private worlds of speech: Speech for inter- and intramental activity. The Modern Language Journal 91, 341–356. te Molder, H. and Potter, J. (eds) (2005) Conversation and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tomasello, M. (2003) Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vygotsky, L.S. (1987) In R.W. Reiber and A.S. Carton (eds) The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky (Vol. 1) Problems of General Psychology. New York: Plenum Press. Vygotsky, L.S. (1978) Mind in Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vygotsky, L.S. (1986) Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Chapter 5

Second Language Interaction for Business and Learning G. THEODÓRSDÓTTIR

Introduction Second language (L2) learners, as opposed to foreign language learners, may have opportunities to interact in the L2 in their everyday life outside of the classroom, be it in service encounters or private conversation, which could be beneficial for the learning of the L2. In Wagner’s words: The real potential for a social approach to language learning lies outside the classroom in the activities of ordinary bilingual social life (. . .) The noneducational reality is just outside the classroom, the target of the participants is to participate in these activities. (Wagner, 2004: 615) Following Firth and Wagner’s (1997) call for a broadening of the second language acquisition (SLA) database to include nonelicited data, this study is interested in how L2 speakers identify or create opportunities for everyday L2 interaction and more specifically how they take advantage of these opportunities with respect to learning or practicing the L2. Using the recording of a service encounter (a bakery) between Anna, who is learning Icelandic as a L2, and a clerk who has Icelandic as his first language (L1), this chapter investigates different activities in which Anna’s identity as a L2 learner is made relevant in the interaction. This investigation shows the unfolding of two trajectories in the course of the interaction, one with a linguistic focus and one with a topical focus. Examining the interaction as an opportunity for interacting and learning, the roles of both participants in the interaction will be discussed with respect to this dual nature of the talk: how they manage in cooperation to successfully complete their business in the target language (Icelandic) despite the limited resources of the L2 speaker. In fact, the interaction may have been beyond the L2 speaker’s linguistic abilities without the help of the co-participant. We will see a strict division of labor between the participants with the L2 learner initiating focus on linguistic features of the L2 and the clerk moving the 93

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business transaction forward, while maintaining an agreement with Anna to interact in Icelandic. In order to fulfill both aspects, the clerk deploys a specific strategy in the conversation, as will be shown in the chapter. One of the benefits of analyzing the activities in which the participants engage in one encounter, rather than applying the more common conversation analytic (CA) approach based on a collection of examples of a single phenomenon from different encounters, is the opportunity to study the dynamics in the interaction: how the activities are structured during the interaction. An examination of the activities of both participants through the course of the interaction reveals a cohabitation of the topical and the linguistic issues, where orientation to linguistic matters is within the scope of the topical interaction. Another interesting point is the development of the participants’ activities, that is Anna’s linguistic focus and the clerk’s strategy, as the interaction progresses: how these activities become increasingly bold. Rather than relying exclusively on my own membership knowledge (Garfinkel, 1967; ten Have, 2002), that is the knowledge or capacities that people have as members of a society, of these kinds of service encounters for the analysis, I will introduce and analyze a service encounter (see also Ventola, 1983, 2005), which also takes place in a bakery, between two Icelanders. The purpose of this is to display how these business interactions are organized sequentially and compare to the focal L2 interaction. This makes for necessary background knowledge in terms of addressing the main topics of the chapter: Does the interaction, where one of the participants is a L2 speaker, have specific characteristics that distinguishes it from interaction between L1 speakers? And, what are they? Building on a relatively new research direction, CA-SLA (Firth & Wagner, 1997, 2007; Kasper, 2009; Kasper & Wagner, 2011; Markee & Kasper, 2004; Mori & Markee, 2009; Pekarek Doehler, 2010), this study applies methods of CA to carefully study naturally occurring talk-in-interaction in its interactional details. This methodology, it is argued, ensures a rich picture of the interactional competencies of the L2 learner. In recent years, a number of studies using this method for the study of SLA have come forth, focusing primarily on L2-classroom activities (He, 2004; Hellermann, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009; Kasper, 2004; Markee, 2000; Markee & Kasper, 2004; Mondada & Pekarek Doehler, 2004; Mori, 2004a, 2004b; Mori & Hasegawa, 2009; Seedhouse, 2004). However, interest in L2 learners’ activities outside the classroom with regards to the learning of the L2 has increased over the past few years (Brouwer, 2003, 2004; Brouwer & Wagner, 2004; Wagner, 2004, 2010). Still little is known about how L2 learning in noneducational settings is organized. It is clear that a better understanding of the available resources for L2 use and learning in the L2 society, and how they can be exploited for the benefits of the L2 learner, can inform teaching and learning practices and can be used for the development of teaching materials and design of language courses. This chapter intends to contribute to the

Second Language Interaction for Business and Learning

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ongoing discussion of the relevance of L2 learners’ language use in their daily life to language learning. The chapter is organized as follows: Following a discussion on the data used in this study is a brief look at a business interaction between two Icelanders. The point of this is to enhance our understanding of the roles of the participants and the sequential organization of the conversation. In the main section of the chapter, a L2 interaction in a bakery will be analyzed and discussed in detail with respect to a dual nature of the talk and the roles of the participants with this question in mind: How does Anna, the L2 learner, with the help of her co-participant, exploit the business interaction as a resource for L2 use and learning? Finally, there is a summary, discussion and the concluding remarks.

The Data The data used in this study consist of audio recordings that a few foreign students at the University of Iceland made on a regular basis in their daily lives. I had sought volunteers among beginning students in the program Icelandic for foreign students at the University of Iceland to record themselves in their interactions outside the classroom. In return, the participants were offered a one-hour tutoring session a week with my assistant, who helped them with their homework. The data collection is based on a method described in Brouwer and Nissen (2003) where participants in courses in L2 Danish were asked to tape their conversations outside of the classroom and hand in the recordings to their teacher who gave them feedback. No such feedback was given on the conversations in my data: it was kept separate from the tutoring sessions. The specific data used in this chapter are taped by Anna, a Canadian student who came to Iceland in the fall of 2005 to learn Icelandic. Anna started recording herself after having been in Iceland for a month. She handed in recordings of half an hour a week for three years. The service encounter, which is the topic of this chapter, was recorded in Anna’s second month in Iceland. The L1 interaction also examined here was taped in the fall of 2009. Whether to use audio or video recording for this project was certainly an issue in the beginning: The choice of audio over video was made with regards to the type of material I was after, namely, authentic, unprepared, naturally occurring interaction. A tape recorder comes in more handy than a video camera and is less likely to compromise the authenticity of the interaction; using video might require two cameras which would have to be set up and adjusted to capture both the participants in the interaction. This takes time that might enable the participants to prepare for the ‘recording’ and thus make the data more prepared and less authentic.

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Interaction in a Service Encounter Service encounters may be the optimal places to practice the L2; the service-personnel (usually) speak the language which is the L2 learners’/ customers’ target language and get paid to interact with the customers. Furthermore, L2 speakers may not, in the beginning of their stay in the new country, know many experienced speakers of their target language and therefore may not have many possibilities to use it in private conversation. However, one aspect of modern society, that is increasing self-service, limits such opportunities for L2 use. The L2 speaker may discover that in many service encounters very little language is needed. In some grocery stores the only face-to-face encounter may be with the cashier when checking out, which due to the nature of the cashier’s job may not be very suitable for lengthy conversations. A L2 learner who wants to use service encounters as language-learning opportunities needs to identify the (few) service situations in which language is actually used to do business. It may, thus, be important for the L2 learner to make the most of each opportunity. The interaction studied here takes place in a bakery where language exchange is in fact needed for business transactions. Before the analysis of the target interaction, we will briefly look at an analysis of an encounter in a bakery where both participants’ L1 is Icelandic. This is to ‘set the stage’ for the main topic of this chapter: The roles of the participants and the sequential organization of the interaction will be examined and compared to the corresponding roles and sequences in the L2 interaction. A L1 interaction for business This part of the chapter studies an interaction between an Icelandic customer and an Icelandic clerk recorded in a similar environment (a bakery) as the focal L2 interaction presented later (Excerpts 5.2–5.6). The purpose of this section is to better understand the structure of a ‘typical’ business interaction in the bakery with which we can then compare the L2 conversation. On service encounters see also Ventola (1983, 2005). The goal is to home in on what distinguishes a business interaction where both participants are L1 speakers from an interaction in a similar situation where one of the participants is a L2 speaker. In Excerpt 5.1, we see a conversation between a customer and a clerk in a bakery. Both participants are L1 speakers of Icelandic. Excerpt 5.1 (simplified): A business interaction in the bakery (CL is the clerk, CU is the customer) 01 CU: góðan dag good day


02

CL:

03

CU:

04

CL:

((someone is talking on a cell phone)) (daginn) day-the Good day áttu brauð með kúmeni↓ have-you bread with cumin↓ Do you have bread with cumin? nei no

Lines omitted 22

CU:

23

24

CL:

25

CU:

26

CL:

27

CU:

28

CL:

29 30

CL:

31

CU:

32 33

CL:

34 35

CL:

heyrðu ég er að hugsa um að fá þarna þetta listen I am to think about to get there this Listen I think I will get there this sem þú sagðir mér fyrst [°uppskeru-°] that you told me first [°harvest-°] that you told me first harvest[já] [yes] já yes viltu það sneitt↓ want-you it sliced↓ Do you want it sliced? já takk yes thanks Yes please já yes (33.7) ((bread-cutting machine)) fleira fyrir þig↓ else for you↓ Anything else for you? já takk ég ætla að fá hérna tvær hrískökur yes thanks I will to get here two rice-cakes Yes please I’ll get here two rice cakes (0.3) já yes (26.4) fleira↓ else↓ Anything else?

97

98

36


CU:

hvað er það komið mikið↓ how is it come much↓ How much is it now? 37 CL: níu hundruð og (fimmtán) nine hundred and (fifteen) 38 CU: .hjá nei takk ég ætla ekki að (fá meira) .hyes no thanks I will not to (get more) Yes no thanks I will not get anything else 39 CL: takk fyrir thanks for Thanks 40 (5.6) 41 CL: gerðu svo vel here you go 42 CU: já (takk) yes (thanks) Lines omitted Following the participants’ exchange of greetings (lines 1–2) the customer utters: áttu brauð með kúmeni (Do you have bread with cumin). The utterance has the format of a yes/no question, possibly inquiring into the availability of the item rather than directly ordering. The use of áttu (do you have) further suggests that the item in question is not displayed for the customer to see. The clerk’s negative response (line 4) shows this to be the case. Following the clerk’s listing alternative choices of bread (omitted from the transcript) to the unavailable cumin-bread, the customer makes his choice in lines 22–23. The participants confirm their understanding in lines 24–25. The next relevant action after the ordering of the bread is for the clerk to inquire whether or not to slice it as we see him do in line 26. Following mutual confirmation tokens from the participants (lines 27–28) the verbal interaction is put on hold while the clerk physically prepares the bread indicated by the long pause in line 29 and the sound of the breadcutting machine. In line 30, the clerk utters: fleira fyrir þig (anything else for you), displaying that he is ready to take an order for a possible next item which is a part of his duties (Ventola, 1983: 246). The clerk has now delivered a first pair part of an adjacency pair, which is described in Schegloff and Sacks (1973: 295–296) as paired sequences, that is question–answer, greeting–greeting, where one speaker produces a first pair part and the co-participant delivers the second pair part of the adjacency pair. The clerk’s first pair part (line 30) is formulated as a yes/no question, but the next relevant action is for the customer to order or indicate that he does not want anything else. The customer provides a second pair part ‘yes’ to the clerk’s question as it is formulated and then he places the order: já takk ég ætla að fá hérna tvær


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hrískökur (yes please I will get here two rice cakes) (line 31). The clerk, acknowledging the order, responds with a ‘yes’ token after a short pause (line 33). The next relevant action is for the clerk to prepare the order, the verbal response (line 33) does not suffice – a physical response is necessary. The 26.4 second pause (line 34) may be the clerk physically preparing the order as we saw in line 29. In lines 26–29 and lines 30–34, we can see a similar sequential order: Following an order and its preparation, the clerk takes the turn with the next relevant action, inquiry into the handling of an item ordered (line 26) or a next possible item (line 30). This shows that it is the clerk’s role to move the business interaction forward. In his turn the customer responds and then there is an extensive pause in the verbal interaction where the clerk physically fulfills the customer’s request and therefore no participation is required from the customer. A final example of this recurring sequence can be observed in lines 35–40: Following the pause the clerk resumes the verbal interaction fleira? (anything else?). Rather than responding to the clerk’s question the customer inquires into how much the current items cost (line 36). The customer has now delivered a first pair part of an adjacency pair, possibly asking for information that will allow him to respond to the clerk’s question. This is an insertion sequence (Hutchby & Wooffitt, 1998; Schegloff, 1968) which is a question–answer sequence that is placed between the first and second pair parts of an adjacency pair and functions as an inquiry into how to understand or respond to the first pair part. At this point there are two first pair parts pending and the next relevant action is for the clerk to respond to the customer’s question (line 36), as he does in line 37. The customer’s response já nei takk ég ætla ekki að fá meira (yes no thanks I will not get anything else) appears to be designed to accomplish at least two things: já (yes) as a confirmation of understanding of the clerk’s response in line 37 which closes the insertion sequence in lines 36–37, nei (no) as an answer to the clerk’s question in line 35, that is the second pair part of the adjacency pair. Finally, the customer provides a ‘long version’ of his negative response: ég ætla ekki að fá meira (I will not get anything else). The clerk’s thanks (line 39) which can be seen as a confirmation of understanding is followed by a 5.6 second pause. As in the previous examples (lines 26–29, 30–34) the verbal interaction is put on hold while the clerk may be engaged in a physical aspect of his work, that is preparing the goods. In short, we can see that this business interaction is driven by the clerk who initiates recurring sequences that consist of (1) an inquiry from the clerk into further orders (cf. Ventola, 1983: 2), (2) a response from the customer and (3) a ‘silent’ period where the clerk may be attending to some physical aspects of his duties, and does not need the customer’s participation. A description of service encounters is found in Ventola (1983) and represented as flow charts which identify several components in service

100


encounters, that is greeting, turn-allocation, service bid, service, resolution, pay, goods handover and finally goodbye (Ventola, 1983: 245). The ‘service bid’ corresponds to the recurring sequence described here: it is recurrent depending on the response from the customer; a positive response to a service bid initiates a further bid whereas a negative response takes the interaction to the next step which is also a point made in the present study. The next section addresses the main subject of this study, namely the L2 interaction for business and learning in which a L2 speaker of Icelandic manages, with the cooperation of his co-participant, to take advantage of an everyday business encounter for language-learning purposes. A L2 interaction for business and learning The interaction examined in this section has a dual focus of ‘doing topical interaction’ on the one hand and ‘orienting to language’ on the other. The analysis shows how the participants manage this duality in the interaction, as well as the question of how the language-oriented activities relate to matters of language learning. In other words, I focus on whether language learning can be described as attending to linguistic features of the L2, whether the participants orient to these activities as language learning, and finally how these activities relate to the ongoing business interaction, that is to what extent they are embedded in the topical interaction, to what extent the business at hand requires attending to linguistic features as a necessary condition for conducting the business, and to what extent the language-oriented activities are parallel activities in their own right. In Excerpts 5.2–5.6, Anna is in a bakery talking to the Icelandic clerk. Early in the interaction (lines 1–2 in Excerpt 5.2), Anna makes her identity as a L2 learner relevant by negotiating with the clerk to use Icelandic in the upcoming interaction, indicating that the interaction may be more than just an ordinary business transaction; it may be an opportunity for language practice. Excerpt 5.2 The first order in the bakery 01 CL: *icelandic 02 AN: já. yes. 03 (0.8) 04 AN: uh:uhm::: (1.7) °uhuhuhuh° má ég fá:: (1.9) uh:m::: (1.3) may I ge::t Can I have 05 hás::: (1.0) uh::::: (2.4) haus:br↑auð? autu:: autumn:br↑ead? autu- autumnbread


06

CL:

07

AN:

08

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j↑á= y↑es = °>(hau)s:brauð(au)tumn:breadS:NÚÐA

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Language Acquisition: Studies in First Language Development

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Language Acquisition: Studies in First Language Development

Language Acquisition: The Age Factor (Second Language Acquisition)

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