Volume 47, Issue 1

A key question in the debate on conversation analysis as an approach to SLA concerns the role of cognition in interaction and learning. Where is cognition located, and how is understanding in interaction achieved? For an empirically grounded answer, I will explore the procedural apparatus that sustains socially shared cognition. Following a brief introduction of three discursive approaches to cognition as socially shared, the article will examine how interactional organizations and linguistic resources serve to generate and sustain mutual understanding in a segment of ordinary conversation between an L1 speaker and an L2 speaker of English. I will then discuss the standard treatment of repair in interactionist SLA from a conversation-analytic perspective. Lastly, I will consider how interactional competencies may be learnable, and how their learnability informs the issue of whether CA is capable of furnishing an explication of second language learning without the help of exogenous theory.

Since the beginning, second language acquisition (SLA) studies have been predominantly cognitive in their theoretical assumptions and programmatic agendas. This is still largely true today. In this paper, we set out our proposals for learning talk analysis (LTA). LTA synthesizes insights from linguistic philosophy, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, discursive psychology, and the discourse hypothesis in SLA. LTA points to behavioral, process-oriented accounts of mind, cognition, affect, language, and language learning that are agnostic about a priori theoretical claims that such traditionally psychological constructs underlie SLA. Instead, LTA treats these constructs as observable, socially distributed interactional practices. While an ethnomethodological respecification of SLA studies is a key agenda item of LTA, LTA is also concerned to foster an on-going conversation with all SLA researchers. The paper defines LTA, discusses how the various intellectual traditions it invokes form a coherent whole, provides a sustained, empirical exemplification of how LTA works, and suggests possible areas for future collaboration between behavioral and cognitive SLA researchers.

Encountering trouble producing a word in the midst of a turn at talk is an everyday experience for foreign language learners. By employing conversation analysis (CA) as a central tool for analysis, the current study explores how students undertake a range of word searches while they organize a pair work session designed for the purpose of language learning. The analysis demonstrates how the learners simultaneously employ structurally different kinds of semiotic resources, such as language, body, and the structures of their textbooks and notebooks for language learning. The close explication of the ways in which cognitive states are embodied, displayed, and treated by the two students during the word search sequences reveals how they conduct indigenous assessment of each other's knowledge while “doing being a foreign language learner in a classroom.”

Responding in a manner that does not align with an action or affiliate with a stance implicated in just prior talk is potentially sensitive work. Conversation Analysis (CA) has shown that participants orient to the sensitive nature of sequences of talk used to project responses that do not align, or, are dispreferred (Pomerantz, Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: Some features of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes, Cambridge University Press, 1984) in some way. This paper examines such responses, especially with the use of no tokens. The talk comes from the interactions of one adult learner of English in a language learning classroom over the course of five ten-week terms. The findings show that the participant's use of no (for other-correction, third-position repair, and multiple sayings) is oriented to by peers as appropriate for the classroom community of practice. Learning, it is suggested, may be seen in the learner's orientation to the preference for affiliation when doing negative responses.

The main goal of this paper is to shift the focus on ‘learning’ away from the traditional locus of inquiry in SLA – the L2 classroom – in order to extend the SLA empirical database, and by so doing extend and broaden our understanding of what it means to learn and use (in mutually reinforcing and enlightening ways) an additional, or second, language. I examine instances where participants are using English as a lingua franca in an international workplace setting. I show that although parties produce non-standard linguistic (lexical, morphosyntactic, etc.) forms that may mark their speech as non-standard, they go to great lengths, interactionally, to disavow any intimations of ‘learner’ status, and artfully deflect attention from and circumvent potential or actual language-encoding difficulties. However, in order for this to occur, various kinds of local learning is taking place within the micro-moments of interaction; for example, the interactants are compelled to assess, in situ, the language competence of their co-participants, and implicitly calibrate their own linguistic and interactional behaviour accordingly. Such calibrations, I argue, entail learning.