Abstract
This book assembles a number of inspiring contributions to a research field that is still very young but expanding fast: CA for SLA, that is, the use of conversation analysis (CA) as a methodology to describe second language acquisition (SLA) processes. Although it is not designed as an introduction to the field, this collection of articles could certainly serve as one. Starting with the comprehensive introductory chapter, which provides an eclectic overview of the many links CA has with SLA research (sociocultural theories of learning, multilingualism, the interaction hypothesis, dynamic systems theory), most authors take care to explain and justify the principles of CA and its specific contribution to language acquisition issues.
Beyond their common denominator of using CA methodology and/or following CA principles, the studies in this book display a wide variety of research foci, including the development of interaction competence over time, ways of orienting to specific instances of learning, ways of organizing language practice, assessing language competence, and the development and emergence of specific linguistic patterns in interaction.
Nguyen’s and Ishida’s contributions each focus on one L2 learner (English and Japanese) and convincingly show that an increase of interaction competence over time means increased participation in the co-construction of the talk at hand. They also demonstrate how changes in interaction competence go hand in hand with the development of the social relationship between participants and with cultural socialization processes. Indeed, as Ishida rightly takes care to point out, it is often difficult or even impossible to single out which elements belong to interaction competence.
For Nevile and Wagner, learning is also defined as interactional participation. They show how co-participants in a multilingual group exam make use of complex interactional resources to attend to each other’s ability to participate, which is dependent on the individuals’ L2 language competences. Unfortunately, their data consist of only one long interaction, so they are not able to describe any actual learning processes. However, the authors hypothesize quite convincingly that the interactional challenge of multilingual talk will most likely foster improvement in speakers’ L2 competences.
Situations where learning is actually oriented to as the activity at hand are investigated by Seo, by Mortensen and by Ikeda and Ko. Seo is able to show how L2 learning is facilitated by participants’ use of gesture, gaze and body orientation. Although Seo’s claim that these findings may be of practical use for teacher training is not immediately obvious, despite perhaps a general raising of awareness for multimodality, it is certainly worth exploring this idea further.
Mortensen investigates a social practice in classrooms he calls ‘doing word explanation’ (p. 136). He analyses data in which L2 teachers and students collaboratively engage in word-explanation side-sequences. While it is no great surprise to language teachers that vocabulary teaching sequences in lessons are not only due to interactional problems but may actually be part of rather well-planned pedagogy, it is very interesting to see how even these teacher-centred phases of classroom activity crucially depend on the students as relevant participants.
In Ikeda and Ko’s contribution we learn about ‘choral practice’ (p. 165) in L2 classrooms, in which several speakers simultaneously or almost simultaneously co-produce whole turn construction units (TCUs) or parts of TCUs. All forms of choral practice are elicited by the teacher through specific turn design, patterns of addressee allocation, code-switching and non-verbal prompts. But because it is a collective achievement, choral practice is a particularly clear display by teachers and students of their orientation towards a common learning focus.
Theodórsdóttir is the only one in this collection analysing doing learning outside the classroom, a context still too rarely studied in SLA. She shows how one L2 learner of Icelandic routinely suspends the preference for progressivity found in most interactions. This learner regularly treats interactions as language learning opportunities, for instance by refusing to code-switch into English or by insisting on completing her TCU although the co-participant has already indicated understanding.
Biazzi and Eskildsen are the two contributions closest to SLA, using CA as an analytic tool and as a way of complementing their SLA data. Both of them put their primary focus on linguistic form, Biazzi on general morphosyntactic competence, correlating it with interaction competence, Eskildsen on the development of auxiliary-do structures in a learner’s inventory over time. Despite the intriguing empirical insights these two papers provide, they are clearly only the first steps in two interdisciplinary fields that are in need of much more research.
A further area of interdisciplinary research is investigated by Lee, Par and Sohn in a rare, but welcome, application of CA to language assessment data. They study language proficiency interviews with Korean heritage speakers and analyse the differences between candidates assessed as intermediate and as advanced. Their analyses strongly indicate a link between a speaker’s access to more complex grammatical resources and more advanced interactional skills and that oral proficiency interviews are therefore able to measure both aspects.
Vöge’s chapter is the most difficult to relate to the general topic of this collection. Her nonetheless very interesting analysis discusses instances of doing being multilingual as a resource to bring about local institutional identities in business meetings. Apart from the fact that foreign language speaker (but not necessarily foreign language learner) is a relevant identity category in her data, there is no orientation to learning in her chapter.
There are a few minor formatting problems in this book: line references in text out of sync with the transcript (pp. 24–26), text of one transcript page smaller than the others (p. 248) and inconvenient endnotes in all chapters. However, these cannot distract from the fact that this eclectic collection can be thoroughly recommended to both CA and SLA researchers as a glimpse into the already rich diversity of CA for SLA studies.