John Hellermann

The Interactive Work of Prosody in the IRF Exchange: Teacher Repetition in Feedback Moves

This article examines the interactive import of prosody from a perspective of participants’ orientation to talk in interaction, taking advantage of data from institutional discourse to focus on the prosodic packaging of recurring turn sequences of the same discourse activity. The analysis focuses on the third slot of a ubiquitous three-part classroom discourse sequence, the IRF exchange (Sinclair & Coulthard 1975), a site in which teachers make repetitive feedback moves following student responses. Examination of more than 25 hours of classroom discourse and more than 300 third-turn teacher feedback types uncovered a systematic use of prosody for these teacher repetitions that coincides with a teacher’s positive assessment of the student response. Further analysis shows that more complex prosodic packaging is used by teachers in their repetitive feedback turns to index other interactive functions. (Prosody, repetition, classroom discourse.)*

On the contingent nature of language‐learning tasks

Using methods from conversation analysis, this paper explores ways that teacher‐designed language‐learning task interactions can vary in their performance due to the nature of face‐to‐face interaction. The analysis describes three task interactions from language‐learning classrooms, showing how the contingencies that are necessitated by learners working in small groups provide for different task performance as well as different potentials for language learning. The video‐recorded interactions come from two different classroom contexts: adult English‐language learners in the USA and adolescent learners of French in Switzerland. In each context, the learners are engaged in a directions‐giving task. Participants’ individual and group orientations to these similar teacher‐designed tasks lead to different co‐constructed performances of the task and, in each case, unique learning potentials.

Looking for Evidence of Language Learning in Practices for Repair: A Case Study of Self-Initiated Self-Repair by an Adult Learner of English

This paper uses methods from conversation analysis to investigate a well‐documented practice from mundane conversation (self‐initiated self‐repair) as it is accomplished during the interactions of one adult learner of English. The interactions took place during her classroom talk‐in‐interaction over the course of 18 months. The research describes the placement of repair initiations, the production practices used for initiation and repair, the activity contexts within which the repairs took place, and how the production of repair might give us a clue to emerging syntactic organization of language learners. By focusing on participant‐relevant language practices like self‐initiated self‐repair this research will add to socio‐cultural understandings of language learning and addresses the call for more longitudinal research in the area.

Mobile reading as social and embodied practice

Abstract Literacy, and particularly reading, is critical to success in schooling and full participation in contemporary societies. As one of the primary skills needed to develop proficiency in a language, the study of reading in additional languages has attracted significant research attention. Focusing on behaviourally visible and locally occasioned literacy events, this paper reports on an analysis of how public interactional practices for out-loud reading by small groups of English language learners facilitate the routinisation of interactional practices. The learners are participants in a mobile augmented reality (AR) activity that involves walking around a university campus in order to complete five serial tasks. Data come from video recordings of the game playing of eight groups (16 h of data) and their associated transcripts, analysed according to the principles of ethnomethodological conversation analysis. Results show that written texts that are part of the activity are given local meaning via various interactional practices that include public reading, co-reading and other embodied practices. We show how these dynamics of re-textualisation provide evidence for developing interactional practices over the course of the five tasks that are part of the activity.

Languaging as competencing: considering language learning as enactment

Abstract The terms interactional competence and learning are discussed in the context of recent research in the areas of cognitive science and ethnomethodological conversation analysis studies of language learning. Two data excerpts from a longitudinal case study of a beginning learner of English are presented to illustrate (1) the difficulty of representing language learning using structural linguistic representations and (2) evidence of language learning as at-that-time appropriate embodied interaction.

Talking About Reading: Changing Practices for a Literacy Event

Although generally studied as a psycholinguistic decoding process, reading can also be studied as a social practice. This chapter presents an analysis of one English language learner’s interactions in literacy events over nine months in a classroom. The participant, “Li”, had little experience with schooling or literacy in any language. The literacy events were opportunities for students to talk with one another about books they had just read. The sequential analysis shows that participants have a number of orientations to accomplishing the work of talking about a just-read book and the practices for doing that work change over the course of nine months. A case is made that repeated performance of the literacy event leads to experienced practice which can be considered evidence of learning.

Colloquium – Toward a Reconceptualization of ‘Language’ and ‘Acquisition’ in SLA Research

Language Teaching / Volume 43 / Issue 02 / April 2010, pp 235 238 DOI: 10.1017/S0261444809990401, Published online: 03 March 2010 Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0261444809990401 How to cite this article: John Hellermann and David Olsher (2010). Colloquium – Toward a Reconceptualization of ‘Language’ and ‘Acquisition’ in SLA Research. Language Teaching, 43, pp 235-238 doi:10.1017/ S0261444809990401 Request Permissions : Click here