Søren Wind Eskildsen

Usage-based perspectives on second language learning

This edited volume brings together perspectives that find mutual kinship in a view of language as an embodied, semiotic, symbolic tool used for communicative and interactional purposes and an understanding of language use as the preeminent condition for language learning - perspectives that we conjoin under the umbrella term of usage based perspectives.

From trouble in the talk to new resources: The interplay of bodily and linguistic resources in the talk of a speaker of English as a second language

This chapter explores how a family of related expressions emerge from repairs and are refined over time by a novice speaker of L2 English. We trace longitudinally a connection between a complex of deictic (pointing) and dynamic (hand movements) gestures and a small family of specific, related linguistic resources centred on the verbs “ask”, “tell”, and “say”. The data reveal that the L2 speaker packages these linguistic resources with particular gestures and re-uses these gesture-word packages in subsequent conversations. We will show in detail how the gesture-talk combination is used to display understanding and achieve intersubjectivity and how it changes over time as the gesture is subsumed by the emergent verbal language and becomes a communicative resource in its own right when circumstance demands it.

The younger, the better?: A usage-based approach to learning and teaching of English in Danish primary schools

Abstract This project investigates early learning and teaching of English in Danish primary schools. Encouraged by recent calls for research to apply a complex multifactor research design to investigate early foreign language (FL) learning (Edelenbos & Kubanek 2009; Lindgren & Muñoz 2013), the project investigates the impact of starting age of learning, i.e., the age factor, and a range of contextual factors (the quantity and quality of exposure to English inside and outside the classroom) and socio-affective factors (children’s motivation and attitudes towards learning, and parents’ education, (perceived) proficiency in the FL, their attitudes towards language learning, and their use of the foreign language professionally) in children’s rate of L2 learning and short-term English language proficiency.

Building a Semiotic Repertoire for Social Action: Interactional Competence as Biographical Discovery.

Abstract This commentary draws on the four articles in this issue to discuss interactional competence from a usage-based perspective. The usage-based conception of language knowledge as an inventory of form-meaning pairings used for communicative purposes will be qualified by incorporating the idea that these communicative purposes are social actions. L2 learning is a matter of biographical discovery in which the accomplishment of social actions is the driving force and L2 teaching should revolve around semiotic resources for accomplishing these. I conclude by calling for further usage-based L2 research that builds on and advances a view of language as a tool for social action.