Social Learning Theories:
Conversation Analysis
Week 12
Tonight
• Warm-up
• Introduction to Conversation Analysis (Kasper
& Wagner, 2011)
• Discussion Lead 1: Seedhouse (2005)
• Discussion Lead 2: Mondada & PekarekDoehler (2004)
• Discussion Lead 3: Wilkes-Gibbs (1997)
• HW
Warm-up
• What social aspects figure into learning from a
language socialization view of SLA?
Introduction to Conversation Analysis:
Kasper & Wagner (2011)
• The focus of CA as an approach to second
language acquisition (SLA)—or CA-SLA for
short—is therefore the social aspects of
language acquisition
• What social aspects are they referring to?
• From EMCA perspectives, language acquisition
can be understood as learning to participate in
mundane as well as institutional everyday social
environments.
• CA, therefore, does not treat language as an
autonomous system independent of its use;
rather, it treats ‘grammar and lexical choices as
sets of resources which participants deploy,
monitor, interpret and manipulate’ (Schegloff et
al. 2002: 15) in order to perform their social acts.
• Interaction is orderly, first and foremost, for
the participants themselves.
• Why is interaction so important?
Intersubjectivity
• When learners are faced with interdependent
tasks, they have to negotiate shared meanings
with each other (Wertsch, 1985). To do so is to
develop intersubjectivity.
• As Drew (2005, p. 75) put it: “The aim of
research in CA is to discover and explicate the
practices through which interactants produce
and understand conduct in interaction.”
• Membership in a social group, then, is
constituted by effective, morally accountable
participation.
• In CA-SLA, interactional competence is
understood to serve double duty
• What does this mean?
• CA relocates cognition from its traditional
habitat in the privacy of people’s minds to the
arena of social interaction.
• How? And Why?
• How does CA’s view of identity differ from the
more recent ideas of identity we have
discussed?
• Such “transportable” identities (Zimmerman,
1998) may be visible (through physical
appearance) or hearable (through speech
production) across situations and activities
without having any bearing on the interaction
for the participants.
• Why this view?
• Much of the literature on L2 talk shows that,
predominantly, participants do not treat their
status as L1 or L2 speakers (e.g., Brouwer, 2003;
Hosoda, 2006) or their cultural backgrounds
(Mori, 2003; Ryoo, 2007) as relevant for their
interaction.
• In other words, transportable identities are a
resource for participants—the identities’ local
relevance is subject to the parties’ interactional
projects at any given moment in their talk.
• Identities, then, are not assumed to reside in a
person but are interactionally produced, locally
occasioned, and relationally constituted
• Against theory-stipulated analytical priorities,
CA adheres to the policy that no aspect of the
data can be dismissed as “uninteresting” a
priori.
• Why does this happen and how does it relate
to CA’s position on exogenous theories?
• Unmovtivated and motivated looking?
Discussion Lead 1: Seedhouse (2005)
• Listening for:
– Theoretical assumptions
– Focus of CA
– Specific components of conversation analyzed
– Implications for practice
Q’s
• How do contributions to interaction both
shape and renew context?
• Contributions are context-shaped in that they cannot
be adequately understood except by reference to the
sequential environment in which they occur and in
which the participants design them to occur.
• Contributions are context-renewing in that they
inevitably form part of the sequential environment in
which a next contribution will occur.
• The basic aim is to establish an emic perspective, i.e. to
determine which elements of context are relevant to
the interactants at any point in the interaction. The
perspective is also an active one in which participants
talk a context into being.
What is the main point?
• [t]he etic viewpoint studies behaviour as from
outside of a particular system, and as an
essential initial approach to an alien system.
The emic viewpoint results from studying
behaviour as from inside the system . . .
Descriptions or analyses from the etic
standpoint are ‘alien’ in view, with criteria
external to the system. Emic descriptions
provide an internal view, with criteria chosen
from within the system.
• So it is incorrect to say that CA does not
consider background or contextual details;
• How does CA consider these then?
• The essential question which we must ask at
all stages of CA analysis of data is ‘Why that, in
that way, right now?’
• This encapsulates the perspective of
interaction as action (why that) which is
expressed by means of linguistic forms (in that
way) in a developing sequence (right now).
• Interactional organisations of turn-taking, adjacency pairs,
preference organisation and repair are often
misunderstood by linguists to be a system of units and rules
in the descriptivist linguistic sense and to constitute the
methodology of CA.
• The interactional organisations themselves are stated in
context-free terms, but the vital point is that participants
employ these context free organisations in a contextsensitive way to display their social actions.
• It is because the participants (and we as analysts) are able
to identify the gap between the context-free model and its
context sensitive implementation that they (and we as
analysts) are able to understand the social significance of
the context-sensitive implementation.
Discussion Lead 2: Discussion Lead 2:
Mondada & Pekarek-Doehler (2004)
Q’s
• That is, language learning involves much more
than an expert-novice relationship and much
more than scaffolded sequences of
negotiation.
• What else, then?
• More specifically, language learning is rooted in learners' participation in organizing talk-in-interaction,
structuring participation frameworks, con- figuring
discourse tasks, interactionally defining identities,
and becoming competent members of the community
(or communities) in which they participate, whether
as students, immigrants, professionals, or indeed any
other locally relevant identities (see also He, this
issue; Kasper, this issue; Mori, this issue, for related
insights). Such participation gives rise to cognitive
practices, forms of attention, and conjoined orientations that are embedded, publicly exhibited, and
made recognizable in actual actions, and are socially
mediated and collectively monitored through
interaction.
Discussion Lead 3: Wilkes-Gibbs (1997)
• Grounding, language as collaboration
Problems
• Clark (1994)
• There are two principles here: (1) the
problems that arise in language use are joint
problems; and (2) dealing with these problems
requires joint management.
Activity
• 4 levels of collaboration with language use
problems.
• Each have 1 level.
• Read and then share.
HW
• Atkinson (2011) Ch 6, A sociocognitive
approach to second language acquisition
• Discussion lead: Cekaite 2008 Embodied
action: keum,jihyun
• Discussion lead: Reinhardt (2008): Rick
• Van Lier (2004), The ecology and semitoics of
language learning: A sociocultural perspective.
---Chapter 1
• Reader response