Astract: This article presents and analyzes speech data from secondary-level learners of Spanish who are engaged in a problem-solving speaking task commonly used in classrooms and in research. It applies a Vygotskyan perspective to understand the nature of selected aspects of their speech activity, such as talk about the task, talk about the talk, and the use of English. The findings suggest that encoding-decoding perspectives, prevalent in much second language research on learner-to-learner speech activity, are inappropriate for capturing and understanding what these learners are attempting to accomplish during their face-to-face activity. In other words, not all speech activity between classroom learners during classroom communicative tasks is necessarily communicative in intent.
This study investigated the discourse of class discussion in the advanced undergraduate Spanish literature course. Motivating this study was the need for research to determine how discussion in advanced undergraduate literature courses provides discourse opportunities to students to develop advanced language functions, as defined in the ACTFL Guidelines. Despite claims that literature classes play an additional role in developing language proficiency, this issue has not received serious research attention. In this study, classroom transcripts were analyzed for the following features: (1) discourse structure of the literary discussion; (2) the use of teacher questions; (3) verb tense distribution; and (4) student uptake. The analysis attempted to uncover how literary discussion afforded opportunities for students to describe, to narrate in major timeframes, to use extended discourse, to share opinions and arguments, to explore alternatives, and to hypothesize–all advanced and superior level speaking functions. The study also included instructor and student interviews to determine their views of foreign language literature classes and to see if what was observed could be explained by the goals the instructor and students had expressed. The findings suggest that simply having a literary discussion does not ensure that students will be pushed to use the language in advanced ways even when faced with tasks requiring critical thinking and advanced language use. One issue that this study reveals is that, for students to experience speaking in the advanced ranges of proficiency, discussions must enable complex thinking in complex language. Other findings suggest that literature instructors should be aware of the discourse opportunities that arise in literary discussions, should make speaking expectations and advanced functions clear to students, and should monitor student language use during discussions.
Adopting sociocultural theory as their conceptual framework, the authors set out to study selected features of student discourse of three pairs of third‐semester (i.e., intermediate‐level) learners of Spanish at the university level. Specifically, they wanted to investigate how these selected features, identified in an earlier research project (Brooks and Donato 1994), developed during opportunities to engage in five different but similar jigsaw tasks. Through discourse analysis, they traced these features and found that the students indeed developed and became better at performing the tasks. Their work suggests that if the purpose and function of learner language during problem‐solving tasks are not clearly understood, learners may end up being denied strategic opportunities for language activity that can lead to their saying “it” right.
In this article we use a sociocultural framework to suggest task engagement as a viable construct in L2 learning research. Clarifying and specifying this construct has important implications for the analysis of conversational data, needed in light of claims for the causal relationship posited for certain kinds of conversational adjustments on L2 acquisition outcomes. Here we examine L2 learner data to identify task engagement as it emerges, unfolds in dialogic activity, and becomes associated with the transformation of task, self, and group. The data to be analyzed come from two pairs of L2 learners involved in jigsaw tasks, one pair using Swahili, the other Spanish; all are native speakers of English. Our concern with task engagement is motivated by methodological and theoretical issues entailed in the study of L2 learning in the interactionist perspective. We argue that a sociocultural approach offers an alternative to that perspective, from the standpoint of method and theory, resting as it does on quite a different set of underlying assumptions, to be described below. The research questions are the following. (1) How might task engagement be defined within a sociocultural framework?(2) What is the effect of task engagement on data analysis
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