ABSTRACT:The article focuses on second language learning in an immersion kindergarten. Within the framework of conversation analysis, the study explores how learning is situated in interaction and evidenced in the participants' verbal and embodied behavior. The data consist of videotaped everyday interaction of a group of Finnish-speaking children during their first two years of Swedish immersion. The children's emerging second language competences are explored by analyzing how they respond to the educator's questions and directives. The production of Swedish is investigated by analyzing how the children recycle lexical items and syntactic structures that the educator has used. In terms of second language understanding, the study reveals that the children orient to the educator's embodied actions at the initial stages. They do not initiate repair even if their response shows that their understanding is partial. During the second term, the children show increasing understanding of the verbal turns, and they also initiate repair in case of understanding problems. In terms of active production of second language, the study shows that the children first recycle lexemes and expressions previously used by the educator. At later stages, they also recycle syntactic structures, and modify the recycled items in Swedish. The focus of the study are the learning processes, but the products of learning are also in evidence, and manifested in the ways the children show understanding of the second language and how they use it.
This paper explores other-initiated repair, or more specifically, extended repair sequences. In extended cases, the repair turn does not immediately resolve the trouble, and the speaker needs to produce a new repair initiation.Drawing on a collection of 458 other-initiations of repair in naturally occurring everyday interaction in Finnish, we show how the distribution of the outcomes of different types of initiations clearly differs. Typically, candidate understandings and open class repair initiations do not lead to extended sequences, whereas repeats (with question words) are more often followed by a second repair initiation. The type of trouble, as well as the typological specificity of different initiations, explains the outcomes of the repair sequences.
The focus of this article is on OKAY as a resource for regulating language and constructing norm centres in authentic consultation meetings related to academic writing and recorded in Finland and Sweden. It gives an overview of all occurrences of OKAY in the interactional data in question, revealing that the word occurs frequently in academic writing consultations in Finnish, Finland Swedish, and Sweden Swedish. There are similarities in the frequency of its use and the distribution of occurrences between counsellor and student in the Finnish and the Finland-Swedish data, whereas the Sweden-Swedish counselling interactions follow a slightly different pattern. Through the lens of conversation analysis and systemic–functional linguistics, we further demonstrate how the counsellors and the students use the evaluative content word OKAY as a resource for regulating both academic writing and the counselling interaction, and thereby position themselves epistemically and orient towards different centres of norms.
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