We use insights and methods from ethnomethodological conversation analysis and discursive psychology to develop an account of embodied word and grammar searches as socially distributed planning practices. These practices, which were produced by three intermediate learners of Italian as a Foreign Language (IFL), occurred massively in natural data that were gathered during a 3‐week period from a third‐semester IFL course at a university in the United States. We develop a behavioral analysis of these data that shows: (1) what participants do during planning talk and how they do such talk and (2) whether they actually do what they planned to do.
In cognitivist Second Language Acquisition (SLA), attention and noticing are described as psycholinguistic processes that (may) have a role in language learning. The operationalization of such constructs, however, poses methodological challenges, since neither online nor off-line measures are coextensive with these cognitive processes that occur in the individual mind-brain. In contrast with such a perspective, the present conversation-analytic study re-specifies attention in social terms, as a nexus of publicly displayed actions that are jointly achieved by college level students of Italian as a foreign language as they engage in collaborative writing while planning for a group presentation to be performed in the second language (L2). More specifically, the article describes gender-focusing sequences that are initiated by attention-mobilizing turns with which a student directs her coparticipants' attention to an oral or written item that is oriented to as possibly inaccurate in terms of gender assignment. The study shows the agentive role of students in identifying learnables and solving language-related issues and provides an example of how participants do learning as a socially situated and collaborative activity by enacting immanent pedagogies (Lindwall & Lymer, 2005).
In this study, the authors explore how classroom tasks that are commonly used in task-based language teaching (TBLT) are achieved as observable aspects of local educational order (Hester & Francis, 2000) through observable and immanently social classroom behaviors. They focus specifically on students' language learning behaviors, which they track through the longitudinal conversation-analytic methodology called learning behavior tracking (LBT) (Markee, 2008). From a theoretical point of view, they situate LBT within the ethnomethodological (EM) perspective on social action pioneered by Garfinkel (1967) and relate it to socially defined ways of understanding planning (Burch, 2014;Markee & Kunitz, 2013). In the empirical part of the article, the researchers analyze TBLT work that was conducted in an English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom in a Swedish junior high school. Specifically, they track the occurrences of a learnable (the spelling of the word disgusting) that was emically oriented to as such by the students as they engaged in planning and accomplishing teacher-assigned tasks. The authors then develop an emic, sequential account of the participants' practical reasoning and dynamically evolving epistemic positions. They argue that this kind of basic empirical research refines our understanding of how TBLT curriculum work is achieved by participants as practical, mundane, and observable activities in language classrooms, and that these insights may feed into more applied research on teacher training, thereby fostering the design of instructional innovations.
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