This paper examines how unplanned vocabulary work arises out of students' talk. Furthermore, we show how the teacher and students jointly contribute towards the ensuing teaching trajectories, whereby the vocabulary items are turned into 'teachables', i.e. interactionally emergent objects of explicit teaching. In doing so, we also explore what aspects of vocabulary knowledge are targeted. This collection-based study uses conversation analysis to examine video recordings of fairly advanced heritage speakers of English from English mother tongue instruction classes in Sweden. The analyses reveal a variety of ways in which the teaching trajectories arise: the teacher's substitution requests for a more appropriate word; a student's naming and word-confirmation requests; the teacher's or a student's translation and meaning requests. A third of these requests were initiated by a student. The trajectories then developed collaboratively and were tailored to the local context to address issues of meaning, form and use. Establishing the meaning of a word frequently involved (and could combine) requesting/ providing, e.g., definitions and translations. Form could be targeted by carefully enunciating topicalised lexis or writing it on the board, and vocabulary use was typically elaborated by contextualising words and sometimes by exploring collocations.

The present chapter investigates teacher-initiated translation requests as spontaneous vocabulary teaching during English mother tongue instruction in Sweden. The collection-based analysis draws on a corpus of 30 hours (11 weeks) of video-recordings of compulsory school-age students. The analysis shows how the teacher routinely draws on the local availability of two shared languages to accomplish a variety of actions: to check students’ comprehension of topicalised vocabulary; to engage the entire cohort; to perform medium repair; and to prompt student production of the target language. The findings may be of relevance for numerous types of bi- and multilingual settings, where language alternation serves to augment the teaching and learning of languages as well as other subject matter.

Here we are. It's been a long journey and yet, the past few weeks and months have gone by at a dizzying pace. There are many people who helped me along on this journey and to whom I am grateful. I begin with my amazing colleagues at Pedagogic Practices. Some have gone and some remain, but you have all made a difference in my life. To the first group of PhDs

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