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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.

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This paper investigates how a group of young adults participating in theatre rehearsals construct a spontaneous improvised scene. The analysis shows how the youths construct a fairly coherent scene in a situation in which the interactional moves and the interactional frame emerges. We analyse how the improvisation is initiated, how it is carried forward, and how the scene is discussed afterwards. After the improvised scene, it emerged that the participants had differing conceptions of what exactly they had been doing. However, these differing conceptions did not hinder them from participating and contributing to the scene in coherent ways and were thus sufficiently similar for practical purposes. In our analysis, we focus on how the youths constructed the scene by recycling lexemes, syntactic forms and embodied actions.