Multilingualism in Action: A Conversation Analytic View on How Children are Re-Voicing a Story in a French Second Language Learning Lesson

Abstract

Our paper provides an empirically based perspective on the contribution of Conversation Analysis (CA) to our understanding of children's second language learning practices in a multilingual classroom setting. While exploring the interactional configuration of a French second language learning activity, we focus our analytic lens on how five children and their teacher rely on multilingual resources (French, German, Luxemburgish, and Portuguese) in order to initiate and to improve the re-voicing of a story in French. Through a moment-bymoment (CA) video based analysis we can show how co-constructing the second language learning object involves various embedded linguistic and interactional competencies. We will point out how the participants engage in the re-voicing activity through their mutual orientation to each other's language conduct. Effective second language learning becomes possible because the teacher's student-directed talk provides opportunities for the children to provide oral narratives in a jointly constituted multilingually shaped interaction. Moreover, by offering insights into the interactional features (turn-taking system), CA allows us to visualize how the children's second language learning practices are interrelated with the sequential structure of multilingual talk-in-interaction. Thus, in our case study we emphasize the fundamentally social nature of second language classroom talk. 1 We do not pretend to provide an exhaustive overview of CA based research on second language learning; we shall only draw together some common threads that advocate CA to investigate language learning activities.

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“…Learners attempt to speak and write the combinations of native language and the target language. These attempts of the learners to shift from one code to another code help them complete the cycle of communication in a multilingual classroom setting (Arend & Sunnen, 2018). This linguistic phenomenon plays an essential role to be able to send the text successfully using various channels of communication.…”

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“…Conversation analysis studies the methods human participants orient to when they organize social action through talk [1,5,6,7]. In other words, CA is concerned with how people achieve courses of action in and through talk and how they make their respective understanding of the actions accountable to each other.…”

“…Recent CA informed research in human communication indeed underlines the complex coordinating dynamics of verbal (speech) and various non-verbal utterances (gaze, gesture, body posture) co-constituting a face-to-face conversation [9]. In addition to that, we must not forget that people "convey much more 7 With restrictions [3,4] 8 See section 3 Figure 3 than just meanings of the words spoken. Their speech also conveys their emotional state and aspects of their personality" [3].…”

“…Participants proceed to the next turn with very little gap. Longer gaps and silence should be avoided; when they occur, they are meaningful and are most of the time perceived as trouble [5,6,7].…”