Keywords

1 Noticing as a Social Accomplishment and a Means to Language Learning

Schmidt’s Noticing Hypothesis (1990, 1993, 1994, 1995) has been highly influential within Applied Linguistics over the past two and a half decades. Put simply, the hypothesis states that “(i)nput does not become intake for language learning unless it is noticed, that is, consciously registered” (Schmidt 2012: 27). The idea of noticing as an initial step towards language acquisition has repercussions for input, learning conditions, feedback and instruction, and has therefore been explored from a variety of psycholinguistic and cognitive perspectives (see Doughty 2001). In recognition of Firth and Wagner’s call for a greater emic sensitivity toward such fundamental SLA topics (Firth and Wagner 1997), this chapter aims to extend that work towards the notion of socially distributed cognition (Kasper 2009)—the notion that learning happens via interaction and that cognition can be located outside the head to the extent that is made visible to participants by and through talk, particularly in interaction that takes place beyond the walls of the classroom.

As it was originally conceived, Schmidt’s hypothesis treats noticing, attention and awareness as essentially private psychological phenomena, therefore rendering them inaccessible to the analyst or the other interactants in real time unless the speaker somehow makes them public via social interaction. However, noticing as an interactional accomplishment has also been studied from a Conversation Analytic (CA) perspective. Keisanen (2012), for example, investigated the way people in cars make use of “summonses, deictic terms, address terms, perceptual directives, and explanations” (p. 275) to accomplish noticings toward either the unfolding landscape outside or a textual artifact within the car. In CA, therefore, the focus is not on noticing only as a private cognitive state, but on the articulation of noticing (Schegloff 2007) and its consequences for the ongoing interaction. Schegloff (2007) states that “an interactional noticing need not be engendered by a perceptual/cognitive one. And many (perhaps most) perceptual/cognitive noticings do not get articulated interactionally at all” (87). More often, an articulated noticing is employed as a means of occasioning some other sort of action, and recipients treat it that way in the ongoing interaction.

Consider Excerpt (1), for example, taken from Pomerantz (1980).

Excerpt 1: Line Busy

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In line 5, the caller does a noticing that presumably relates to events that took place just prior to the call. However, “Yer line’s been busy” is not simply a noticing and nothing further than that. The receiver of the call treats it as the initiation of an account and rightly goes on to provide a reason for why the line was busy.

Likewise in Excerpt (2), which has been reproduced from Schegloff (1980), when Carol arrives back in her dorm room without the ice cream sandwich she has gone to buy, her friends notice and comment on it, and this leads to an explanation of why she did not buy the ice cream.

Excerpt 2: Ice-cream Sandwich (Taken from Schegloff 1980)

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In both cases the person who does the noticing is in the epistemic K- position (Heritage 2012), meaning that she possesses less knowledge about the noticeable matter than the recipient does. In addition, noticing something and articulating that noticing occasions an account, explanation or reason. S is not simply noticing the missing ice cream sandwich: by doing so she is also in effect asking Carol why she did not get one.

So from a CA perspective, noticing may be occasioned by a perceptual event, but is often treated as an interactional event. Noticing also serves to bring about joint attention and initiate collaborative orientation (Goodwin and Goodwin 2012). In mundane talk between people with differing language expertise, the noticing of a particular language item, such as a lexical, syntactic or pragmatic form, can lead the relative expert speaker to provide an explanation (see Eskildsen this volume). Consider for example the following interaction, taken from my dataset. Mom (who is American) and Shin (who is Japanese) are watching a cooking show in Japanese on YouTube.

Excerpt 3: Harmony

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In this case, Mom is the novice language user, and in fact she probably understands almost none of the Japanese in the video without the subtitles. However, when an English loanword appears in the Japanese commentary (l. 1) she repeats it (l. 2), which serves to articulate her noticing of the word and simultaneously topicalize that segment of the video. After a brief acknowledgement for Shin, Mom then clarifies which aspect of the word she is noticing by saying that the same word exists in English. As in Excerpts (1) and (2), this then leads Shin to give an account aligned to the noticing, suggesting that he has heard Mom’s noticing as a request for an account or an explanation.

From an interactional perspective then, the noticing of a word or a phrase has much in common with many other commonly found environmental noticings, even though the noticer’s attention may be drawn toward a spoken (and therefore auditory) manifestation of language rather than a visual one. Although most CA work on the practices of repair is framed in terms of initiation and enactment of repair (Schegloff et al. 1977), such initiation might also be thought of as the articulation of a noticing, particularly one that departs from the repair initiator’s current understanding. In doing so, the elements of the speaker’s private mind become publically available, interactionally scrutinizable and sequentially consequential for the ongoing talk.

In addition, as Eskildsen and Wagner (2015) have noted, “humans use the entire body to participate in socially organized processes of understanding and learning, which ultimately challenges a strict Cartesian division between mind and body. Instead, the mind is the body” (291). The practices of noticing therefore are revealed both through spoken and embodied interaction, via a collaborative focusing of attention (Eskildsen 2018; Eskildsen and Markee 2018, Jacknick and Thornbury 2013). For example, when a teacher makes a written mistake on the whiteboard or a projected screen, students orient to it in a bodily and visible manner through gaze shifts, smiles, and stares before they articulate that noticing by initiating correction (Kääntä 2014).

Focus on Form (FoF) is a well-known pedagogical approach related to Schmidt’s noticing hypothesis (Long 1991), which researchers have recently been reappraising from a CA perspective. Fasel Lauzon and Pekarek Doehler (2013), for example, investigated FoF in relation to corrections in an L2 French classroom to demonstrating how matters that applied linguists consider cognitive, such as attention focus or noticing, constitute a locally contingent process that becomes consequential for participants themselves through routinely recognizable practices of interaction—including repetitions, delays, repairs, and the like. CA researchers do not see noticing or focus on form as an individual endeavor (belonging solely to either the teacher or the learner), but as a joint accomplishment borne out through mutual adjustments and conjoint actions in the talk.

Although Schmidt’s noticing hypotheses originated from his observations of his own language learning in everyday situations outside the classroom (Schmidt and Frota 1986), Kasper and Burch (2016) point out that, ironically, much of the later research that it generated took place in the classroom rather than in the wild. Kasper and Burch use CA to examine how L2 users adopt the FoF approach in their everyday talk beyond the classroom. They demonstrate how momentary attention to lexical items or syntactic forms is occasioned and dealt with within and around other mundane actions. Their aim is “to make visible how, and with what consequences, the participants generate, sustain and abandon attention to language form through their coordinated actions in the ongoing social activity” (199–200). Such concerns are arguably less relevant to the sort of interaction that takes place in language classrooms, where a focus on language is an omnirelevant project, frequently allowing the teacher to initiate noticings about words that are made publically available for the benefit of a group of students (Waring et al. 2013) and leading to interactional trajectories that are accomplished collaboratively with the students according to the locally emergent context (Stoewer and Musk 2018) and developed “on-the-fly” (Mortensen 2011).

The current study is very much in keeping with this perspective. Its objective is to examine episodes of interactional noticing related to language form that take place “in the wild” (Hutchins 1995), such as in mundane conversation where neither speaker is pre-designated as a “teacher” and the main purpose of the talk is not language learning per se. In such episodes, noticing a lexical itemFootnote 1 located in the surrounding interaction can occasion a departure from the projected trajectory of the talk, momentarily putting it on hold while the participants orient to the noticing and the pursuant accounts and explanations that become procedurally consequential. The study will examine two extended episodes of such talk, one in which the noticing is occasioned by a chance reference to an environmentally available object and the other through the use of an unrecognized word. Both cases result in extended explanations of the noticed lexemes and the analysis will explore how the participants incorporate elements of the physical environment into these explanations and how they subsequently return to the noticed word in later talk, flagging it as a recently learned item.

2 Background to the Data

The study is based on interaction collected in two very distinct situations: (a) a Japanese student living with an American family in Seattle and (b) a Bolivian man having his haircut at a Japanese hair salon. Although the settings and the languages being used are quite different, such details are not of primary consequence to the study, since the focus on noticing lexical items is equally pertinent in either context. In fact, exploring the associated interactional practices in two diverse settings lends support to the universality of the target phenomenon (Schegloff 2006).

These excerpts have been taken from two broader data sets of L2 interaction. The first consists of 44 episodes of six Japanese learners of English communicating with host families in Australia and the US. The video-recordings were collected between 2012 and 2017 and comprise approximately 15 h of mundane interaction, mostly in dinner table settings. The second data set was collected in a Japanese hair salon and tracks the interaction between two stylists and four of their customers over a series of four monthly haircuts. Three of the four customers are novice users of Japanese (one Bolivian, one American and one Chinese), and the two Japanese stylists speak only limited English.

The study adopts a conversation analytic (CA) approach (Sidnell and Stivers 2013). The data have been transcribed according to the conventions developed by Gail Jefferson (2004a), and embodied aspects of the talk are indicated below the talk in a tier rendered in gray. Where it occurs, Japanese talk is represented in English over two tiers; a literal gloss and a vernacular translation. See the Appendix for further details.

3 Analysis

My analysis will focus on two kinds of word noticings and in particular on the way they are occasioned and how that leads to opportunities for learning in the wild. We will begin by looking at circumstances in which physical objects in the environment allow the novice to speculate on the meaning or origin of the word without direct information from the expert speaker. We will then examine situations in which a word from the surrounding talk is noticed by the novice and treated as unrecognized, via the processes of interactional repair.

3.1 Noticing Occasioned Through Reference to a Physical Object

The short segment of talk in this section is taken from around a dinner table in the US. Shin is a Japanese homestay student living with a host family in Seattle for 3 weeks. The aim of the analysis is to track the way Shin notices the word sliver and how this subsequently leads to a display of vocabulary learning. Since this involves an extended sequence of interaction, the transcripts and their analysis have been divided into several pertinent segments in order to trace the development of Shin’s learning. At the point we pick up the conversation, the family has been eating pizza for some time and there are only a couple of slices left. Mom has just cut one of the last pieces into three thin strips. She gives one strip to Gran and puts another on her own plate, meaning there is one thin piece as well as one whole piece left in the box as Mom goes to close it.

Excerpt 4.1: Sliver: Shin Notices a New Word

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Since Mom has cut one slice of the pizza into smaller strips and there is also still another full slice left, there are in effect two sorts of “last pieces”; a normal sized one and one that is a third the width of a normal slice. Therefore, when Dad formulates his request as I’ll take the last (l. 1), Mom initiates a clarification sequence by specifying the two choices to Dad, as the skinny one or the fat one?, pointing to each available piece with the knife as she does so (ll. 2–3). Dad then produces the word sliver twice, firstly in overlap with Mom in line 4, a turn segment that is hearable as the completion of his initial request, and then again in the clear in line 5. This self-repetition is undoubtedly related to the overlap (see Jefferson 2004b); however, Dad’s addition of the definite article the in the second version also formulates it as a response to Mom’s clarification initiation (in which she used the skinny one, the fat one), and also coincidently provides some further information about the word sliver for Shin—it is being used as a noun in this context. Mom then repeats sliver in line 6 as a form of receipt, making it clear that she has understood Dad’s choice (Greer et al. 2009).

In the next 1.5 s Shin tracks the knife with his gaze as Mom chooses the thinner piece of pizza and puts it on Dad’s plate. He has heard an unknown word used three times in quick succession, is normatively able to equate it with one of the two choices (skinny or fat) and observes that the piece that Dad has received is the thinner of the two. In short, he has had the opportunity to watch a word being used in context by two expert speakers and is in a position to make some logical assumptions about its meaning; he has physically noticed it, and perhaps formed a theory about its meaning. What matters from an interactional perspective is that he then articulates that noticing by saying sliver in line 9 with a rise-fall pitch pattern that marks it as an initiation of repair. In next turn Mom demonstrates that she hears it that way, by repeating the word along with a nod and a minimal uptake token. Finally, of note in this section is Shin’s sequence-closing acknowledgement token ahn in line 11, which displays his understanding that Mom has confirmed (at least) that he has heard the word correctly. In the next segment Shin tests out his theory with the expert English speakers around him.

Excerpt 4.2: Sliver: Shin Checks the Meaning

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Having confirmed his hearing of the target word and simultaneously accomplished an articulation of noticing , Shin immediately proceeds to offer a candidate understanding of the word’s meaning in line 12; skinny like u::h it means skinny. Mom’s description of the slice of pizza as ‘skinny’ (Excerpt 4.1, l. 2) becomes what Goodwin (2013) terms a substrate in that it appears in just-prior talk and is recycled to accomplish another action. In the next turn Mom and Dad both treat Shin’s turn as repair initiation, but in subtly distinct ways. In line 13, Mom’s yes seems to have a stand-alone finality to it—as if there is no need for further discussion—while Dad’s yeah in line 14 has a slightly tentative quality that leaves open the possibility of further talk.

In line 15, Shin gives a brief receipt token and then repeats the focal language item once more, possibly as a form of receipt but also one that affords him a further opportunity to pronounce it and commit it to memory. Even though he does not seem to be initiating further clarification, Mom does provide a short acknowledgement and for her the sequence may potentially end there. Dad, however, seems to be preparing to extend the talk in lines 19 and 22, but before he does, Shin produces one relatively quiet turn (l. 21) that seems to be directed primarily toward himself. Almost under his breath (and while raising a piece of pizza to his mouth), he says, I’m learning. This is an important turn because not only does it acknowledge that he has noticed the new language item, it also provides evidence that he is monitoring his learning progress. We will return to this turn below.

At this point it is worth considering again that the noticing is not an internal, individual process, but an externally shared one. Shin’s move to make the word sliver prominent prompted Mom and Dad to search for the significance of Shin’s repetition of that particular word at that particular point in time. It is therefore not only Shin’s noticing that matters, but also how the recipients treated his turn as a repair initiation through their interpretive actions. As one reviewer pointed out, when Shin reformulates sliver as skinny it is not just a psychological noticing that leads to “theory building” and then, “articulating that noticing”, but more that he is checking the reference “is this what you mean?” and “what is being referred to,” and this leads all three interactants to an occasion of teaching and learning.

Excerpt 4.3: Sliver: Dad Elaborates on the Focal Language Item

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At a point where Shin has made a claim of understanding of the focal item, Dad chooses to use this as a teaching moment by expanding on the talk and providing a further usage of the new word in the form of a spoken definition (Markee 1994). He explains that sliver can also refer to a small, thin piece of wood.Footnote 2 Initially he exploits another environmentally available physical resource, the wooden chair on which he is sitting, to illustrate the phrase piece of wood (ll. 22–26). Although Shin gives an enthusiastic uptake of this additional information in the next-turn, Dad immediately overlaps Shin’s acknowledgement to initiate a specification; since the side of the chair is fairly large (a diameter of more than 5 cm), it does not adequately fit the definition of sliver. In line 28 Dad uses his hands to qualify his description while reformulating the just-prior phrase a piece of wood to a very sma:ll piece of wood. Shin mirrors this gesture and gives an additional uptake token (l. 29–30).

Having conveyed the notion of sliver as a small piece of wood, Dad follows this up with an iconic gesture that further illustrates an important part of the meaning he is trying to convey—that the very small piece of wood is one that can get caught in your finger. He initially stabs the space between Shin and himself with his hand in a position that emulates holding something. He then formulates a turn that gets abandoned or at least is finished with a gesture rather than a word (see Olsher 2004 on embodied completion). The start of his turn specifies that the sliver gets in your and the gesture indicates that the absent object is hand. Shin once again indicates his understanding of this extra information and Dad repeats the focal item sliver once more (l. 34), along with the word yeah, which works to close down the sequence.

In sum, Dad has used an environmentally available physical object (the chair) to begin his explanation and refined it through embodied interactional practices, including gesture and improvised physical depiction. This explanation is the sort of account that we have seen follows episodes of noticing in Excerpts (1, 2 and 3), and in this instance it also takes on a teacher-like quality that highlights the participants’ relative interactional identities (see Antaki and Widdicombe 1998), in that both Dad and Shin treat such teaching as situatedly normative.

However, recall that Dad’s explanation also comes immediately after Shin has done a noticing of another kind—a noticing of his own learning in line 21. Since that noticing did not receive any specific uptake from the expert speakers, Shin then initiates a second version of it in the ongoing conversation in Excerpt (4.4).

Excerpt 4.4: Sliver

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As a kind of coda, Shin repeats the turn that he produced earlier, but in a way that is more firmly on record. After a significant gap of silence in line 35 (Excerpt 4.3) in which the topic could have potentially ended, in line 36 he self-selects to let out a long and audible sigh that seems to indicate satisfaction rather than disappointment. This is followed by an articulated noticing concerning his own language progress, I’m learning. Notice this is exactly the same as the turn he produced in line 21 (Excerpt 4.2), except that it is produced more audibly and in a slot in which his audience is more available to listen—Dad has finished the explanation he was preparing and Mom has finished handing out the pizza. In line 21, even though the noticing was public, the participants seem to treat it primarily as private talk, with neither Mom nor Dad commenting on it. In contrast, this second version in line 36 receives a reaction from both of them. Dad produces a simple agreement in next turn and Mom acknowledges it as well in line 40, although in a very different way, mildly rebuking Shin in a playful manner.

It is worth considering what the act of publically noticing a change in one’s own epistemic state is doing at this particular point of the conversation. Shin has already made it clear that he has learned the word as early as line 11, where he produced a change-of-state token (Heritage 1984). This constitutes his visceral reaction as he acknowledges the change from not-knowing to now-knowing (Schegloff 2007), and it is publically available to the other participants: they are aware that he has just learned the word. So in line 36 when he says I’m learning, Shin is doing more than just noticing, he is making that noticing relevant as a means of extending the talk. It can be normatively understood by the others that further on-topic talk is a relevant next action at this point—although it is not a first pair part (Schegloff 2007), it would be difficult to let a comment like this go without any acknowledgement at all. Turns can be potentially interpreted as having multiple pragmatic actions. By noticing his own progress, Shin may, for example, be “fishing for a compliment”, and indeed a compliment is one action that is missing from Mom and Dad’s talk up until this point. I’m learning could even be interpreted as a form of self-congratulation, in the absence of a compliment from others around the table.

Whichever the case, Dad at least acknowledges and agrees with Shin in next turn (Yes, you are). Shin receipts this through laughter that may provide evidence to suggest that he hears Dad’s turn as the sort of missing compliment he was looking for. Mom then formulates her response in a very different manner, with a joke-like warning not to forget a single thing. This is hearable as ‘doing being a teacher’, and thus acknowledges Shin’s learning, but in a way that more explicitly indexes his identity as a relative language novice. Far from the compliment Shin may have been looking for, Mom takes this as an opportunity to playfully admonish him, and it is perhaps this sequential disjunct that occasions the next-turn laughter from Dad and Gran. Notice that Shin’s laughter here is audibly later than the other two expert speakers and consists of just one brief pulse of laughter, which implies that he may not understand the joke.

In short this sequence shows us two ways of noticing a new vocabulary item, one a visceral interjection as soon as the noticing happens and the other a more thought-out formulation that can occur well after the appearance of the new word. In addition, we have seen how learning in the wild can be occasioned by the layered interplay between mundane talk, embodied interaction and physical objects that exist in the participants’ immediate environment. The two slices of pizza, Mom’s description of them and Dad’s choice reformulated as the focal item sliver, as well as the embodied actions of pointing and passing the thinner slice, all serve as affordances for enabling Shin to learn a new vocabulary item. A textbook could just as easily, or perhaps even more efficiently have included this word and its gloss in a list of vocabulary, but arguably Shin’s active engagement with the word in a real-life situation offers greater potential for learning the word and its uses. He puts forward his own theory of its meaning, which is confirmed by the expert speakers and then occasions an expanded explanation. Although it may be difficult to argue that learning has taken place here, Dad’s explanation is definitely a form of teaching, which suggests that Dad himself is orienting to Shin’s noticing of the word sliver as an opportunity for learning.

3.2 Noticing Occasioned Through the Use of an Unrecognized Word

As demonstrated in the previous section, an orientation to learning can be occasioned by a novice speaker noticing a label being applied to something within the physical context, but this is also intricately linked to the interactional context. Interaction gives rise to words, turns and sequences that learners may notice and orient to through the practices of repair.

This section will explore a similar practice in a completely different setting. In the following extended sequence of mundane talk, which takes place in a hairdresser in Japan, we will examine how a Bolivian learner of Japanese orients to a lexical item as unknown, and then later how the Japanese interlocutors orient to it as recently learned. The L2 speaker of Japanese, Emil, is having his hair cut by Yoh and his assistant, Yumi. Although the data are largely in Japanese, these participants often communicate in an interactional medium I have called a dual-receptive language alternation (Greer 2013), such that Yumi and Yoh speak in Japanese and Emil responds in English, which is his second but stronger language.

At the point where we begin our analysis in Excerpt (5.1), Yoh is comparing the weather in Japan and Bolivia. The focus of our analysis will be on how Emil notices and later recognizes the Japanese word shikke, which means moisture in the air or humidity. As with our discussion of sliver in the previous section, we will divide the interaction into meaningful sections in order to facilitate its analysis, and in this case those sections are also divided naturally by the participants themselves, as they do other things then later return to their discussion of the target word.

Excerpt 5.1: Emil Notices a Word

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In line 6, Yoh’s discussion of the weather leads him to use the word shikke (which means ‘damp air’ or ‘humidity’ or ‘moisture in the air’). He produces it twice in this turn, pausing after the first occasion and then incorporating the repeated version into the syntax of the ongoing sentence, a turn that is not particularly lexically or grammatically difficult. This may allow Emil to focus in on shikke as the only part of the sentence that he does not understand. Listening to it twice potentially affords him the opportunity to be sure that he has heard the pronunciation correctly. In line 7 then, when Emil repeats the word shikke with upward intonation he is other-initiating repair, but at its most fundamental level he is also noticing or paying attention to this lexical item as something unrecognizable to him, and then goes on to do a second, more explicit, version of this by asking What’s shikke? (l. 9). In Schmidt’s terms he is doing a confirmation check (Lyster 1998).

In line 10, and in overlap with Emil’s question, Yoh attempts to unpack the word by replacing it with a synonym, shitsudo (humidity), which is a more formal, slightly more scientific or bookish word that means roughly the same as shikke. However, Emil does not indicate any understanding of that word either (as evidenced by the 0.6 s gap in l. 11) and Yoh repeats his synonym with extended vowels, which suggests a display of thinking.

Yumi then self-selects in line 13 to proffer a related English word (‘water’) followed immediately by another Japanese word that might be considered within the same word family—(johki/‘steam’). She accompanies her delivery with iconic gestures that help to convey a sense of the word, raising her hands into the air to suggest that the water has floated away as she self-repairs to the word steam, then looking back to Emil to monitor his reaction.Footnote 3 Although this still does not elicit a response of recognition from Emil, it does get one from Yoh and leads him to produce a phonetically Japanese version of the English equivalent (schiimu/‘steam’) in line 14. Although Yumi does not appear to consider steam the most appropriate translation (based on her non-committal intonation and embodied display of doubt in l. 16), the word does enable Emil to make a guess of his own that eventually turns out to be correct—the word humiditeh in line 17. Note, however, that this is not an English word that either Yoh or Yumi appears familiar with and this leads them to consult the dictionary. Immediately after he formulates humiditeh in line 17, Emil tags it with a negatively-valenced confirmation initiator no? which displays his orientation toward his guess as being potentially wrong. In a slot where a response is sequentially due, Yumi does not provide any uptake to confirm or reject Emil’s candidate repair, and her head remains cocked to the side, suggesting she does not recognize this English word. In line 20, Yoh repeats the word humidity and in line 21 Yumi makes her display of non-understanding more concrete by verbalizing the message her physical stance has been projecting, saying I wonder if that is it while looking away. In short, the conversation has reached an impasse with neither party able to confirm the link between the two words in their preferred language. The problem is temporarily set aside by Yoh in line 22, when he perfunctorily admits that he also does not know the English word. He repeats Yumi’s just-prior turn then quickly directs her to look it up in the dictionary, a move that suspends the sequence so that he can direct Emil to the shampoo sink. It is worth noting, therefore, that all participants are not always equally invested in resolving trouble in any given instance of interaction. Yoh has multiple involvements in this talk (Raymond and Lerner 2014) and arguably he is first and foremost committed to cutting Emil’s hair rather than the small talk that goes on while he is doing that, whereas Yumi, who is not directly taking part in the haircut, is free to carry out the interaction with Emil. Their laughter in lines 23–26 attests to the relatively abrupt ending of this sequence, and Yumi goes to another room to look up the word shitsudo in an online dictionary and Yoh and Emil move to the shampoo chair for a period of time.

Throughout this sequence the participants have used a variety of means to explain the target word, including same-language synonyms, other-language equivalents and mimed approximations. However they also seem to be orienting to the problem as one entirely consisting of finding an equivalent lexical item—they make no effort to try to explain the word in a Japanese sentence, but instead simply give one-word answers. This may be a strategy that orients to Emil’s limited level of Japanese as well as Yumi and Yoh’s limited level of English.

The talk shown in Excerpt (5.2) takes place about 1 min later, when Emil’s shampoo is just about to start and Yumi has finished looking up the word shitsudo in an online dictionary and is able to confirm to Emil that it does indeed mean humidity. As shown in Fig. 1, she is approximately 5 m away from Emil at this point.

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Emil and Yoh are at the shampoo chair. Yumi is standing some distance away behind the mirror after having just looked up the word on her laptop

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Excerpt 5.2: Yumi Confirms the Meaning in English

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Since there has been a significant change in the physical and interactional participant constellation in the minute or so since the previous excerpt, Yumi’s first task is to renegotiate the participant framework so that she can re-enter the talk. She waits until a lapse in the talk between Yoh and Emil at line 7, then restarts the prior talk by marking it as such in line 8 with an upward-intoned incomplete TCU and waiting for Emil to acknowledge it. She then continues in line 10 by offering the Japanese word she has just searched for in the dictionary. In line 11 Yoh repeats this and shifts his gaze to Yumi, demonstrating that he is also aligning himself as a relevant recipient to whatever telling Yumi is projecting. Rather than attempting to pronounce the word humidity, however, in line 12 Yumi uses gestures and a simple English phrase to ask Emil to repeat the English word he said earlier, which he does in line 13 leading Yumi to then confirm that this is the word that she has found online. During the subsequent laughter, Yumi also produces the original trouble source shikke (l. 17) as well as multiple instances of the synonym shitsudo, indicating that she has looked up both of them and found that humidity is an adequate English equivalent for either. The sequence ends in line 23 as Yoh re-orients to his primary task of shampooing Emil’s hair, but this brief exchange demonstrates that both parties have undergone a change in their lexical understanding and that Emil now has at least passive knowledge of noticed word shikke and the lexical equivalent that it occasioned.

Finally, in Excerpt (5.3), we will consider a reoccurrence of this focal item, which takes place about 14 min later. Here the original word shikke again appears in a separate part of the conversation and Yoh marks it as a newly acquired word for Emil. By this time Emil and Yoh are back in the styling chair and have been comparing the two cities of Kobe and Kyoto.

Excerpt 5.3: Yoh Flags the Target Word as Just Learned

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In line 8, Yoh produces a sentence that is essentially the same as the one that originally caused the trouble for Emil: Kyoto wa shikke ga totemo ooi des (Kyoto has quite a lot of humidity). Recall that the turn that contained the original trouble source in Excerpt (5.1) was (nihon wa) shikke ga oi des kara (because Japan has a lot of humidity). The subject is different, but apart from an intensifier and a causal connective, the formulation is basically the same. However, notice that in line 9 Yoh inserts a parenthetical segment into the turn-in-progress (sakki no hanashi des kedo/‘as we said earlier’), which receives uptake from Emil in line 10. This serves to flag Yoh’s production of the target word shikke in next turn (l. 11), and this re-indexing of the item as “just learnt” is in itself a form of expert speaker-initiated noticing (see Eskildsen this volume). Emil gives an uptake token in line 13 and repeats the newly acquired word, indicating that he now recognizes the word and has perhaps learned it, at least in the short term. This allows Yoh to complete his turn-in-progress in line 16, but also shows their joint-orientation to the earlier sequences in which they arrived at mutual understanding through a prolonged process of interactional repair. This flagging then is also a sort of noticing, this time by Yoh, who notices that the word he is about to use is one that is new to Emil, and therefore may need extra time to process. As Brouwer and Wagner (2004) have shown, such cross-episodic comparisons of language use can prove beneficial in demonstrating development of interaction over time.

4 Concluding Discussion

Language learning is situated and attentionally gated (The Douglas Fir Group 2016), meaning that it takes place in a given sequential and social context and it is predicated on the learner noticing new language forms. This study has examined instances of mundane L2 talk in which the participants orient to language learning via the interactional practices of noticing. Such sequences are initiated when one speaker pays attention to an instance of language use, whether it is present in the just-prior talk or via some form of environmentally available target word. The learner’s noticing typically involves a repetition of the target lexical item which topicalizes it for the other participants. This can lead to further talk of the sort that is regularly seen in language classrooms, including explanations, alternative formulations and intersubjective repair (see Waring et al. 2013). The multi-modal analysis has examined the layered manner in which a variety of elements such as intonation, gaze, gesture , language choice, proxemics and physical artifacts co-occur with the talk to accomplish the noticing as an orientation to language learning. Epistemic asymmetries were temporally resolved, enabling novice learners to gain access to the lexical resources they require and locally ascribing the expert speaker with teacher-like qualities.

In the first instance, we witnessed how the novice language speaker noticed an unfamiliar word being applied to a particular object (a piece of pizza) and was able to infer the relevance of its distinguishing feature (its thinness) to the descriptor that was used. His articulated noticing made public his personal hypothesis about its meaning and led to further explanations of other usages of the same word that were delivered in relation to the sequential and physical environment. This suggests some of the ways in which language learning in the wild might differ from that in the classroom, where opportunities to make inferences about incidental language use in relation to descriptions of environmental objects can be limited or at best, artificial. It is worth recalling that both the expert and the novice treated the novice user’s noticing as an opportunity for language learning, implicitly (the expert) by responding with teacher-like explanations and explicitly (the novice) by saying I’m learning (Excerpt 4.2, l. 21 and Excerpt 4.3, l. 36).

In the second episode the noticing was also occasioned by the expert speaker’s use of a word that was unknown to the novice, but in this case it was not linked to any environmentally available object . As in the first case, the articulation of noticing was treated as an initiation of repair, and the expert speakers used a range of linguistic and non-verbal resources to enact repair. In addition to gestures, gaze and same-medium explanations through the use of Japanese synonyms, they also took advantage of known English words and eventually confirmed the meaning via the use of an online dictionary. This suggests that the original noticing leads to language exchange, not just one-sided teaching—Yumi and Yoh learned the word humidity while teaching Emil shikke and shitsudo—a situation derived from the multilingual competences they used to address the interactional trouble. Moreover, this language exchange later led one of the speakers to interactionally flag the word as newly learned when it appeared in subsequent conversation.

Finally, the analysis has shown that articulated noticing is an integral element of socially-distributed cognition , suggesting that a good deal of what goes on when we think, hypothesize and learn takes place outside the mind and within the process of interaction. Even though the noticing itself may have been initiated by one of the parties, once articulated publically it results in joint attention and is co-constructively resolved.