Doing the Daily Routine: Development of L2 Embodied Interactional Resources Through a Recurring Classroom Activity

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the intricate relationship between situated embodied actions, social classroom practices, and second language (L2) learning as an important emerging issue in CA perspectives on classroom discourse and interaction. I investigate how a series of classroom activities becomes established as a recurring routine and how a beginning L2 speaker, Carlos, develops interactional competence in and through that routine. The data show that as Carlos is engaging in the teacher-led work to establish a daily routine consisting of name card distribution, taking attendance, and writing “yesterday’s, today’s, and tomorrow’s dates” on the whiteboard, he is employing and routinizing a range of embodied, interactional, and linguistic resources needed to volunteer, write, account, as well as elicit volunteers and index an upcoming activity in the L2. The study not only substantiates L2 learning as a usage-based process, anchored in meaningful interaction, but suggests that the semiotic resource known as “language” is a residual of social sense-making practices.

1 Introduction

Dating back to ground-breaking work in the 1990s (Markee 1994; Firth and Wagner 1997), the field of second language acquisition (SLA) research has witnessed an outcrop of theories and models that converge on the concept of language as a tool for social action and hold its learning to be fundamentally rooted in people’s social and interactional realities (Douglas Fir Group 2016; Eskildsen and Cadierno 2015; Firth and Wagner 2007; MacWhinney 2015; Pekarek Doehler and Pochon-Berger 2015). Moreover, with the pervasive use of video-data, SLA researchers are becoming increasingly aware in that language and language learning are fundamentally embodied (Eskildsen and Wagner 2013, 2015, 2018; Hellermann et al. 2019; Kunitz 2018; Lilja and Piirainen-Marsh 2019b; Majlesi 2018; Markee 2008; Markee and Kunitz 2013; McCafferty and Stam 2008; Mori and Hayashi 2006; Seyffidinipur and Gullberg 2014; Streeck et al. 2011; Thorne and Hellermann 2015).

Speaheading this social, interactional and embodied turn of the field of SLA, a conversation-analytic branch of SLA (CA-SLA) has emerged from being an outsider’s perspective to taking center-stage in the field (Eskildsen and Markee 2018). CA-SLA takes a participant-relevant perspective to investigate learning in terms of socially visible and co-constructed processes and practices (Eskildsen 2018a; Eskildsen and Majlesi 2018; Firth and Wagner 2007; Lilja 2014; Markee and Kasper 2004; Pekarek Doehler 2010; Sahlström 2011; Theodórsdóttir 2018) and seeks out and traces L2 development in terms of interactional competence, that is methods to accomplish social actions (Brouwer and Wagner 2004; Eskildsen 2011, 2017, 2018c; Hall 1995; Hall et al. 2011; Pekarek Doehler and (Pochon)-Berger 2015, 2018). In a recent study of second language (L2) learning and interaction, Eskildsen and Markee (2018) showed through meticulous analyses of participants’ visible orientations (i.e., their constant displays of their current ecologically mediated thinking through verbal and bodily actions) how teaching, explaining, understanding, and learning are accomplished in ways that are embodied and fundamentally co-constructed and which cannot be reduced to any one constituent turn-at-talk. People do not just speak one-on-one; they weave the fabric of intersubjectivity together as they act and react through talking, enacting, pointing, nodding, gaze-shifting etc. These actions, which play into language teaching and learning, are achieved in ways that ultimately rest on contingencies in the local ecology (cognition is embedded), bodily actions (cognition is embodied), and fundamentally collaborative practices that cannot be attributed to any one individual mind (cognition is socially shared and extended). The present study continues this line of research as it reveals that Carlos, a beginning L2 speaker, is learning, or routinizing, a range of specific semiotic resources as he participates in the construction of the classroom activity as a routine and in the local accomplishment of its constituent components.

2 Classroom Interaction

Since Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) identified a specific recurring interactional pattern consisting of teacher-initiation, learner-response, and teacher-feedback (the IRF-sequence), research on classroom interaction has become extremely varied, as attested by the magnitude of the recent handbook of classroom discourse and interaction (Markee 2015). Qualitative researchers have argued that the IRF-sequence is not particularly conducive to learning (Hall and Walsh 2002; van Lier 2000; Waring 2008) because it limits the possible actions of the L2 learner. Classroom research drawing on conversation analysis (CA) has shown that the format itself is empirically dubious because it does not capture the dynamics of classroom interaction, especially with respect to the action carried out by the teacher in the third turn (Lee 2007), and because classroom discourse extends far beyond the IRF-sequence; classroom language learning does not only happen in teacher-student dyads, but in all kinds of exchanges in the classroom; that is, student-student interactions, interactions between multiple students, student-material interactions etc. (e.g., Eskildsen 2017; Hellermann 2008; Hellermann and Cole 2009; Koole 2007; Kunitz 2018; Kunitz and Skogmyr Marian 2017; Markee and Kunitz 2013; Mondada and Pekarek-Doehler 2004; Olsher 2003; Lilja and Piirainen-Marsh 2019a; Seedhouse 2004; Sert 2015). This chapter focuses on a recurring, teacher-led activity in one classroom. In that activity, the teacher predominantly addresses the students collectively, but the students do not necessarily orient to the activity in the same way as will be shown in the analyses.

3 L2 Interactional Competence

The research reported here is in lineage with CA research on L2 interactional competence (See the detailed discussion of interactional competence in Pekarek Doehler this volume). This research has been concerned with exploring L2 speakers’ interactional competence, that is methods of accomplishing specific actions, such as repair, turn openings and closings, story-telling, dispreferred responses, and how those methods change over time (e.g., Barraja-Rohan 2015; Brouwer and Wagner 2004; Hall et al. 2011; Pekarek Doehler 2018; Pekarek Doehler and (Pochon-)Berger 2015, 2018). In a recent special issue of Classroom Discourse (Sert et al. 2018), the notion of interactional competence was scrutinized (Eskildsen 2018b; Hall 2018; Hellermann 2018), investigated empirically (Hellermann 2018; Pekarek Doehler 2018) and discussed with respect to pedagogical implications (Waring 2018). Hall (2018) argued for a terminological change and an adoption of the notion of interactional repertoires in research dealing with what people are actually learning (relatedly, see Markee 2019). Her argument, developed further in a book-length publication (Hall 2019), is that interactional competence is part of the human condition and therefore, as a concept, is inapt for capturing the dynamics of L2 learning. However, interactional competence as a term used in L2 studies has been defined as something inherently dynamic, changing, and in constant calibration in response to ecological changes. This research redefines the term competence itself, it could be argued. In the present chapter, I have used the terms – interactional competence and interactional repertoires – interchangeably because competence, along these lines, is the interactional repertoires that sustain it. My own research, coming as I do from a background in usage-based linguistics, has taken a more traditional standpoint on competence as its point of departure, namely individualistic aspects of the development of a linguistic inventory put to use for communicative purposes. It has, however, evolved into what Pekarek Doehler (2018) described as an “interactional usage-based approach”, as it has become increasingly clear, through empirical investigations of L2 learning over time, that what people are learning is more aptly captured in terms of “language as a semiotic resource for social action” (Eskildsen 2018b, c, 2020; Eskildsen and Cadierno 2015; Eskildsen and Kasper 2019; Eskildsen and Markee 2018). That is, people experience linguistically packaged ways of accomplishing specific social actions and reuse these for the same and related purposes over time, which then forms the backbone of their emergent, constantly calibrated interactional competence.

Conversation analytic work on gesture and other embodied behavior, for example gaze (e.g. Sert 2019), handling of objects, and uses of technology (see Musk this volume, for an example of how CA may be used to understand how corrections are achieved in computer-mediated collaborative writing) in L2 learning and interaction has also been very prolific over the last decade. This research has shown that embodied behavior is an integral part of L2 interactional competence. When people perform social actions, such as completing turns-at-talk, doing word searches, establishing recipiency, displaying willingness to participate, opening and closing sequences, requesting, instructing, explaining, noticing, planning, focusing on form, accounting and displaying ongoing understanding, they do so in ways that are fundamentally embodied and not restricted to the modality of ‘talk’ (e.g., Belhiah 2013; Burch 2014; Eskildsen and Markee 2018; Eskildsen and Wagner 2013, 2015, 2018; Evnitskaya and Berger 2017; Greer 2019; Hall and Looney 2019; Hayashi 2003; Kasper and Burch 2016; Kunitz 2018; Lilja 2014; Lilja and Piirainen-Marsh 2019b; Markee and Kunitz 2013; Mori and Hasegawa 2009; Mori and Hayashi 2006; Mortensen 2011, 2016; Olsher 2004; Seo 2011; Seo and Koshik 2012; Markee and Kunitz 2013; Sert 2015). In the present study, I bring research on L2 interactional competence and embodied actions in L2 talk together to trace changes in Carlos’ embodied and verbal resources for social action in a recurring activity in an American English-as-a-second-language (ESL) classroom.

4 Data and Analysis

The data source for the present study is the Multimedia Adult English Learner Corpus (MAELC). Constructed as a collaboration between Portland State University (PSU) and Portland Community College (PCC), it consists of more than 3600 h of audio-visual recordings of ESL classroom interaction. The classrooms in which the recordings were made were equipped with video cameras, and students were given wireless microphones on a rotational basis; the teacher also wore a microphone. There were six ceiling-mounted cameras in each classroom, two of which were controlled by operators and followed the two microphone-assigned students (Reder 2005; Reder et al. 2003). Classroom activities include grammar tasks, reading and writing tasks, speaking and listening exercises, and they are a balanced mix of dyadic pair work, group work, teacher-fronted activities, and so-called free movement tasks where students move around the classroom and do spoken tasks with each other (Hellermann 2008). The students and teachers in the MAELC database all signed consent forms, agreeing to the data and images from the data being used for research purposes, and the research based on the data was approved by PSU’s Human Subjects Research Review Committee.

The particular data used here are centered on Carlos (pseudonym), an adult Mexican Spanish-speaking learner of English. Carlos had been in the United States for 21 months prior to joining this ESL program, and he progressed successfully through the four levels, from beginner (SPL 0–2) to high intermediate (SPL 4–6; Reder 2005), assigned to the classes by Portland Community College (PCC). Carlos has been a focal student in many of my prior publications (e.g., Eskildsen 2012, 2015, 2017, 2018c; Eskildsen and Wagner 2015, 2018; Eskildsen et al. 2015), and he was originally chosen because he attended PCC from 2001–2005 (although not consistently; see Eskildsen 2017), which enables long-term investigations of his L2 learning. Moreover, he is a highly active student who often engages in encounters with the teacher and his fellow students and takes an active role in the organization of the classroom activities. This is also evident in some of the teacher’s comments in the data used here. Carlos lived in Oregon at the time of recording and I know from classroom talk that he had different jobs at different points in time and that he had been trained as an appliance repair man in Mexico. In addition, I expect him to have interacted with locals in his daily life outside of the classroom, but unfortunately, I do not have access to those interactions. The data used here, therefore, are exclusively classroom data.

The analyses focus on the establishment of a “daily routine” in the classroom consisting of three components: (1) handing out name tags; (2) taking attendance; and (3) writing the dates of today, yesterday, and tomorrow on the whiteboard. It is a routine in which the entire class participate, but the focus of the analysis is on Carlos and his changing participation in the routine over time. The data used here span 8 months beginning from Carlos’ first day in class. Table 1 presents an overview of the chronology of the extracts and their respective points of interest.

Table 1 Overview of extracts

The first extract comes from the first day of the term and, in fact, the first day of recording in the classroom. Prior to the extract the students have been taking attendance; i.e., checking their names on a poster (picture 1). When the last student, Gabriel, has checked his name, the teacher turns to face the class, asking what day it is (lines 1–3).

Extract 1: Sep 27, 2001. The Daily Routine Before It Is Established

Her question results in the class responding in a non-orchestrated choir (lines 4–6). Although multiple students are speaking at the same time, we can discern some approximations of the word “Thursday”, pronounced as “toorsday” (i.e., with /t/ instead of /θ/ and (roughly) with /ʊə/ instead of /ɜ:/). The teacher’s next move is to ask for a volunteer to write “it” on the board. She begins orienting physically to the board as well as to the act of writing on the board as she moves towards the board uncapping a whiteboard marker (line 7). Following a pause (line 8), she reformulates her request (line 9), now standing by the board (line 9, picture 2). Carlos answers the teacher’s request through embodied behavior as he simply gets up and walks to the board (line 10) (see also Majlesi this volume; Kunitz this volume, in which the analytic interest is how students’ moving around the classroom has an impact on participants’ verbal behaviors). The teacher’s comment in response is a remark on Carlos’ participation in classroom activities that is treated by the class as a laughable (lines 11–13). Carlos’ action, however, is successful; the teacher recognizes it as volunteering as she gives him the marker and asks him to write the date (lines 14–16).

Carlos, however, writes the question what is today? instead of the date (not shown). So he has demonstrably understood that it was time to volunteer to carry out an act of writing on the board, but he has not understood the teacher’s instruction concerning what to write. I note that the teacher’s request for a volunteer to write on the board was deeply embodied in addition to the verbal request for someone to write; she oriented physically to the whiteboard, she uncapped the marker, she pointed to the whiteboard with the marker. As such, her embodied conduct elaborated and enhanced those parts of her request, whereas her instruction to write the date was done more vaguely, initially through deictic “it” and subsequently with her back to her recipient (line 16, pictures 4 and 5). Carlos’ understanding of the teacher’s actions seems crucially dependent on her bodily conduct.

In this first extract, for all practical purposes, the writing of today’s date on the whiteboard could not be considered more than a singular activity that took place there and then. Carlos’ participation, while relevant and central to the achievement of the activity as a collaborative enterprise, was purely non-verbal. However, in the following class, 4 days later, the teacher visibly begins constructing this activity as part of a daily routine (Extract 2). Just prior to the extract, the teacher has written the components of the daily routine on the whiteboard under the header “every day” (picture 6). In the picture she is writing “write the date” as the third component, and in the ensuing talk she uses the inscription as reference as she is indexing the activity of writing the date as part of a daily routine, i.e., “the next thing we need to do” (line 1) (the first ones being the students placing their name cards in front of them on their desks and taking attendance, points 1 and 2 on the teacher’s list). Sequentially, the next lines have a format that is very similar to the one found 3 days prior; the teacher asks what day it is, twice in slightly difffering ways, and the students respond (lines 2–6).

Extract 2: Oct 1, 2001. Establishing the Daily Routine

Following a confirmation check sequence (lines 7–8), the teacher specifically asks for a volunteer to write the date for Monday on the board (line 9). In the light of this action and the teacher’s indexing the upcoming task as “the next thing we need to do” (line 1), we can infer that her actions so far have concerned eliciting volunteers. The confirmation check (“Monday?”) in line 7 is not the teacher displaying uncertainty as to what day it is; rather, it is an unsuccesful attempt at getting students to recognize that a volunteer is needed. This does not happen, though, until the teacher specifically asks for a volunteer (line 9) which results in overlapping responses from two students, Katarina and Carlos; Katarina gets up and begins walking towards the board, and Carlos raises his hand (lines 11–12). The way the class is configured and the envorinmentally occasioned behavior of the participants influence what happens next: Carlos is sitting in front of Katarina so he cannot see that she has volunteered and is already on her way to the board (lines 11–12). The teacher is also currently focusing away from Katarina (she is struggling to uncap a whiteboard marker). This lack of orientation to the students’ actions may explain her one-word repetition in line 13, which is probably another attempt at eliciting student participation; she has not noticed, at this point, that Katarina is already responding.

Carlos then verbally expresses his agency to volunteer (line 14). This can be heard as a response to the teacher’s turn at line 13 as well as an upgrade of his embodied volunteering at line 12. The teacher’s next action deals with the responses from both Katarina and Carlos. The turn-initial change-of-state token (Heritage 1984) suggests that she only now sees that Katarina has volunteered, and she then goes on to reject Carlos’ volunteering (lines 14–16). She also designs her rejection, a dispreferred response, in a mitigated fashion (preceeded by ah) and she ultimately accounts for it as well by recourse – again – to Carlos’ participation in the classroom activities. Following this (not shown), another student volunteers to write on the board, which the teacher acknowledges.

Looking at the language used in the first two extracts, I note, for reasons that will become clear, that the teacher uses “can” and “want” to elicit volunteers: “can someone go and write…” (Extract 1) and “who wants to write…” (Extract 2). I also note that the students are allowed to participate in the volunteering without using verbal language. They raise their hands or simply walk to the whiteboard. Carlos’ “I can”, the only instance of verbal language production in the volunteering on the part of the students, sits sequentially after his first display of willingness to volunteer (he raised his hand) and is employed because the teacher has not reacted to his embodied volunteering. Carlos’ “I can”, then, is an upgrade of the embodied volunteering and is oriented to by the teacher as requiring response; she accounts for not nominating him as he declares his willingness to participate.

Another 3 days later, the teacher begins referring to this series of activities as the daily routine (Extract 3a). Prior to this interaction (not shown due to space considerations), she has already referred to the activity as “the daily routine” and asked the students “what do we do” and “what’s the first thing we do”. Getting no response, she begins explaining (Extract 3a, line 1) by recourse to the components of “the daily routine”, now printed on a transparency film and hung on the whiteboard (pictures 10–11).

Extract 3a: Oct 4, 2001. Explaining the Daily Routine

Her explanation is delivered in slow speech (“daily is every day, routine is something you do every day”, lines 1–2), following which she begins summarizing the list-so-far as she asks the students if they have done the first activity, to which the (obvious) answer is yes (line 4). Next she moves on to the second point, taking attendance, which the students do, and the teacher ticks it off on her list (not shown). She then gets to the third point of the daily routine, namely to write the dates for today, yesterday and tomorrow. Having reminded the students that this is the next step, she leaves the whiteboard and walks to the other side of the room to another whiteboard, uttering “okay the date for today” (Extract 3b, line 1). This results in a range of responses from various students (lines 2–11) during which the teacher writes a capital T on the whiteboard (line 3).

Extract 3b: Oct 4, 2001. “I can write”

Although the students co-produce a factually correct response (“today is Tuesday”, lines 3–10), the teacher does not seem to acknowledge it. Instead, her next action, purely embodied, is to walk across the room in front of the students, waving the whiteboard marker and gazing away from the students (picture 12). Carlos then responds by raising his hand and volunteering verbally (line 12). The teacher moves toward another whiteboard, still waving the marker, and finally she turns around to face the class (line 15). By then Carlos has gone to the whiteboard. He repeats his intent to volunteer (line 15) which the teacher now acknowledges (she gives him the marker, line 17), making a similar kind of comment as in the previous examples. It is through Carlos’ response here and the teacher’s acknowledgment of it that we know that the teacher’s actions, verbal and embodied, were aimed at eliciting volunteers and that Carlos has understood that somebody was expected to volunteer.

If we compare the sequential unfolding of Extracts 3a and 3b with the sequence identified in the first two extracts, there has been a change in that the teacher’s elicitation of volunteers is purely embodied, but all the same actions recur. The build-up to the recurring action sequence is much more elaborate this time, as the teacher explicitly constructs and conveys the components of the routine as a scaffold to get to the writing of the dates. I also note that Carlos’ use of “I can write” becomes relevant only in this particular sequence, when his own embodied volunteering goes unnoticed by the teacher, and before the teacher has selected another student or acknowledged another student’s volunteering. Carlos’ use of “I can write” is therefore occasioned in a way that presupposes an understanding of the social practice he is participating in and, through his participation, co-constructing: to do what he does he needs to understand that volunteering to write is relevant and that “I can write” can be used to express such volunteering – and in turn his actions become essential in the sequential co-construction of the activity in the sense that his volunteering, when endorsed by the teacher, is the action that reveals her first action as an attempt to elicit student volunteers.

In the next class 4 days later, the teacher explicitly holds the students accountable for knowing what the routine is (Extract 4, line 1). In the omitted lines she comments on her microphone before she asks the students what the routine is, while finding the transparency film and sticking it to the whiteboard (lines 2–3).

Extract 4: Oct 8, 2001. Routine as Accountable Competence

No response is immediately forthcoming from the students, but slowly they begin doing the stepwise routine as presented on the transparency film with no further instructions from the teacher. The students now seem to recognize the sequence of activities in the routine and to be able to carry it out.

Another three days later, on Oct 11, the teacher again takes the transparency film from under the overhead projector and sticks it to the whiteboard. She then gives the name cards to a student who begins passing them around without any instruction. The teacher then draws attention to the next activity in the routine by pointing to the transparency film and, preceded by musical onomatopoeia delivered in a sing-song fashion, asking “what’s this?” (Extract 5a, line 1). One student responds “check” and Carlos expresses agreement, it seems (lines 2–3). Next, what Carlos says sounds like “I gonna check” (line 4), but he remains seated and makes no indication that he is about to actually go and check his name. The teacher hears Carlos’ words, as testified by her repetition, perhaps a recast (line 5), but she is not orienting to his action as volunteering: her next action is to nominate Rosario to check the names (line 7), but she declines (omitted lines).

Extract 5a: Oct. 11, 2001. “I can write” – “I go check”.

The teacher then asks the students, somewhat playfully, what is wrong and continues by suggesting that everybody is tired because of the rain (lines 8–11). Meanwhile, Carlos gets up (line 9). In his following turn he volunteers verbally (lines 10–12) to write, using “I can write”. Following some general classroom talk (omitted lines), the teacher hands Carlos a pen (picture 13). Carlos, however, does not immediately accept the pen (line 14). Instead he points to the name board (picture 14) and, while pointing downwards (picture 15), he says “the name?” (line 15), with rising intonation, which the teacher understands as a question. She responds with a “well” (line 16), indicating a dispreferred response, and shifts gaze to the whiteboard (line 16), which becomes the focus of shared attention between her and Carlos. Carlos then begins formulating an alternative while orienting to the routine on the board (line 17, picture 16) in response to which the teacher asks what he thinks (line 18). Her increment, which one, indicates her alignment with Carlos’ formulation of having alternative options, while making it clear that the options are also limited to the confines of the activities of the daily routine. Carlos hesitates (line 19), and the teacher’s next action, an elaboration, which one is next (line 20), prompts a confirmation check from Carlos (the next?, line 21) and a confirmation from the teacher (uhuh, line 22). Focusing on the list, the teacher and Carlos ultimately agree that name checking is next and Carlos carries out the task (lines 23–25, pictures 17–20).

I note that Carlos changes his language as his task changes. It starts with him volunteering to write as part of the routine of writing the dates on the whiteboard, but his course of action does not seem to be aligned with that of the teacher. The first sign of this is when he declines her offer to take the pen (line 14). Here he seems to become aware that the teacher does not want him to write anything, but to take attendance as he says “the name?” with rising intonation. Carlos’ gestures at this moment are interesting; his pointing to the name board elaborates his understanding of what the teacher is trying to get him to do, but the downward pointing is not straightforwardly interpretable. He could be pointing to the pen that the teacher is holding because this pen is different from the whitebord markers in the classroom and cannot be used to write on the boards. When the teacher and Carlos orient to the order of activities on the list of components of the routine, he shows verbally that he is no longer going to “write” but “check names” instead because the other students have not yet checked their names, only he himself has. His turn “only I go check” is either a comment to this state of affairs and thus a display of his understanding of why it is necessary to check people’s names, or it could be an expression of accepting the teacher’s nomination to check students’ names on the attendance board.

In other words, “I can write” is for Carlos a routine to volunteer to do writing, no more and no less, at least as far as the present data are concerned. When he is not volunteering, other linguistic resources become relevant. What started out as an act of volunteering to write on the whiteboard becomes a negotation with the teacher on what to do; referring to the order of activities and using language associated with the task at hand, Carlos shows the teacher that he understands that taking attendance is the next thing to be done. “Check names” may be an obvious phrase associated with the daily routine, but as will be shown next, Carlos seems to be learning other linguistic resources in this recurring environment.

About 10 min later the teacher moves on to the next item on the list. That this is what she is doing is apparent from the students’ responses (Rosario and Carlos, lines 7–9). Until that point she has only indicated that they are not done yet, pointed to the list and knocked on the board (lines 1–3).

Extract 5b: Oct. 11, 2001. “the next is…”

Together, Rosario, Carlos, and the teacher establish that the next thing is today’s date (lines 7–11), following which the teacher begins uncapping a board marker. Note in particular the co-construction accomplished by Carlos and Rosario in lines 8–9 (“the next is today’s Tuesday”). This line shows that they have moved closer to an understanding of the activity as a daily routine based on a pre-specified order of components. Participating in the accomplishment of routine thus becomes a resource for Carlos’ learning of “the next” in the sequential ordering of things; the two uses in Extracts 5a and 5b are the first occurrences in his data and they happen in this recurring environment in which the teacher has used it repeatedly on previous occasions.

The rest of the sequence is exclusively embodied; the teacher seems to be on her way to select Rosario (line 11), but Carlos volunteers by getting up, en route exchanging a smiling gaze with Rosario (line 12) which indicates that they are somehow sharing this moment, and the teacher accepts his volunteering by shifting her gaze toward him (line 13) and preparing to hand him the marker. Finally he takes the pen and begins writing.

Another 4 days later, on October 15, Carlos and Rosario are already doing the routine when the recording begins (Extract 6). They are standing by the whiteboard (picture 21), having written the dates for today and tomorrow, when Carlos asks for a new volunteer to write yesterday’s date. He knows the routine very well by now, it seems, and there is a possibility that he has picked up the question format from the teacher’s use of similar formats in the previous “daily routine” executions.

Extract 6: Oct. 15, 2001. Carlos Running the Routine: “who wan write”?

One week later, on October 22, Rosario and Alejandro are volunteering to write on the whiteboard. The teacher assigns “today” to Alejandro and asks Rosario whether she wants to do yesterday or tomorrow (lines 1–3, Extract 7). Rosario answers by attempting to suggest what day tomorrow is, in response to which the teacher makes an embodied claim of no knowledge (lines 5–6). Meanwhile, Carlos gets up and approaches the whiteboard and the teacher uttering the word yesterday while raising his hand (lines 4–7). This is a response to the teacher’s question (lines 1–3), but the teacher is “doing being literal” as she orients to it as a continuation of Rosario’s turn at line 5. This prompts Carlos to account for his actions – he wants to write yesterday (line 9), which the teacher acknowledges (lines 10–11). Rosario eventually gets up to write tomorrow’s date (not shown).

Extract 7: Oct. 22, 2001. “I write yesterday”

The interesting thing in this extract is Carlos’ on-going calibration of his interactional repertoire. He is not saying “I can write”, which he has been using in the daily routine to display willingness to volunteer, because that is not what he is doing here. Instead, he is expressing disagreement with the teacher (“no”) and accounting for his behavior (“I write yesterday”). The data have shown, among other things, how the linguistic expression “I can write” has become a routine for Carlos for carrying out a particular action in a specific, recurring sequential environment. The data do not only provide positive evidence for this through the examples in which Carlos is using “I can write”, they also show that Carlos is using other linguistic resources for other, related purposes (“I go check”; “no, I write yesterday”), and that he seems to be picking up other linguistic resources for social action en route (“the next”; “who wan write”).

The learning of “I can write” can still be traced 6 months later¹ (Extract 8). In this extract the teacher is calling upon two students to volunteer (line 1). However, she is also orienting to the pen in her hand (here’s one, line 1) while looking for a second one (line 3). Carlos, in line 4, then responds to both the question about the whereabouts of the pen (I don’t know) and to the teacher’s call for two volunteers (I can write). Meanwhile another student, Gabriel, who has begun walking toward the teacher, is selected and although Carlos still shows interest in volunteering (not shown), the teacher selects another student who does not volunteer as often as Carlos.

Extract 8: May 17, 2002. “I can write”

5 Conclusions

Viewing sense-making, understanding, and learning as fundamentally social processes that take place as observable phenomena in real-time interaction, I have investigated how a beginning L2 speaker, Carlos, expresses his willingness to volunteer in a recurring activity in an ESL classroom. His participation requires knowledge of classroom practices as well as the ability to put particular semiotic resources to use in order to participate in the communication surrounding the writing activities, not to mention the L2 capacities to do the writing. The data have shown that, as Carlos is engaging in the recurring classroom routine, he is learning the embodied, interactional, and linguistic resources needed to volunteer, write, account, designate next activity, elicit volunteers as well as index a relevant upcoming action in the L2.

The study has not only substantiated L2 learning as a fundamentally usage-based process, anchored in meaningful interaction, but suggests that the semiotic resource known as “language” is a residual of social sense-making practices. This, of course, is quite a statement and it warrants qualification. In the paper where Extract 8 was originally used, I traced Carlos’ use of can-constructions. The data revealed that “I can write” was the primordial expression from which other can-uses emerged and that it was used exclusively in situations where Carlos volunteers to write on the communal board. Even though the database has been expanded since then (cf. Eskildsen 2012, 2015), this finding still holds with the refinement that, in the extracts shown here, Carlos’ first can-use was the interrupted “I can-” (Extract 2). Here, however, I am more interested in the close relationship between the expression “I can write” and the action that it accomplishes which is to express volunteering that has not yet been noticed by the teacher. In the examples shown, the teacher accepts embodied displays of volunteering and Carlos only uses “I can write” when that embodied volunteering has not been publicly acknowledged by the teacher.

This, on the other hand, has implications for linguistic theory (Eskildsen and Kasper 2019). Can is a modal verb that is often associated with the meanings ‘know how to’, ‘be able to’ or something that denotes a possibility, but these definitions all fall short here. Instead, meaning is inherently indexical, that is fundamentally context-dependent (Sealey and Carter 2004); “I can write” is situated in a practice from which the expression derives its meaning of volunteering. Isolating can from the expression and the practice yields an impoverished and therefore misleading description of its semantics. Linguistic patterns are “routinized ways to implement actions” (Thompson and Couper-Kuhlen 2005) and therefore a comprehensive account of linguistic meaning needs to consider the relationship between linguistic expressions and the actions they help speakers accomplish (Eskildsen 2020, Eskildsen and Kasper 2019).

Moreover, the data have shown how the teacher has constructed a daily routine – and taught it to the students – out of the practices of handing out name cards, taking attendance, and writing today’s, yesterday’s and tomorrow’s dates on the whiteboard. The students have gradually shown their recognition of the practices as a routine and learned to carry it out. In the remaining classroom sessions during that term, the students (predominantly without Carlos as volunteer) did the routine when prompted by the teacher’s instructions, verbal and embodied. The practice and its learning are socially co-constructed, deeply embedded and embodied, as noted, and Carlos’ verbal learning concerned not only “I can write”, which becomes established as a recurring multiword expression with a recurring function (Eskildsen 2009). There is in fact evidence to suggest that Carlos is learning phrases associated with the routine (“check names”) but he also seems to be learning to use the phrase “the next” to designate upcoming activities in a sequence of events; the instances of that phrase shown here are the first two in Carlos’ data and the first one is a repeat of the teacher’s prior turn which underlines the locally contextualized nature of language learning. Over the following months Carlos diversifies his uses of this epxression to also denote the next entity in a series of things.

“Who wan write” is also a phrase that Carlos seems to be picking up in and through the interactions he engages in as a part of this daily routine. It is fair to suggest that his participation in this routine in which the teacher has been using the phrase “who wants to write” has helped him routinize this expression. This, in turn, seems to evolve into the phrase “I wanna write” in Carlos’ learning trajectory. Finally, the data have indicated that Carlos is calibrating, or fine-tuning, his interactional repertoire as his participation in the daily routine changes over time. This is evident in his use of “I write yesterday” in a place where one might have expected him to use “I can write” as a make-do solution. He does not, however, which shows that he has different resources for accomplishing different social actions. “I write yesterday” was used to account for his prior behavior, not to display volunteering.

It has been argued along the way that the data confirm the embedded, embodied and socially constructed nature of language, cognition, and learning. Sense-making and any learning that may rest on it hinge on the local ecology (whiteboard, list of routines, name board, name tags) and people’s positioning in and physical stances towards this ecology. Moreover, the collaborative actions accomplished are crucially dependent on both verbal and bodily actions (pointing, gazes, movements). The embeddedness of the activities in the material ecology and the embodied nature of the interactions are visible facts, not hearable facts. Arguably, audiorecordings of these interactions would be impossible to make sense of for an analyst because the gestures, movements, deixis and referencing to objects would be imcomprehensible (see Majlesi and Markee 2018 and Markee 2019 for an overview of matters related to transcription). Clearly, this points to the necessity of using videodata. We only understand the participants’ actions because we have access to their full, situated ecology. By implication we can only fully understand (classroom) language learning if we understand the ecology in which the language-carrying actions are accomplished.

Epistemologically, the data used here have shown that sense-making and interactional competence are both embodied. Of course, spoken language is a crucial component in a developing L2 interactional competence, but it rests on an understanding of sense-making practices and procedures that are embodied, embedded and socially shared. Carlos’ interactional competence in development therefore presupposes an understanding of the social practice in which he is engaging (Wagner 2015). As he is learning to volunteer at appropriate moments in the classroom, he is also becoming an increasingly competent member in that classroom. It is interesting to note that different students orient to unfolding activities and tasks in a classroom in different ways (e.g., Hellermann 2008); here, this is seen in the predominant visible participation in the activity by Rosario, Carlos (and Alejandro) while most other students are more passive. Their learning trajectories in terms of a developing interactional competence will, by implication, look very different – but that is of course a matter that goes beyond the present investigation.

6 Pedagogical implications

The pedagogical implication is that L2 teaching should be primarily concerned with making semiotic resources for social action readily available for students to notice and appropriate. Putting an interactional repertoire to good and proper use is to know what to do how and when and to be able to package it semiotically in such a way so that it can be readily made sense of by others. Experienced language users routinely accomplish social actions in ways, and by use of linguistic resources, that are recognizable to co-participants, and the central problem of L2 learning then comes to concern how people learn to do something they have never done before at the relevant points in time and in a way that is recognizable to their co-participants.

As I point out in Eskildsen (2018b), the key to answering this question from the perspective of the L2 user lies in observing, eavesdropping, overhearing, noticing and appropriating, the doing of which presupposes an ability to monitor other people’s actions and turn-constructions in interaction, which is grounded in an understanding of social practices (Wagner 2015). Language learning is locally contextualized, a matter of biographical discovery, and embedded and driven by actions accomplished through language. The pedagogical implications of this are immense but as Waring (2018) notes, interactional practices are teachable objects (see also Barraja-Rohan 2011; Betz and Huth 2014; Kunitz and Yeh 2019), so the answer from the teacher’s perspective is to carry out context-rich teaching and make interactional environments available to the L2 users that entice them to attend to the details of accomplishing social actions, e.g., agreeing and disagreeing, story-telling and responding to such, repairing, requesting, giving dispreferred responses, and opening, closing and shifting topics (Pekarek Doehler and Pochon-Berger 2015). These are all teachable objects in that they are practices and social actions that can be accomplished through particular methods, including semiotic resources. A key to L2 learning, and therefore L2 teaching, is that the correlation between particular semiotic resources and particular social actions is observable and noticeable. The task of the teacher, then, is to make such correlations observable and noticeable and practicable in real-life situations. Language and its learning are rooted in understandings of social practices and accomplishment of social action. Language teaching should be, too.

Conventions for Transcribing Embodied Conduct

PP:*/#/%/#	Mark beginning of embodied conduct in the talk.
*/#/%/#Word	Description of corresponding embodied conduct on the next line.
COM: word…	Transcriber’s comment on next actions that are not transcribed.