Conversation analysis (CA) is a finely tuned qualitative method for analyzing how people use language to carry out their myriad everyday interactions both in leisurely conversations and in more specialized—often work—settings. Through interactive tasks based on authentic dialogs, this lesson is designed to help students discover and label some fundamental and regular features of talk-in-interaction while adopting CA’s action-based view of language.

With the increased frequency in the use of online translation tools (OTTs), such as Google Translate, in the foreign language classroom, teachers are reported to be concerned about students’ overdependence on these tools, their potential detrimental effects on learning, ethical issues of using them inappropriately and students’ lack of skills to use them critically. Thus, this study sets out to investigate the basis of teachers’ scepticism empirically by analysing OTT search sequences that display critical interactional strategies, where students reject the first translation option(s) offered by an OTT. The data analysed come from 22 h of video data of collaborative writing tasks, tracked using multimodal conversation analysis. The findings revealed five critical OTT strategies deployed to resolve emergent lexical issues. However, the pairs of students varied greatly in their use and range of critical OTT strategies, suggesting the need for explicit training in using different strategies.

_{In the last decade interactional studies have been addressing the strategies of teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) to teach impromptu vocabulary items. However, there is still a dearth of interactional studies that focus on students’ own strategies to resolve lexical issues. Since the Swedish syllabus for English calls for students to be able to use different strategies when their language is lacking, we need to know more about what skills they use and whether there are ways in which their skills can be improved. The current study thus examines students’ interactional strategies for resolving lexical gaps and other lexical issues in their collaborative writing, sometimes with recourse to digital lexical resources. It also explores the learning potentials of both collaboration and digital tools.The collection of students’ lexical strategies comes from 31 hours of video recorded data from collaborative computer-assisted writing tasks in the EFL classroom of four Swedish upper secondary schools.}

_{The findings reveal five principal interactional strategies, three of which are unique to collaboration. Moreover, one strategy involves using digital resources by looking up lexical items in an online translation tool (e.g. Google Translate). Both collaboration and digital tools can create opportunities for learning lexis by extending access beyond individual knowledge resources. This is particularly so when it comes to students’ lexical gaps. Moreover, training students to develop different strategies when using online translation tools should be particularly beneficial for both collaborative and individual writing.}

This study applies multimodal conversation analysis to examine how pupils of L2 English in Sweden make use of online translation tools (OTTs), i.e. bilingual dictionaries and Google Translate, in a range of digital collaborative writing tasks. The collection of sequences where pupils use OTTs comes from 31 hours of video-recorded data from four Swedish upper-secondary schools. In contrast to previous research on OTTs, this multimodal micro-analytic study examines the process of using OTTs and links it to the written product, by analysing actions on the screen accompanied by embodied pupil interaction. Thus the analyses track: (1) how and when pupils deploy OTTs, (2) whether the tools help them to resolve lexical gaps and other lexical issues and (3) what problems arise in the process. The study also discusses what help can be offered to overcome the encountered difficulties of using OTTs.

Using video recordings of a collaborative writing task carried out on a shared computer in an English as a foreign language class, this chapter explores the epistemic ecology of correcting spellings, where knowledge of spelling is unevenly distributed, i.e. the knowledge available to the typist, the other student (the non-typist) and the spell-checker. Three possible assumptions are addressed: (1) that the inbuilt spell-checker offers help in spelling; (2) that two “writers” both contribute to ensuring that spellings are correct; (3) that the potentially uneven distribution of knowledge about spelling between the current typist, the non-typist and the spell-checker does provide for epistemic progression (i.e. knowledge gains) and thus learning opportunities when genuine spelling problems arise. The findings mainly corroborate these assumptions, but they also uncover a number of issues that affect and sometimes confound the potential for correction and learning. For example, a common problem in an otherwise non-English medium setting is that the language tools are wrongly configured (or they are not switched on). Moreover, the timing of the correction process typically gives the typist the first “opportunity space” to correct, followed by the spell-checker and lastly the non-typist. There is also evidence from this study that not all students are familiar with how the language tools (including the spell-checker) work and what help can be had. This suggests the need to teach the basic functions and initiate awareness-raising activities about the potential gains, issues and pitfalls of both the spell-checker and collaboration.

Detta kapitel visar med exempel från engelskundervisningen i en svensk skolkontext hur språklärande äger rum i samspel med andra, ofta med hjälp av artefakter i omgivningen såsom tavlan och datorn. Trots att det språkliga automatiskt hamnar i fokus i ett kapitel om språkinlärning, begränsar sig samspelet inte bara till det verbala, utan lärandet utförs med hjälp av kroppens och omgivningens olika resurser. Exemplen illustrerar hur en multimodal analys krävs för att genomlysa handlingar som reparationer (korrigeringar) och ordsökningar som också erbjuder viktiga lärtillfällen för andraspråksinlärning.

Inom multimodal interaktionsanalys utgörs data av videoinspelningar. Utan en videoinspelning kan man inte utföra multimodal interaktionsanalys i enlighet med vad som avses i denna bok. Videoanalysen inbegriper generellt såväl identifiering av relevanta sekvenser i förhållande till ett visst forskningsintresse som transkription av vad som dokumenterats i videofilmen och framskrivande av en empiriskt grundad argumentation. Det är denna analysprocess, ”från ax till limpa”, som utgör ämnet för detta kapitel. Olika undersökningar kan naturligtvis se olika ut. Vår framställning kan därför ses som ett vägledande förslag på arbetsgång.

This paper examines how unplanned vocabulary work arises out of students’ talk. Furthermore, we show how the teacher and students jointly contribute towards the ensuing teaching trajectories, whereby the vocabulary items are turned into ‘teachables’, i.e. interactionally emergent objects of explicit teaching. In doing so, we also explore what aspects of vocabulary knowledge are targeted.

This collection-based study uses conversation analysis to examine video recordings of fairly advanced heritage speakers of English from English mother tongue instruction classes in Sweden. The analyses reveal a variety of ways in which the teaching trajectories arise: the teacher’s substitution requests for a more appropriate word; a student’s naming and word-confirmation requests; the teacher’s or a student’s translation and meaning requests. A third of these requests were initiated by a student. The trajectories then developed collaboratively and were tailored to the local context to address issues of meaning, form and use. Establishing the meaning of a word frequently involved (and could combine) requesting/providing, e.g., definitions and translations. Form could be targeted by carefully enunciating topicalised lexis or writing it on the board, and vocabulary use was typically elaborated by contextualising words and sometimes by exploring collocations.

Shifting focus from monolingual to multilingual talk within conversationanalysis has offered new, radically social and post-cognitivist understandingsof bilingualism, especially through the empirical study of language alternation.This chapter presents some central ideas in the literature on language alternationand traces the emergence and development of the organisational approach. Thisprioritises a participant perspective, whereby bilinguals mobilise their linguisticresources to organise their actions in mundane and institutional settings.While languaging rather than the linguistic concept of “language” is advocatedto capture the nature of bilingual talk, extending the analysis to include multimodalaspects of social interaction is put forward as a promising directionfor future inquiry.

The present study uses multimodal conversation analysis to examine how pupils studying English as a foreign language make spelling corrections in real time while doing collaborative computer-assisted project work. Unlike most previous related investigations, this study focuses on the process rather than evaluating the final product. The findings establish how the initiation and correction of (perceived) spelling errors involve varying configurations of three agents: the pupil currently typing, the other pupil and the computer software. Almost 80% of spelling corrections are carried out by the pupil typing with no intervention from the other pupil or the spellchecker. It is argued that here both the ‘triadic ecology’ and the timing of correction trajectories entail a structural preference for self-correction, which in turn reduces the affordances of the spellchecker and collaboration. Nevertheless, the spellchecker and the other pupil do play a role in catching potential misspellings that the typist has missed. Moreover, rather than right-clicking to activate the spellchecker’s menu of spelling suggestions, the typist typically deletes back to before the faulty letter(s) and then re-types words, which suggests the importance of progressivity of the typing flow as well as no need for the spellchecker’s assistance.