This ethnomethodological, conversation analytic (CA) paper aims to respecify engagement in praxeological terms as a set of observable interactional behaviors. Recently, motivation researchers operating within mainstream SLA have started to discuss the construct of engagement in language learning (Mercer & Dörnyei, 2020; Philp & Duchesne, 2016). The present study intends to contribute to such discussion by exploring engagement through a CA lens, thereby adding to recent studies (Burch, 2016; Evnitskaya & Berger, 2017) in this area within the field of CA-SLA. Specifically, this study explores the practices through which 6 pairs of EFL students enrolled in two upper secondary schools in Sweden visibly do engagement as they accomplish a problem-solving task. The task was designed on the basis of previous cycles of task design, implementation, and analysis which concluded that untimed, open-ended tasks introduced with brief instructions lead to collaborative interaction. At the methodological level, these tasks are particularly suited to the study of engagement in task accomplishment, precisely because of their unstructured nature, which allows the analyst to observe, from an emic perspective, how the students move the task forward and co-construct its completion. The participating students were given a scenario concerning a person found in a cave and, with the aid of cut-out pictures of artifacts, were asked to discuss how that person had gone into the cave. Our analysis shows that the students display engagement by observably: (a) treating emerging narratives as insufficiently developed or illogical; (b) articulating alternative narratives based on different interpretations of the artifacts; and (c) invoking the task instructions in moments of impasse. Through these practices the students orient to task progressivity, while task completion is co-constructively warranted or rejected by invoking the amount of time spent on task. Overall, the study contributes to CA-SLA research on task-based instruction.

References

Burch, A.R. (2016). Motivation in interaction: A conversation-analytic perspective. University of Hawai'i at Manoa ProQuest Dissertations Publishing,  2016.

Evnitskaya, N., & Berger, E. (2017). Learners’ Multimodal Displays of Willingness to Participate in Classroom Interaction in the L2 and CLIL Contexts, Classroom Discourse, 8:1, 71-94. 

Mercer, S., & Dörnyei, Z. (2020). Engaging Language Learners in Contemporary Classrooms (Cambridge Professional Learning). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Philp, J., & Duchesne, S. (2016). Exploring Engagement in Tasks in the Language Classroom. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 36, 50-72.