Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

How Learning Occurs in an Extensive Reading Book Club: A Conversation Analytic Perspective

How Learning Occurs in an Extensive Reading Book Club: A Conversation Analytic Perspective Abstract Extensive reading (ER) has been implemented in various second language (L2) teaching and learning contexts, and studies in the field have provided a wealth of empirical evidence that a large amount of L2 reading over an extended time improves students’ reading ability and benefits other areas of language learning (Nakanishi 2015; Jeon and Day 2016). However, despite the large amount of research on ER, there is still a lack of studies that show how or whether students accomplish learning during ER activities. To begin to fill this gap, this study applies a conversation analytic lens to investigate cases of local L2 learning and linguistic development during ER book club interactions. The analysis of the selected excerpts shows how the participants themselves shift the interactional focus from book talk to a lexical item during talk-in-interaction (i.e. orientation to learning), and how they deploy the learning object in subsequent speech events (i.e. short-term development). The analysis also shows how the participants orient to emergent learning objects from several different angles (e.g. pronunciation, meaning, spelling, and morphological form). 1. INTRODUCTION Extensive reading (ER), as a pedagogical approach to teaching and learning a foreign/second language, is based on the idea that pleasure reading benefits second language (L2) students’ learning. It has been implemented under different names such as Free Voluntary Reading, Pleasure Reading, and Sustained Silent Reading (Krashen 2004), with ‘its various names emphasiz[ing] different aspects of a similar/same kind of reading’ (Yamashita 2015: 168). The central tenet of ER is that learners should (i) read as much as possible (ii) for pleasure (iii) with the freedom to choose what, when, and where to read (Day and Bamford 1998; Day 2015). ER scholars have paid particular attention to the effects of reading (as an activity done by individuals) on various L2 learning outcomes including but not limited to reading comprehension, reading fluency, vocabulary, and grammar (for overviews, see Nakanishi 2015; Jeon and Day 2016). However although a great deal of research has been done on the effects of ER on individual students’ language learning, there is a lack of studies on how students accomplish learning during ER activities. Several ER studies report the use (Song and Sardegna 2014; Kirchhoff 2015) and suggest the inclusion (Day and Bamford 1998; Jacobs and Farrell 2012) of activities that fundamentally involve social interaction (e.g. in an ER reading circle activity, students talk about their books in a small group) in teaching through ER. Nevertheless, scholars in the field have not yet focused on (i) how ER activities evolve as social interaction (see, however, Freebody and Freiberg 2001; Peplow 2016, who investigate reading as ‘situated social practices’ in non-ER contexts) and (ii) how L2 students can benefit from participating in them. In fact, considering that several studies have reported that ‘reading supplemented with activities’ leads to better incidental gains of linguistic knowledge and retention than ‘reading only’ (Zimmerman 1997; Laufer 2003; Min 2008), it is surprising that research has not been done to see how participants learn and develop linguistic knowledge in situ. The same issue exists in the field of conversation analysis as an approach to second language acquisition (CA-SLA; Kasper and Wagner 2011). CA-SLA studies have explored diverse cases of local (or incidental) learning (or opportunities for learning) in various interactions (as discussed in the section ‘Language Learning as Social Practice’ below). But they have rarely focused on how participants orient to and accomplish L2 learning during reading activities (see, however, Hellermann 2006, 2017, who investigates L2 students’ development of interactional practices in a sustained-silent reading classroom context). To begin to fill these gaps, this research project uses a conversation analytic lens to investigate how students in an ER book club learn linguistic knowledge as socially viewable participant concerns in interaction. Consequently, this study will provide a deeper understanding of the nature of an ER book club setting, the relations among the participants in the local context, and how these participants orient to learning in situ. As the type of conversation that takes place at ER book clubs seems to be pedagogically beneficial for L2 learners (Shelton-Strong 2012) and is increasingly happening in real life for both educational and social purposes (Peplow 2016), a more systematic review of what goes on in such book club contexts is warranted. I frame this study’s setting as an ER book club because, unlike in typical book club settings where groups of people meet to share responses to the same text (Peplow 2016), the participants in this ER book club read different books of their choice, following generally accepted ER teaching practices or principles (Day and Bamford 1998; Day 2015).1 Because the participants read different books, they had to take extra steps (e.g. explaining the characters, briefly summarizing the storyline, and so on) to establish mutual understanding about their book’s contents with the co-participants before further engaging in book talk. In fact, this study demonstrates how vocabulary learning emerges, for example, when a student did not fully understand the story of another participant’s book (Excerpt 2). Thus, the fact of the book club being in an ER context is relevant to the practices in which the learners engage, at least in the excerpts that I provide in this study. 2. LANGUAGE LEARNING FROM READING AND BEYOND A number of researchers have found better language learning effects of ‘reading supplemented with activities’ compared to ‘reading only’. For instance, quasi-experimental studies have reported that reading supplemented with vocabulary enhancement activities as opposed to a reading-only approach is more beneficial for students’ expansion and retention of L2 vocabulary knowledge (Laufer 2003; Min 2008). Zimmerman (1997) also found that interactive vocabulary instruction involving small group communicative activities led to better gains in L2 vocabulary knowledge than just reading. In a similar vein, Song and Sardegna (2014) investigated the effects of what they called ‘enhanced ER’ (i.e. ‘extensive reading with communicative output activities’, p. 68) on 12 Korean secondary school students’ incidental acquisition of English preposition knowledge. For one semester, the students spent an hour and a half reading and doing reading-related activities (such as moderated group discussion, book sharing, and book poster presentations) twice a week after school as an extracurricular activity. Song and Sardegna found that the enhanced ER treatment improved the students’ ability to notice and correct wrong prepositions as well as to produce correct prepositions. Based on their findings, they claimed that ‘reading plus activities leads to more incidental gains in both receptive and productive knowledge’ (p. 76). Studies of literature circles (i.e. ‘small peer-led discussion groups, involved in reading the same piece of literature’; Shelton-Strong 2012: 214) have reported similar findings. For example, by investigating students’ literature circle experiences in an L2 classroom context, Shelton-Strong (2012) found that the activities ‘foster learner autonomy, while providing opportunities for focused extensive reading and collaborative, purposeful discussions’ (p. 222). Studies of literature circles in other L2 contexts also have reported positive language learning outcomes (Mark 2007) as well as positive perceptions toward the activity (Calzada 2013). In line with these findings, Kirchhoff (2015) noted that ‘talking about the books can change extensive reading from being a solitary act into one that meets students’ academic and social needs and may be the emergence of intrinsic motivation to read’ (p. 54). Kirchhoff investigated 41 Japanese college students’ perceptions of book talk in a 15-week ER course and found that the students perceived the book talk as a good activity for both learning about the content of the books and communicative practice. She noted that book talk ‘pushed L2 output and expanded their relationships with classmates’ (p. 62). These studies argue that we, as language teachers, need to supplement reading with activities for language learning. However, how or whether learning emerges during these activities in a given setting has not been of focal attention to the field yet. The lack of documentation of the practices through which students orient to learning during ER activities has meant that opportunities for situated studies of students’ learning in ER contexts have been limited. As a result, we do not know a lot about how or whether students learn and develop their linguistic repertoires during ER-based activities. In this study, by describing the reflexive indexicality of action (Garfinkel 2002; Macbeth 2014) as it appears in the participants’ interaction over 20 min, I attempt to show cases of local learning in an ER book club. In addition, the study demonstrates how such learning as social practice can be studied with a CA approach, which is the topic of the following section. 3. LANGUAGE LEARNING AS SOCIAL PRACTICE CA-SLA has been growing as a field of inquiry, since Markee, Firth, and Wagner (Markee 1994, 2000; Firth and Wagner 1997, 2007; Wagner and Firth 1997) began to emphasize that cognition can be understood as a socially shared phenomenon as a condition for reconceptualizing learning as social practice. By adopting an emic (participant oriented)—instead of an etic (researcher oriented)—perspective, scholars have provided empirical evidence of how learning happens in real time (Melander and Sahlström 2009; Lee 2010; Sahlström 2011; Majlesi and Broth 2012; Jakonen and Morton 2015, to name a few; see also the list of references in Sert 2015: 35). While experimental researchers begin by ‘assuming that verifiable truths about the phenomena that they are interested in may be “discovered, explained and generalized” by studying these phenomena under carefully controlled laboratory conditions’ (Markee 2015: 4), CA researchers instead seek to ‘“understand, not explain,” phenomena’ (p. 5) collected in natural conversation settings. Sahlström (2011), for example, showed how two multilingual children in Finland engaged in counting from 1 to 10 in English (which is not their everyday language) as a focal concern during their everyday interaction over a week. He argued that the children’s orientation to the counting practice in English to change epistemic possibilities for one of the children illustrates learning as social practice. In line with this study, Melander and Sahlström (2009) also demonstrated learning by showing how a small group of children oriented to the topic of the size of blue whales and changed their participation about the topic over 12 min. In both cases, learning emerged as a matter of the learners doing something on their own. Learning in this sense is ‘the members’ task’ (Lee 2010: 409–410); it is the actions the participants are engaged in. Many CA-SLA researchers also have reported that participants actively set up opportunities for vocabulary learning by orienting to lexical items as learning objects in various settings. Markee (2008), for example, tracked a student’s learning of a lexical item, ‘prerequisite’, in a teacher-led classroom context. Kasper and Burch (2016) tracked how the learning of a Japanese word, ‘sakaeteru’ (meaning bustling), became a focus of participants’ concern during their leisure talk in a café. Kim (2012) also demonstrated various examples of how participants create opportunities for recognitional reference in conversation-for-learning contexts. In fact, among the earliest studies that showed evidence for learning as social practice, where the participants make vocabulary learning the focal concern of their interaction, were Markee’s studies (1994, 2000) of student-initiated definition talk during small group activities. Markee showed how students in lower to upper intermediate English as a second language (ESL) classes oriented to the structure of conversation as a resource, which enabled one of the students (L10) to understand and learn a word (coral), at least in the short term, during a process of collaboratively figuring out the meaning of the word in a small group task activity. To be more specific, Markee (1994, 2000) showed L10’s display of her lack of lexical knowledge of coral at one point in time (2000: 112, Excerpt 7.1; 108–109, Excerpt 7.2) and also how she received language support from her peers (2000: 107; Excerpt 7.5). He further demonstrated how L10 was able to define the word and use it in a correct manner in her later group presentation (2000: 110–111; Excerpt 7.8). Unlike most other CA-SLA studies, however, these excerpts show not only how a student orients to an activity as learning but also how she develops, as the outcome of the learning, a new lexical knowledge in the short term (cf. Ishida 2006, who traced the changes of a Japanese as a foreign language (JFL) student’s use of modal markers over the course of a 10-min task interaction, showing how the short-term development of competence in the use of modal expressions occurred without having to orient to the activity as learning). From this perspective, ‘learning is conceptualized as process and product, as action and achievement’ (Hellermann 2017: 5), not as an individual’s internalization of discrete linguistic items. 4. DATA AND METHODOLOGY The data for this study come from video recordings of an ER book club session in an Intensive English Program context at a university in the USA. The book club sessions were conducted by a facilitator (Hailey, pseudonym). The sessions took place once a week for 16 weeks (with two orientation sessions and 14 reading-related sessions) in 2015 as an extracurricular activity. During the book club sessions, participants, including the facilitator, silently read their individually chosen books together for 10–15 min (i.e. the reading period),2 wrote a response to a prompt prepared by the facilitator for about 10 min (i.e. the writing period), and took turns in talking about what they wrote and about their books for the remaining time (i.e. the speaking period). The facilitator had no preselected pedagogical goals except to have the participants read their own books, write a response to the prompt, and share their responses and books with the co-participants. Consequently, although it had its own institutional agenda, the book club was fairly unrestricted in regard to turn taking (see particularly Excerpts 2, 3, and 6 where students, not the facilitator, take the floor to ask the presenter questions). The interactional organization of the book club, in other words, did not normally involve the more or less ubiquitous instructional pattern of the initiation-response-feedback sequence (Sinclair and Coulthard 1975). The ER book club in this regard is a unique educational site that deserves further investigation. Hailey, the facilitator, has a master’s degree in second language studies and had taught English in various international programs and English institutes using the ER approach in the USA and Japan since 2008. However, leading an informal book club while being a participant herself was a new practice for her as well as for the students. She contacted five of her previous students in the program, who she thought would be interested in joining the book club, for the purpose of promoting their language learning and good L2 reading habits through reading for pleasure. During the recruiting process, she explicitly told the students that the book club was voluntary, and that they would receive no course credit or any other benefit (or penalty) for attending (or not attending). All five, plus one more student who heard about it in the third week, joined the club. The meetings were conducted either in a student lounge where the books (mostly simplified books designed for L2 readers) that students could borrow were kept or in an empty classroom. The data for this study come from the meeting in the ninth week, which took place in the empty classroom and lasted about 40 min. Out of usual seven, four participants (the facilitator, Clara [Chinese], Harim [Taiwanese], and Rayin [Chinese]; all pseudonyms) were present. By taking the learning as process and achievement approach to a single-case study and tracing the participants’ behavior in the process of learning about a lexical item in a short period of time, I aim to empirically show how students orient to learning and develop various linguistic resources, at least in the short term, while being engaged with the activity at hand (Markee 2008; Kasper and Wagner 2011: 131–134). To be more specific, the current analysis focuses on book talk sequences (which lasted about 20 min) that took place during the session’s speaking period. These sequences include Clara’s presentation (i.e. the practice of reporting a prompt answer along with the book story; Excerpt 1); the post-expansion phase of Clara’s presentation (i.e. further talk on the presentation with co-participants; Excerpts 2, 3, and 4); as well as the facilitator’s presentation (Excerpt 5); and the post-expansion phase of her presentation (Excerpt 6). Prior to this activity, participants read the books of their choice and wrote responses to the following prompt: ‘What is the best book you have read so far? Why?’I selected these sequences for analysis because they provide good examples of, first, how the participants themselves shift the interactional focus from topical talk to a lexical item during the book club interaction (i.e. orientation to learning), and, second, how they deploy the learning object in subsequent speech events (i.e. short-term development). Through the analysis, this study will show how CA can be utilized to track participants’ successful language learning behavior (cf. Markee 2008), at least in the short term, during book club conversations. The video recording was done with two cameras and two microphones, resulting in 16 h of data. All transcripts follow Jefferson’s (2004) conventions for the vocal content. For the transcription of non-vocal conduct, I adapted the conventions employed by Burch (2014; see also Goodwin 2013), which include codes and textual descriptions of gaze, posture, facial expression, gesture, and manipulation of objects as well as screen shots from the video recordings (see Supplementary Appendix). 5. TRACKING THE LEARNING OF A LEXICAL ITEM Excerpts (1–6) below show how the participants in the book club meeting orient to learning as social practice and develop their pronunciation, spelling, and understanding of the meaning and morphological variants of the word bully in the short term. Excerpts (1–2) show how Clara problematizes her own pronunciation of bullied during her presentation. Excerpts (3–4) show how Harim then treats the word as a learning object and how he orients to different sources of information (e.g. from Clara, the facilitator, and his phone) about this word, and, finally, Excerpts (5–6) show how the participants orient to their shared recent history of pedagogical work with this word. I will also demonstrate how the participants’ orientation to the emergent learning object is shaped by the multifaceted nature of language learning. 5.1 Focus on pronunciation Excerpt 1 provides evidence of Clara’s change in the pronunciation of bullied from less to more target-like (compare lines 5, 7, and 11 with line 14) through a persistent pronunciation search (line 7) and repair initiation (line 9) as well as correction sequences (lines 11–14) during her presentation in the phase of a book club meeting’s speaking period. 5.1.1 Excerpt 1 Clara formulates her story’s climax (Kasper and Prior 2015) by highlighting an element in her book with a preface ‘one day↓ (0.4) one thing happened and:↓ changes their life.’ in lines 1–2. This action not only connects the background she has been talking about (not shown) with the climax components that she will explain soon but also creates suspense with particular lexicogrammatical choices (e.g. the undisclosed ‘one thing’ [which is used as a prospective indexical; see Goodwin 1996] that can change people’s lives). Continuing her description in line 4, Clara signals trouble with the word ‘bullied’ in line 5 with her post-positioned speech perturbation, ‘buil- (.) built.’ (Schegloff 1979; see also Brouwer 2004). She also produces a less target-like pronunciation of the word as ‘built’/’bult/(line 5) with her gaze toward the facilitator after completing her turn (line 6). Clara takes the facilitator’s nod in line 6 as a continuer and quietly repeats the word with altered pronunciation in line 7. She does so by providing an alternative sound through changing one of the word’s vowels from a monophthong/u/to a diphthong/Iu/and one consonant from voiceless/t/to voiced/d/(compare line 5 and line 7). By providing the sound changes, Clara is proposing an alternative for the repairable (Lilja 2014). This act shows something to the hearer about the nature of the trouble. In other words, by presenting alternatives, Clara displays the trouble as having a particular phonetic character (see Brouwer 2004 for a ‘doing pronunciation’ sequence). The facilitator orients to Clara’s trouble by leaning forward toward Clara’s notes in an attempt to see the problematic word while creating co-operation between her and Clara to help Clara complete the repair (lines 8–9). With this other initiation of repair, the facilitator shows her orientation to Clara’s pronunciation search and to her own lack of knowledge of the word that Clara is trying to pronounce. In other words, they are both ‘unknowing’, but in regard to different aspects of the word: Clara cannot pronounce it and the facilitator does not know what it is. Clara orients to the facilitator’s repair initiation by verbally completing the incomplete sequence while physically pointing at the word that she had written and moving the notes toward the facilitator (lines 10–11). In so doing, she is explicitly inviting the facilitator’s help on the pronunciation while also orienting to the facilitator’s searching for a word in her notes. After reading the word in Clara’s notes (lines 10–12), the facilitator shows in her response turn with the change of state token oh (Heritage 1984) and embodied action by moving her body backwards (line 13) that she has now understood what word Clara is having trouble with. This is important to note because it shows that the facilitator’s focus on the word’s pronunciation is clearly due to the fact that she cannot forward the activity until she achieves mutual understanding with Clara. The facilitator then offers the word with the target-like pronunciation. In her overlapped response (line 14), Clara treats the facilitator’s display of understanding (line 13) as a correction, thus acknowledging it. Clara then refocuses on her presentation after closing the side sequence with ‘okay’ and a micro pause in line 17. The interaction in Excerpt 1 is notable in that it shows evidence of Clara’s lack of knowledge in pronouncing the word bullied in a target-like manner. As in Markee’s (1994, 2000) data, such evidence of a speaker’s insufficient knowledge plays an important role in showing how the speaker subsequently gains the knowledge; that is, it is part of the evidence of a process of learning-in-interaction. In the next extract, which comes from later in the same discussion (at the post-expansion phase of Clara’s presentation), we will observe Clara’s lack of development of the pronunciation (line 90) and Harim’s claim of insufficient knowledge of the word (line 94) as well as how participants create a ‘pedagogical space’ (i.e. ‘a space for learning and for teaching’; Samuda 2015: 282) to teach and learn the trouble-source bully (line 93). Prior to Excerpt 2 below, Harim has been asking Clara questions related to her book to clarify his understanding. The extract begins with Harim’s information request about what happened to ‘Hason’ when ‘Armi’ (characters in Clara’s book) decided not to save him (line 88). 5.1.2 Excerpt 2 After she indexes trouble in formulating the answer in line 89, Clara responds to Harim that Hason was ‘bullied’ (line 90), thereby bringing the word that she used in Excerpt 1 back into the interaction, but at a slow pace and with the less target-like pronunciation/bIulid/. The slow, less target-like pronunciation shows that Clara is still having trouble pronouncing the word. Then, unlike in Excerpt 1 line 13, the facilitator displays recognition by correcting the pronunciation while putting the progress of the talk on hold (line 91). However, when the correction happens, the facilitator’s gaze is on Harim, not on Clara. In fact, although Clara treats the facilitator’s action as a correction by acknowledging the correction through repeating the trouble source several times until she pronounces it in a more target-like manner (line 92), she also gazes at Harim while doing so. Both participants are facing Harim because he is the recipient of the question that he initiated in line 88. In other words, they are soliciting a display of understanding from Harim on the problematic word. The repairable is now repaired for Clara (in regard to the pronunciation of the word) and they are moving on to see if it is repaired for Harim (in regard to the understanding of what the word means) as well. Specifically, the facilitator asks Harim whether he knows the meaning of the word through an epistemic status check (Sert 2013) in line 93 after looking at Harim’s silent mouth mimicking of Clara’s repetition in line 92 (see the picture). With the question ‘do you know <bully>?’, the facilitator treats the word as a lexical item that Harim may not know and orients to Harim’s L2 competence. In fact, the facilitator in collaboration with the others opens up a pedagogical space by focusing on the meaning of the word. In his response (line 94), Harim makes a non-vocal claim of insufficient knowledge (Sert and Walsh 2013; Sert 2015) of the word bully by shaking his head from left to right. Clara also, by overlapping, co-orients to Harim’s lack of understanding by first using ‘bullying’, that is changing the morphological inflection of the trouble source, which suggests her additional morphological knowledge of the word. She then uses Chinese as a support language by providing a translation of the word (qīfù), while moving her pen and eyebrows up to re-gain Harim’s attention from the facilitator (line 95). In so doing, she is orienting to Chinese as a shared language between the two and to her own knowledge of the vocabulary item. In line 97, Harim treats Clara’s language support as new information with his stressed and elongated rising intonation of ‘uh:↑’ (thereby displaying his lack of relevant knowledge once again). His initiation of another question ‘who- who- who- bullying: him↓’, this time with the form of the word that Clara used before providing the Chinese translation (‘bullying’), shows that Harim’s problem with understanding the meaning of the word has been solved (line 99). By switching back to English after the trouble has been resolved, the participants resume their topical talk, in which they are pursuing understanding of Clara’s book’s content. It is possible that Harim did not recognize the present and past tense forms of bully (line 94), particularly in light of his use of ‘bullying’ instead of the other forms in line 99. He may have understood the meaning of the word after hearing ‘bullying’ from Clara before the translation, which in this case would show his partial knowledge of the word. The situation becomes clearer in the next extract, when Harim refocuses on the word form by asking an explicit question. To recap: Excerpt 2 provides clear evidence that Clara is still having trouble with pronouncing the word even after the facilitator’s correction in Excerpt 1, as well as that Harim has insufficient knowledge of the word bully. Moreover, it shows how the facilitator in co-operation with the others creates a pedagogical space for Harim to learn a new word, which has arisen from the contingencies of the interaction. 5.2 Treating bully as a learning object In the following excerpt (3 min and 21 s passed between the end of Excerpt 2 and the start of Excerpt 3), we see Clara pronouncing ‘bullied’ in a more target-like manner as an outcome of a repair sequence (line 231), thereby showing short-term development of the pronunciation. We also see participants’ orientation to learning the pronunciation and spelling (Excerpt 3, lines 229–242) as well as the morphological form (Excerpt 4, lines 243–263) of the lexical item ‘bully’. 5.2.1 Excerpt 3 Beginning in line 229, we see how Harim initiates an orientation to learning by asking about the trouble word—with a less target-like pronunciation (‘booth’/buθ/)—while simultaneously doing specific embodied actions to secure the floor (leaning forward) and to show persistence (or ‘sustained orientation’; Burch 2016) in an attempt to learn the word (making a fist and doing a light pounding action). This light pounding can be understood as a category-bound predicate for bullying, as somebody punching, thereby bullying, someone. With this pronunciation search (or epistemic search; see Jakonen and Morton 2015), Harim displays his learning of the word meaning while positioning himself as unknowing with regard to its pronunciation, and positioning the addressed recipient (i.e. Clara) as a possible knower. In so doing, Harim is treating Clara instead of the facilitator as authoritative in regard to this knowledge of the word. In her response to Harim’s pronunciation search, Clara demonstrates her ability to pronounce the word in a target-like manner, but also reveals possibly partial morphological knowledge of the word by saying ‘bullied’ instead of ‘bully’ (line 231). Her being able to produce the word with a target-like pronunciation, however, is evidence of pronunciation development over a short period of time. Then, with the question ‘ha- how do I spell:↓’ (line 232), Harim focuses on the word’s spelling. To be more specific, Harim begins his search for the word’s spelling by writing down the spelling (line 235) that Clara produces in line 233. His double-checking of the spelling of the word in line 238, however, shows that he wrote it down incorrectly (one ‘l’ is missing). Harim’s self-initiated self-repair (line 238), where he repairs the second letter of the word (‘o’ to ‘u’), overlaps the other-initiated other-repair by Clara with the correct spelling with double ‘l’ in line 239, thereby possibly leading Harim to miss an opportunity to get the correct spelling. The facilitator’s agreement (‘uh huh’) with her gaze on Harim’s notes (line 240) is thus ambiguous. It could be an agreement that Harim had the right spelling, even though he made a mistake as he read it out loud, or it could be an agreement with Clara’s spelling. The fact that Harim continues to write in line 241 might also suggest that he had not finished writing down the spelling at the time that the facilitator provided an agreement marker, indicating that the facilitator was agreeing to the partial spelling. Excerpt 4 is the continuation of the conversation in Excerpt 3. 5.2.2 Excerpt 4 In line 243, the facilitator asks Clara what the basic form for bullied is by pointing at the word that Harim has written while saying the demonstrative pronoun ‘that’ with rising intonation and repeating the trouble source. Demonstratives along with pointing gestures are interactional resources for eliciting attentional focus (Diessel 2006), as they demand that recipients attend more closely to the focal object. With this question, the facilitator, in collaboration with the others, creates this pedagogical space for teaching and learning a morphological form of the word. The participants’ focus of teaching and learning at this moment has arisen from the contingencies of the interaction. In her response, Clara tries a gerund form of the word (‘bullying’) after her cutoff ‘bull-’ (line 244), which indicates a trouble source (Schegloff 1979). This use of ‘bullying’ was also evidenced in Excerpt 2 line 95, which seems to indicate either Clara’s inaccurate understanding of what the facilitator means by ‘basic form’ or her less of knowledge of the morphological forms of the word bully. The facilitator corrects Clara’s less target-like response by providing the correct form with ‘bully::’ (line 245). She does this while gazing at Harim’s phone while elongating and emphasizing the last syllable of the word, thereby not only correcting Clara but also possibly orienting to Harim’s use of a dictionary on his phone, which he started in line 243 after receiving the correct spelling of the word from Clara (cf. students’ electronic dictionary use in L2 discussion in Hauser 2014 and peers’ smartphone use in their lingua franca English interaction in Greer 2016). Harim is now treating his phone dictionary, not Clara (as in Excerpt 3) or the facilitator, as the most authoritative source of knowledge about the word that he needs to double-check before closing this learning sequence (line 263). Clara then seeks confirmation in line 246 by quietly voicing the word ‘bully’ in correct form with rising intonation while gazing forward. In response, the facilitator spells the word out loud with an emphasis on ‘y’ (line 247), which gets co-constructed by Clara (line 248). After the confirmation, both Clara and Harim show changes of epistemic state with ‘oh’ (Heritage 1984) in lines 250 and 252, indicating that neither of them knew the basic form of the lexical item (or at least, its spelling) beforehand. Next, Harim presses keys on his phone with his right-hand fingers while silently mouthing the spelling ‘b-u-l-l’ (line 254) and then says the word out loud, ‘bully:↓’ with an elongated vowel (line 255). At the same time, the facilitator leans forward toward Harim’s phone and gazes at it (lines 254–259). Harim again portrays his change of knowledge with the change of state token ‘oh’, but in an upgraded manner with longer elongation and an up and down tone while nodding (line 258). He then exaggerates his understanding as a reaction to the facilitator’s confirmation check ‘okay?’ (line 259) through his repeated ohs and embodied actions in lines 260–263. In so doing, Harim is once again treating his phone dictionary as the most authoritative source of knowledge about the word. This act closes the learning sequence. In short, Excerpts 3 and 4 provide clear evidence of short-term development of Clara’s pronunciation and Harim’s knowledge of the meaning of the word. After displaying their lack of knowledge of the word (in Excerpts 1 and 2), both Clara and Harim showed the changes in their lexical knowledge, that is they displayed their achievement of learning. In addition, we also observed how the participants oriented to their learning of the word from several different angles: from a pronunciation focus to a spelling focus (Excerpt 3) and then to the morphological form (Excerpt 4) of the word. This progression shows the speakers engaging with the multifaceted nature of language learning as they display that knowing how to pronounce a word does not mean knowing how to spell or inflect it. Also important is Harim’s shift in who/what he orients to as the source of knowledge: from Clara and the facilitator to his phone dictionary. 5.3 Orienting to shared history of vocabulary pedagogy Excerpt 5 shows Harim’s display of his recognition and target-like pronunciation of the word ‘bully’ while the facilitator is talking about a different book, one that she read. The word is now being used to talk about something else. One minute and 20 s has passed between the end of Excerpt 4 and the start of Excerpt 5. 5.3.1 Excerpt 5 Prior to Excerpt 5, the facilitator was talking about her own book. When she uses the word bullied during her talk (line 300), she nods while gazing at Harim during a substantial pause after producing ‘bullie::d’ with an elongated second syllable. In so doing, she orients to their shared history related to the word (cf. ‘shared repertoire’; Hellermann 2008), thereby eliciting some type of recognition from Harim. The facilitator’s noticeable act prompts Harim to display his recognition of the word by repeating it, but in its basic form, ‘bully’, and, possibly, his smile while nodding is orienting to their shared history with the word (line 302). His repetition of the word in its basic form could be the result of mishearing the facilitator’s pronunciation, particularly because her/d/in the final syllable was less hearable, as she was elongating the final vowel, or it could be his display of knowledge of the basic form of the word, especially as the spelling that he looked up with the facilitator was ‘bully’ (Excerpt 4). Either way, he was able to acknowledge the word that the facilitator used with a target-like pronunciation and orient to their past history with the word. Next, in Excerpt 6, Harim shows his competence in formulating a confirmation-seeking question with the use of the word bully in line 366. This happens during the post-expansion phase of the facilitator’s presentation. 5.3.2 Excerpt 6 In line 366, Harim correctly uses bully with a target-like pronunciation (thereby showing short-term development of his knowledge of the pronunciation and morphological form of the word), perhaps as a noun (although it follows an inaccurate verb form) when he says that the character in the facilitator’s book ‘facen/feIsən/bully’ (by which he seems to mean ‘had to face a bully’, or he might have meant to say ‘was bullied’, in which case this would be an inaccurate use of the word form) while displaying his and the facilitator’s shared orientation to the word being in Harim’s notes. This display of a new use of the word in line 366 could have developed from his dictionary work on his phone (Excerpt 4). Though it is unclear where he learned the form or whether he used the word as a noun or verb, we at least know that his insufficient knowledge of the word has been sufficiently supplemented for him to be able to use the word in constructing his own question, although maybe not in a target-like manner, during this book club session. In sum, the excerpts presented above (Excerpts 1–6) illustrate evidence of students’ orientations to learning and successful short-term language learning behaviors in the context of an ER book club. Evidence for this successful learning includes Clara’s change of her pronunciation from less to more target-like, as well as Harim’s change from his claim of insufficient knowledge to his display of understanding and his use of the word with a target-like pronunciation and possibly in a correct morphological form. 6. DISCUSSION In this article, I showed evidence of how students oriented to the learning of the lexical item bully and of how they expanded their linguistic knowledge of the word through their practices at an ER book club. In Excerpt 1, we observed how Clara changed her pronunciation of the word, bullied from less to more target-like through pronunciation search and repair initiations during her presentation practice. In Excerpt 2, during the post-expansion phase of Clara’s presentation, we saw how Harim initiated a focus on the word in collaboration with the facilitator, creating a pedagogical space to teach and learn the word. We also saw how Clara providing language support to Harim, which may have promoted his understanding of the word meaning. In Excerpts 3 and 4, we saw Harim’s display of the word’s meaning and Clara’s pronunciation of the word in a target-like manner, thereby showing their short-term development of word knowledge. We also observed how the participants oriented to teaching and learning the pronunciation and spelling (where Harim is positioned as unknower) as well as the morphological form (where both Clara and Harim are positioned as unknowers) of the word. In Excerpts 5 and 6, we observed Harim’s display of short-term development of the morphological form and pronunciation of the word during the facilitator’s presentation. Unlike in (quasi-)experimental ER studies, this analysis explored and showed the details of learning processes while displaying the achievements of the learning sequences. In other words, we saw how the participants’ learning orientation functioned as both a transforming act and a substrate (i.e. ‘the materials being operated on’; Goodwin 2013: 9) that opened up the opportunity for the participants to successfully develop their linguistic knowledge (Markee 1994, 2000). Compared to showing how learners orient to learning, tracking such successful language learning behavior over time is a more difficult analytical project (Markee 2008). SLA studies on the negotiation of meaning (Long 1985; Pica 1994) have proposed that negotiation enhances the comprehension of input, which promotes acquisition. My empirically grounded data substantiate how such acquisition could occur (at least in the short term). To be more specific, I showed how Harim’s information request on Clara’s book content (Excerpt 2) and the pronunciation of a word (Excerpt 3) created, in co-operation with others, a pedagogical space where the participants were able to make the incomprehensible input (or unrecognizable referent) comprehensible (or recognizable) and to learn to use a word in a less to more target-like manner. Through the ‘dense coordination of multisemiotic practices’ (Kasper and Burch 2016: 223), including but not limited to their embodied actions, dictionary use, note writing, and using Chinese as a medium repair resource (Gafaranga 2000), participants were engaged with the learning of the word, and successfully demonstrated changes and expansion of their linguistic knowledge. Another point demonstrated by the analysis is that this study indicates that ‘knowledge gaps, or “learnables” (Majlesi and Broth 2012), are not necessarily the same as those learning objects identified by the teacher’s [or facilitator’s] agenda or the curriculum’ (Jakonen and Morton 2015: 90). As mentioned above in the analysis section, the students’ and the facilitator’s focus on form arose from the contingencies of the interaction. In other words, what to teach (Excerpts 2 and 4) and what to learn (Excerpts 1 and 3) emerged in talk. This finding is in line with other investigations in CA studies on (L2) learning that showed how, in various ways in different contexts, participants’ orientations shift from pursuing the activity at hand to L2 learning as they strive to maintain or restore intersubjectivity (Kasper and Burch 2016) or to deal with matters that hinder or permit the progressive unfolding of pedagogic activity (Lee 2010; Jakonen and Morton 2015). This study contributes to the field by further showing how the learning of a word can have several different sides or layers to it; that is, the study addresses the multifaceted nature of language learning. Knowing how to pronounce the word did not necessarily mean that the participants knew how to spell it or use it. We were able to clearly see how different focuses on linguistic resources—there was a pronunciation focus, a morphology focus, and a meaning focus throughout the excerpts—contributed to differential learning-achieving practices that worked together to expand participants’ linguistic knowledge of a word. Moreover, with respect to the facilitator’s role in ER activity, the evidence of teaching and successful learning in my data showed that it is important for a facilitator to take the role of a language expert to foster students’ learning. As we saw in the excerpts, the facilitator was ‘the more proficient, knowledgeable interlocutor who [could] feed the language-learning needs of different students in a wide variety of ways’ (Van den Branden 2009: 284). It was by taking the role of language expert and constantly orienting to the activity at hand as a kind of teacher that the facilitator in co-operation with the others was able to create the pedagogical space for language learning. However, Excerpt 4 also showed how Harim treated another source of knowledge (his phone dictionary) as more authoritative than the facilitator (and Clara). In other words, he treated the other participants as insufficient sources of information. The pedagogical implication is that dictionaries do have uses in L2 learning and teaching environments. The study’s findings overall could be employed for teacher training purposes (Seedhouse 2008; see also a case of interventional CA in Antaki 2011 and applications to applied linguistics in Kasper and Wagner 2014). Teachers and facilitators who know how to apply a conversation analytic lens to their educational settings could become more sensitive to the complexities of the local settings. This article is an initial contribution to what could be a promising line of research on ER. It has been well established in ER studies that students learn to read by reading and develop various types of linguistic knowledge through repeated encounters with reading input (Nakanishi 2015; Jeon and Day 2016). This article sought to show how CA could contribute further to the field by demonstrating how participants accomplish learning in situ and tracing the development of linguistic knowledge, as it unfolds throughout an interaction in a post-reading activity. Such an analytic approach allows researchers to describe how language learning processes are publicly displayed and accomplished (Kasper and Wagner 2011) as observable learning behaviors (Markee 2008). While in this article I have been primarily concerned with participants’ orientation to a particular word as a single-case study, I believe future studies on ER activities could benefit by investigating other kinds of work related to different aspects of language learning or the developmental changes of practices particular to a setting. The cumulative evidence of such research would provide much better understanding of how and to what degree post-reading activities can benefit students’ learning as well as various ways of teaching in situated activities, creating rich resources for teacher training. Acknowledgements The author would like to thank his participants for allowing him to investigate their book club meetings for his research. He is very grateful to Drs. Gabriele Kasper, Hanh Nguyen, Sangki Kim, Josephine Lee, Rue Burch, Richard Day, Betsy Gilliland, Mary Kim as well as the four anonymous reviewers and the editor of this journal (Dr John Hellermann) for their insightful and constructive suggestions for earlier versions of this manuscript. Any infelicities remaining are the responsibility of the author. NOTES Footnotes 1 The facilitator who implemented the book club also called it an ER book club, for the same reason. 2 Members were also asked to borrow their books and read at home as much as they could before coming to the meeting. REFERENCES Antaki C. 2011 . Applied Conversation Analysis: Intervention and Change in Institutional Talk . Palgrave Macmillan . Brouwer C. E. 2004 . ‘Doing pronunciation: A specific type of repair sequence’ in Gardner R. , Wagner J. (eds): Second Language Conversations . Continuum . Burch A. R. 2014 . ‘Pursuing information: A conversation analytic perspective on communication strategies Language Learning 64 : 651 – 84 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Burch A. R. 2016 . ‘Motivation in interaction: A conversation-analytic perspective,’ Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, Honolulu Calzada S. M. 2013 . ‘Reading as a means of promoting social interaction: An analysis of the use of literature circles in EFL teaching ,’ Encuentro: Revista De Investigación e Innovación En La Clase De Idiomas 22 : 84 – 97 . Day R. R. 2015 . ‘Extending extensive reading ,’ Reading in a Foreign Language 27 : 294 – 301 . Day R. R. , Bamford J. . 1998 . Extensive Reading in the Second Language Classroom . Cambridge University Press . Diessel H. 2006 . ‘Demonstratives, joint attention, and the emergence of grammar ,’ Cognitive Linguistics 17 : 463 – 89 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Firth A. , Wagner J. . 1997 . ‘On discourse, communication and some fundamental concepts in SLA research ,’ The Modern Language Journal 81 : 285 – 300 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Firth A. , Wagner J. . 2007 . ‘Second/foreign language learning as a social accomplishment: Elaborations on a reconceptualized SLA ,’ The Modern Language Journal 91 : 800 – 19 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Freebody P. , Freiberg J. . 2001 . ‘Re-discovering practical reading activities in homes and Schools ,’ Journal of Research in Reading 24 : 222 – 34 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Gafaranga J. 2000 . ‘Medium repair vs. other-language repair: Telling the medium of a bilingual conversation ,’ International Journal of Bilingualism 4 : 327 – 50 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Garfinkel H. 2002 . Ethnomethodology’s program. Working out Durkheim's aphorism . Rowman & Littlefield Publishers . Goodwin C. 1996 . ‘Transparent vision’ in Ochs E. , Schegloff E. A. , Thompson S. A. (eds): Interaction and Grammar . Cambridge University Press . Goodwin C. 2013 . ‘The co-operative, transformative organization of human action and Knowledge ,’ Journal of Pragmatics 46 : 8 – 23 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Greer T. 2016 . ‘Multiple involvements in interactional repair: Using smartphones in peer culture to augment lingua franca English’ in Theobald M. (ed.): Friendship and Peer Culture in Multilingual Settings (Sociological Studies of Children and Youth, Volume 21) . Emerald Group Publishing Limited . Hauser E. 2014 . ‘Embodied uses of electronic bilingual dictionaries ,’ JALT Journal 36 : 5 – 24 . Hellermann J. 2006 . ‘Classroom interactive practices for developing L2 literacy: A microethnographic study of two beginning adult learners of English ,’ Applied Linguistics 27 : 377 – 404 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Hellermann J. 2008 . Social Actions for Classroom Language Learning . Multilingual Matters . Hellermann J. 2017 . ‘Talking about reading: Changing practices for a literacy event’ in Pekarek Doehler S. , González-Martínez E. , Wagner J. (eds): Longitudinal Studies in Conversation Analysis . Palgrave Macmillan . Heritage J. 1984 . ‘A change-of-state token and aspects of its sequential placement’ in Atkinson J. M. , Heritage J. (eds): Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis . Cambridge University Press . Ishida M. 2006 . ‘Interactional competence and the use of modal expressions in decision making activities: CA for understanding microgenesis of pragmatic competence’ in Bardovi-Harlig K. , FeIix-Brasdefer J. C. , Omar A. (eds): Pragmatics and Language Learning , Vol. 11 . National Foreign Language Resource Center . Jacobs G. M. , Farrell T. S. C. . 2012 . Teachers Sourcebook for Extensive Reading . Information Age Publishing . Jakonen T. , Morton T. . 2015 . ‘Epistemic search sequences in peer interaction in a content-based language classroom ,’ Applied Linguistics 36 : 73 – 94 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Jeon E.-Y. , Day R. R. . 2016 . ‘The effectiveness of ER on reading proficiency: A meta-analysis ,’ Reading in a Foreign Language 28 : 246 – 65 . Jefferson G. 2004 . ‘Glossary of transcript symbols with an introduction’ in Lerner G. (ed.): Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation . John Benjamins . Kasper G. , Burch A. R. . 2016 . ‘Focus on form in the wild’ in van Compernolle R. A. , McGregor J. (eds): Authenticity, Language, and Interaction in Second Language Contexts . Multilingual Matters . Kasper G. , Prior M. T. . 2015 . ‘Analyzing storytelling in TESOL interview research ,’ TESOL Quarterly 49 : 226 – 55 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Kasper G. , Wagner J. . 2011 . ‘Conversation analysis as an approach to second language acquisition’ in Atkinson D. (ed.): Alternative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition . Routledge . Kasper G. , Wagner J. . 2014 . ‘Conversation analysis in applied linguistics ,’ Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 34 : 171 – 212 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Kim Y. 2012 . ‘Practices for initial recognitional reference and learning opportunities in conversation ,’ Journal of Pragmatics 44 : 709 – 29 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Kirchhoff C. 2015 . ‘Extensive reading in the EFL classroom: Benefits of a face-to-face collaboration activity ,’ The Reading Matrix 15 : 54 – 65 . Krashen S. 2004 . The Power of Reading: Insights from the Research . Heinemann . Laufer B. 2003 . ‘Vocabulary acquisition in a second language: Do learners really acquire most vocabulary by reading? Some empirical evidence ,’ Canadian Modern Language Review 59 : 567 – 87 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Lee Y. A. 2010 . ‘Learning in the contingency of talk-in-interaction ,’ Text and Talk 30 : 403 – 22 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Lilja N. 2014 . ‘Partial repetitions as other-initiations of repair in second language talk: Re-establishing understanding and doing learning ,’ Journal of Pragmatics 71 : 98 – 116 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Long M. 1985 . ‘Input and second language acquisition theory’ in Gass S. , Madden C. (eds): Input in Second Language Acquisition . Newbury House . Macbeth D. 2014 . ‘Studies of work, instructed action, and the promise of granularity: A commentary ,’ Discourse Studies 16 : 295 – 308 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Majlesi A. R. , Broth M. . 2012 . ‘Emergent learnables in second language classroom interaction ,’ Learning, Culture and Social Interaction 1 : 193 – 207 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Mark P. L. 2007 . ‘Building a community of EFL readers: Setting up literature circles in a Japanese university,’ JALT2006 Proceedings. Tokyo. Markee N . 1994 . ‘Toward an ethnomethodological respecification of second-language Acquisition’ in Tarone E. , Gass S. , Cohen A. (eds): Research Methodology in Second-Language Acquisition . Lawrence Erlbaum Associates . Markee N . 2000 . Conversation Analysis . Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers . Markee N. 2008 . ‘Toward a learning behavior tracking methodology for CA‐for‐SLA ,’ Applied Linguistics 29 : 404 – 27 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Markee N. 2015 . ‘Are replication studies possible in qualitative second/foreign language classroom research? A call for comparative re-production research ,’ Language Teaching ; doi: 10.1017/S0261444815000099 . Melander H. , Sahlström F. . 2009 . ‘In tow of the blue whale: Learning as interactional changes in topical orientation ,’ Journal of Pragmatics 41 : 1519 – 37 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Min H. T. 2008 . ‘EFL vocabulary acquisition and retention: Reading plus vocabulary enhancement activities and narrow reading ,’ Language Learning 58 : 73 – 115 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Nakanishi T. 2015 . ‘A meta-analysis of extensive reading research ,’ TESOL Quarterly 49 : 6 – 37 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Peplow D. 2016 . Talk about Books: A Study of Reading Groups . Bloomsbury Publishing . Pica T. 1994 . ‘Research on negotiation: What does it reveal about second-language learning conditions, processes, and outcomes? ,’ Language Learning 44 : 493 – 527 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Sahlström F. 2011 . ‘Learning as social action’ in Hall J. K. , Hellermann J. , Pekarek Doehler S. (eds): L2 Interactional Competence and Development . Multilingual Matters . Samuda V. 2015 . ‘Tasks, design, and the architecture of pedagogical spaces’ in Bygate M. (ed.): Domains and Directions in the Development of TBLT . John Benjamins Publishing Company . Schegloff E. A. 1979 . ‘Identification and recognition in telephone conversation openings’ in Psathas G. (ed.): Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology . Irvington . Seedhouse P. 2008 . ‘Learning to talk the talk: Conversation Analysis as a tool for induction of trainee teachers’, in Garton S. , Richards K. (eds): Professional Encounters in TESOL: Discourses of Teachers in Teaching . Palgrave Macmillan . Sert O. 2013 . ‘Epistemic status check’ as an interactional phenomenon in instructed learning settings ,’ Journal of Pragmatics 45 : 13 – 28 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Sert O. 2015 . Social Interaction and L2 Classroom Discourse . Edinburgh University Press . Sert O. , Walsh S. . 2013 . ‘The interactional management of claims of insufficient knowledge in English language classrooms ,’ Language and Education 27 : 542 – 65 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Shelton-Strong S. J. 2012 . ‘Literature circles in ELT ,’ ELT Journal 66 : 214 – 23 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Sinclair A. M. , Coulthard M. . 1975 . Towards an Analysis of Discourse: The English Used by Teachers and Pupils . Oxford University Press . Song J. , Sardegna V. G. . 2014 . ‘EFL learners’ incidental acquisition of English prepositions through enhanced extensive reading instruction ,’ RELC Journal 45 : 67 – 84 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Van den Branden K. 2009 . ‘Mediating between predetermined order and chaos: The role of the teacher in task-based language education ,’ International Journal of Applied Linguistics 19 : 264 – 85 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Wagner J. , Firth A. . 1997 . ‘Communication strategies at work’ in Kasper G. , Kellermann E. (eds): Communication Strategies: Psycholinguistic and Sociolinguistic Perspectives . Routledge . Yamashita J. 2015 . ‘In search of the nature of extensive reading in L2: Cognitive, affective, and pedagogical perspectives ,’ Reading in a Foreign Language 27 : 168 – 81 . Zimmerman C. B. 1997 . ‘Do reading and interactive vocabulary instruction make a difference? An empirical study ,’ TESOL Quarterly 31 : 121 – 40 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS © Oxford University Press 2017 This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Applied Linguistics Oxford University Press

How Learning Occurs in an Extensive Reading Book Club: A Conversation Analytic Perspective

Applied Linguistics , Volume 40 (1) – Feb 1, 2019

Loading next page...
 
/lp/oxford-university-press/how-learning-occurs-in-an-extensive-reading-book-club-a-conversation-KWCYANqUyO

References (63)

Publisher
Oxford University Press
Copyright
© Oxford University Press 2017
ISSN
0142-6001
eISSN
1477-450X
DOI
10.1093/applin/amx014
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Abstract Extensive reading (ER) has been implemented in various second language (L2) teaching and learning contexts, and studies in the field have provided a wealth of empirical evidence that a large amount of L2 reading over an extended time improves students’ reading ability and benefits other areas of language learning (Nakanishi 2015; Jeon and Day 2016). However, despite the large amount of research on ER, there is still a lack of studies that show how or whether students accomplish learning during ER activities. To begin to fill this gap, this study applies a conversation analytic lens to investigate cases of local L2 learning and linguistic development during ER book club interactions. The analysis of the selected excerpts shows how the participants themselves shift the interactional focus from book talk to a lexical item during talk-in-interaction (i.e. orientation to learning), and how they deploy the learning object in subsequent speech events (i.e. short-term development). The analysis also shows how the participants orient to emergent learning objects from several different angles (e.g. pronunciation, meaning, spelling, and morphological form). 1. INTRODUCTION Extensive reading (ER), as a pedagogical approach to teaching and learning a foreign/second language, is based on the idea that pleasure reading benefits second language (L2) students’ learning. It has been implemented under different names such as Free Voluntary Reading, Pleasure Reading, and Sustained Silent Reading (Krashen 2004), with ‘its various names emphasiz[ing] different aspects of a similar/same kind of reading’ (Yamashita 2015: 168). The central tenet of ER is that learners should (i) read as much as possible (ii) for pleasure (iii) with the freedom to choose what, when, and where to read (Day and Bamford 1998; Day 2015). ER scholars have paid particular attention to the effects of reading (as an activity done by individuals) on various L2 learning outcomes including but not limited to reading comprehension, reading fluency, vocabulary, and grammar (for overviews, see Nakanishi 2015; Jeon and Day 2016). However although a great deal of research has been done on the effects of ER on individual students’ language learning, there is a lack of studies on how students accomplish learning during ER activities. Several ER studies report the use (Song and Sardegna 2014; Kirchhoff 2015) and suggest the inclusion (Day and Bamford 1998; Jacobs and Farrell 2012) of activities that fundamentally involve social interaction (e.g. in an ER reading circle activity, students talk about their books in a small group) in teaching through ER. Nevertheless, scholars in the field have not yet focused on (i) how ER activities evolve as social interaction (see, however, Freebody and Freiberg 2001; Peplow 2016, who investigate reading as ‘situated social practices’ in non-ER contexts) and (ii) how L2 students can benefit from participating in them. In fact, considering that several studies have reported that ‘reading supplemented with activities’ leads to better incidental gains of linguistic knowledge and retention than ‘reading only’ (Zimmerman 1997; Laufer 2003; Min 2008), it is surprising that research has not been done to see how participants learn and develop linguistic knowledge in situ. The same issue exists in the field of conversation analysis as an approach to second language acquisition (CA-SLA; Kasper and Wagner 2011). CA-SLA studies have explored diverse cases of local (or incidental) learning (or opportunities for learning) in various interactions (as discussed in the section ‘Language Learning as Social Practice’ below). But they have rarely focused on how participants orient to and accomplish L2 learning during reading activities (see, however, Hellermann 2006, 2017, who investigates L2 students’ development of interactional practices in a sustained-silent reading classroom context). To begin to fill these gaps, this research project uses a conversation analytic lens to investigate how students in an ER book club learn linguistic knowledge as socially viewable participant concerns in interaction. Consequently, this study will provide a deeper understanding of the nature of an ER book club setting, the relations among the participants in the local context, and how these participants orient to learning in situ. As the type of conversation that takes place at ER book clubs seems to be pedagogically beneficial for L2 learners (Shelton-Strong 2012) and is increasingly happening in real life for both educational and social purposes (Peplow 2016), a more systematic review of what goes on in such book club contexts is warranted. I frame this study’s setting as an ER book club because, unlike in typical book club settings where groups of people meet to share responses to the same text (Peplow 2016), the participants in this ER book club read different books of their choice, following generally accepted ER teaching practices or principles (Day and Bamford 1998; Day 2015).1 Because the participants read different books, they had to take extra steps (e.g. explaining the characters, briefly summarizing the storyline, and so on) to establish mutual understanding about their book’s contents with the co-participants before further engaging in book talk. In fact, this study demonstrates how vocabulary learning emerges, for example, when a student did not fully understand the story of another participant’s book (Excerpt 2). Thus, the fact of the book club being in an ER context is relevant to the practices in which the learners engage, at least in the excerpts that I provide in this study. 2. LANGUAGE LEARNING FROM READING AND BEYOND A number of researchers have found better language learning effects of ‘reading supplemented with activities’ compared to ‘reading only’. For instance, quasi-experimental studies have reported that reading supplemented with vocabulary enhancement activities as opposed to a reading-only approach is more beneficial for students’ expansion and retention of L2 vocabulary knowledge (Laufer 2003; Min 2008). Zimmerman (1997) also found that interactive vocabulary instruction involving small group communicative activities led to better gains in L2 vocabulary knowledge than just reading. In a similar vein, Song and Sardegna (2014) investigated the effects of what they called ‘enhanced ER’ (i.e. ‘extensive reading with communicative output activities’, p. 68) on 12 Korean secondary school students’ incidental acquisition of English preposition knowledge. For one semester, the students spent an hour and a half reading and doing reading-related activities (such as moderated group discussion, book sharing, and book poster presentations) twice a week after school as an extracurricular activity. Song and Sardegna found that the enhanced ER treatment improved the students’ ability to notice and correct wrong prepositions as well as to produce correct prepositions. Based on their findings, they claimed that ‘reading plus activities leads to more incidental gains in both receptive and productive knowledge’ (p. 76). Studies of literature circles (i.e. ‘small peer-led discussion groups, involved in reading the same piece of literature’; Shelton-Strong 2012: 214) have reported similar findings. For example, by investigating students’ literature circle experiences in an L2 classroom context, Shelton-Strong (2012) found that the activities ‘foster learner autonomy, while providing opportunities for focused extensive reading and collaborative, purposeful discussions’ (p. 222). Studies of literature circles in other L2 contexts also have reported positive language learning outcomes (Mark 2007) as well as positive perceptions toward the activity (Calzada 2013). In line with these findings, Kirchhoff (2015) noted that ‘talking about the books can change extensive reading from being a solitary act into one that meets students’ academic and social needs and may be the emergence of intrinsic motivation to read’ (p. 54). Kirchhoff investigated 41 Japanese college students’ perceptions of book talk in a 15-week ER course and found that the students perceived the book talk as a good activity for both learning about the content of the books and communicative practice. She noted that book talk ‘pushed L2 output and expanded their relationships with classmates’ (p. 62). These studies argue that we, as language teachers, need to supplement reading with activities for language learning. However, how or whether learning emerges during these activities in a given setting has not been of focal attention to the field yet. The lack of documentation of the practices through which students orient to learning during ER activities has meant that opportunities for situated studies of students’ learning in ER contexts have been limited. As a result, we do not know a lot about how or whether students learn and develop their linguistic repertoires during ER-based activities. In this study, by describing the reflexive indexicality of action (Garfinkel 2002; Macbeth 2014) as it appears in the participants’ interaction over 20 min, I attempt to show cases of local learning in an ER book club. In addition, the study demonstrates how such learning as social practice can be studied with a CA approach, which is the topic of the following section. 3. LANGUAGE LEARNING AS SOCIAL PRACTICE CA-SLA has been growing as a field of inquiry, since Markee, Firth, and Wagner (Markee 1994, 2000; Firth and Wagner 1997, 2007; Wagner and Firth 1997) began to emphasize that cognition can be understood as a socially shared phenomenon as a condition for reconceptualizing learning as social practice. By adopting an emic (participant oriented)—instead of an etic (researcher oriented)—perspective, scholars have provided empirical evidence of how learning happens in real time (Melander and Sahlström 2009; Lee 2010; Sahlström 2011; Majlesi and Broth 2012; Jakonen and Morton 2015, to name a few; see also the list of references in Sert 2015: 35). While experimental researchers begin by ‘assuming that verifiable truths about the phenomena that they are interested in may be “discovered, explained and generalized” by studying these phenomena under carefully controlled laboratory conditions’ (Markee 2015: 4), CA researchers instead seek to ‘“understand, not explain,” phenomena’ (p. 5) collected in natural conversation settings. Sahlström (2011), for example, showed how two multilingual children in Finland engaged in counting from 1 to 10 in English (which is not their everyday language) as a focal concern during their everyday interaction over a week. He argued that the children’s orientation to the counting practice in English to change epistemic possibilities for one of the children illustrates learning as social practice. In line with this study, Melander and Sahlström (2009) also demonstrated learning by showing how a small group of children oriented to the topic of the size of blue whales and changed their participation about the topic over 12 min. In both cases, learning emerged as a matter of the learners doing something on their own. Learning in this sense is ‘the members’ task’ (Lee 2010: 409–410); it is the actions the participants are engaged in. Many CA-SLA researchers also have reported that participants actively set up opportunities for vocabulary learning by orienting to lexical items as learning objects in various settings. Markee (2008), for example, tracked a student’s learning of a lexical item, ‘prerequisite’, in a teacher-led classroom context. Kasper and Burch (2016) tracked how the learning of a Japanese word, ‘sakaeteru’ (meaning bustling), became a focus of participants’ concern during their leisure talk in a café. Kim (2012) also demonstrated various examples of how participants create opportunities for recognitional reference in conversation-for-learning contexts. In fact, among the earliest studies that showed evidence for learning as social practice, where the participants make vocabulary learning the focal concern of their interaction, were Markee’s studies (1994, 2000) of student-initiated definition talk during small group activities. Markee showed how students in lower to upper intermediate English as a second language (ESL) classes oriented to the structure of conversation as a resource, which enabled one of the students (L10) to understand and learn a word (coral), at least in the short term, during a process of collaboratively figuring out the meaning of the word in a small group task activity. To be more specific, Markee (1994, 2000) showed L10’s display of her lack of lexical knowledge of coral at one point in time (2000: 112, Excerpt 7.1; 108–109, Excerpt 7.2) and also how she received language support from her peers (2000: 107; Excerpt 7.5). He further demonstrated how L10 was able to define the word and use it in a correct manner in her later group presentation (2000: 110–111; Excerpt 7.8). Unlike most other CA-SLA studies, however, these excerpts show not only how a student orients to an activity as learning but also how she develops, as the outcome of the learning, a new lexical knowledge in the short term (cf. Ishida 2006, who traced the changes of a Japanese as a foreign language (JFL) student’s use of modal markers over the course of a 10-min task interaction, showing how the short-term development of competence in the use of modal expressions occurred without having to orient to the activity as learning). From this perspective, ‘learning is conceptualized as process and product, as action and achievement’ (Hellermann 2017: 5), not as an individual’s internalization of discrete linguistic items. 4. DATA AND METHODOLOGY The data for this study come from video recordings of an ER book club session in an Intensive English Program context at a university in the USA. The book club sessions were conducted by a facilitator (Hailey, pseudonym). The sessions took place once a week for 16 weeks (with two orientation sessions and 14 reading-related sessions) in 2015 as an extracurricular activity. During the book club sessions, participants, including the facilitator, silently read their individually chosen books together for 10–15 min (i.e. the reading period),2 wrote a response to a prompt prepared by the facilitator for about 10 min (i.e. the writing period), and took turns in talking about what they wrote and about their books for the remaining time (i.e. the speaking period). The facilitator had no preselected pedagogical goals except to have the participants read their own books, write a response to the prompt, and share their responses and books with the co-participants. Consequently, although it had its own institutional agenda, the book club was fairly unrestricted in regard to turn taking (see particularly Excerpts 2, 3, and 6 where students, not the facilitator, take the floor to ask the presenter questions). The interactional organization of the book club, in other words, did not normally involve the more or less ubiquitous instructional pattern of the initiation-response-feedback sequence (Sinclair and Coulthard 1975). The ER book club in this regard is a unique educational site that deserves further investigation. Hailey, the facilitator, has a master’s degree in second language studies and had taught English in various international programs and English institutes using the ER approach in the USA and Japan since 2008. However, leading an informal book club while being a participant herself was a new practice for her as well as for the students. She contacted five of her previous students in the program, who she thought would be interested in joining the book club, for the purpose of promoting their language learning and good L2 reading habits through reading for pleasure. During the recruiting process, she explicitly told the students that the book club was voluntary, and that they would receive no course credit or any other benefit (or penalty) for attending (or not attending). All five, plus one more student who heard about it in the third week, joined the club. The meetings were conducted either in a student lounge where the books (mostly simplified books designed for L2 readers) that students could borrow were kept or in an empty classroom. The data for this study come from the meeting in the ninth week, which took place in the empty classroom and lasted about 40 min. Out of usual seven, four participants (the facilitator, Clara [Chinese], Harim [Taiwanese], and Rayin [Chinese]; all pseudonyms) were present. By taking the learning as process and achievement approach to a single-case study and tracing the participants’ behavior in the process of learning about a lexical item in a short period of time, I aim to empirically show how students orient to learning and develop various linguistic resources, at least in the short term, while being engaged with the activity at hand (Markee 2008; Kasper and Wagner 2011: 131–134). To be more specific, the current analysis focuses on book talk sequences (which lasted about 20 min) that took place during the session’s speaking period. These sequences include Clara’s presentation (i.e. the practice of reporting a prompt answer along with the book story; Excerpt 1); the post-expansion phase of Clara’s presentation (i.e. further talk on the presentation with co-participants; Excerpts 2, 3, and 4); as well as the facilitator’s presentation (Excerpt 5); and the post-expansion phase of her presentation (Excerpt 6). Prior to this activity, participants read the books of their choice and wrote responses to the following prompt: ‘What is the best book you have read so far? Why?’I selected these sequences for analysis because they provide good examples of, first, how the participants themselves shift the interactional focus from topical talk to a lexical item during the book club interaction (i.e. orientation to learning), and, second, how they deploy the learning object in subsequent speech events (i.e. short-term development). Through the analysis, this study will show how CA can be utilized to track participants’ successful language learning behavior (cf. Markee 2008), at least in the short term, during book club conversations. The video recording was done with two cameras and two microphones, resulting in 16 h of data. All transcripts follow Jefferson’s (2004) conventions for the vocal content. For the transcription of non-vocal conduct, I adapted the conventions employed by Burch (2014; see also Goodwin 2013), which include codes and textual descriptions of gaze, posture, facial expression, gesture, and manipulation of objects as well as screen shots from the video recordings (see Supplementary Appendix). 5. TRACKING THE LEARNING OF A LEXICAL ITEM Excerpts (1–6) below show how the participants in the book club meeting orient to learning as social practice and develop their pronunciation, spelling, and understanding of the meaning and morphological variants of the word bully in the short term. Excerpts (1–2) show how Clara problematizes her own pronunciation of bullied during her presentation. Excerpts (3–4) show how Harim then treats the word as a learning object and how he orients to different sources of information (e.g. from Clara, the facilitator, and his phone) about this word, and, finally, Excerpts (5–6) show how the participants orient to their shared recent history of pedagogical work with this word. I will also demonstrate how the participants’ orientation to the emergent learning object is shaped by the multifaceted nature of language learning. 5.1 Focus on pronunciation Excerpt 1 provides evidence of Clara’s change in the pronunciation of bullied from less to more target-like (compare lines 5, 7, and 11 with line 14) through a persistent pronunciation search (line 7) and repair initiation (line 9) as well as correction sequences (lines 11–14) during her presentation in the phase of a book club meeting’s speaking period. 5.1.1 Excerpt 1 Clara formulates her story’s climax (Kasper and Prior 2015) by highlighting an element in her book with a preface ‘one day↓ (0.4) one thing happened and:↓ changes their life.’ in lines 1–2. This action not only connects the background she has been talking about (not shown) with the climax components that she will explain soon but also creates suspense with particular lexicogrammatical choices (e.g. the undisclosed ‘one thing’ [which is used as a prospective indexical; see Goodwin 1996] that can change people’s lives). Continuing her description in line 4, Clara signals trouble with the word ‘bullied’ in line 5 with her post-positioned speech perturbation, ‘buil- (.) built.’ (Schegloff 1979; see also Brouwer 2004). She also produces a less target-like pronunciation of the word as ‘built’/’bult/(line 5) with her gaze toward the facilitator after completing her turn (line 6). Clara takes the facilitator’s nod in line 6 as a continuer and quietly repeats the word with altered pronunciation in line 7. She does so by providing an alternative sound through changing one of the word’s vowels from a monophthong/u/to a diphthong/Iu/and one consonant from voiceless/t/to voiced/d/(compare line 5 and line 7). By providing the sound changes, Clara is proposing an alternative for the repairable (Lilja 2014). This act shows something to the hearer about the nature of the trouble. In other words, by presenting alternatives, Clara displays the trouble as having a particular phonetic character (see Brouwer 2004 for a ‘doing pronunciation’ sequence). The facilitator orients to Clara’s trouble by leaning forward toward Clara’s notes in an attempt to see the problematic word while creating co-operation between her and Clara to help Clara complete the repair (lines 8–9). With this other initiation of repair, the facilitator shows her orientation to Clara’s pronunciation search and to her own lack of knowledge of the word that Clara is trying to pronounce. In other words, they are both ‘unknowing’, but in regard to different aspects of the word: Clara cannot pronounce it and the facilitator does not know what it is. Clara orients to the facilitator’s repair initiation by verbally completing the incomplete sequence while physically pointing at the word that she had written and moving the notes toward the facilitator (lines 10–11). In so doing, she is explicitly inviting the facilitator’s help on the pronunciation while also orienting to the facilitator’s searching for a word in her notes. After reading the word in Clara’s notes (lines 10–12), the facilitator shows in her response turn with the change of state token oh (Heritage 1984) and embodied action by moving her body backwards (line 13) that she has now understood what word Clara is having trouble with. This is important to note because it shows that the facilitator’s focus on the word’s pronunciation is clearly due to the fact that she cannot forward the activity until she achieves mutual understanding with Clara. The facilitator then offers the word with the target-like pronunciation. In her overlapped response (line 14), Clara treats the facilitator’s display of understanding (line 13) as a correction, thus acknowledging it. Clara then refocuses on her presentation after closing the side sequence with ‘okay’ and a micro pause in line 17. The interaction in Excerpt 1 is notable in that it shows evidence of Clara’s lack of knowledge in pronouncing the word bullied in a target-like manner. As in Markee’s (1994, 2000) data, such evidence of a speaker’s insufficient knowledge plays an important role in showing how the speaker subsequently gains the knowledge; that is, it is part of the evidence of a process of learning-in-interaction. In the next extract, which comes from later in the same discussion (at the post-expansion phase of Clara’s presentation), we will observe Clara’s lack of development of the pronunciation (line 90) and Harim’s claim of insufficient knowledge of the word (line 94) as well as how participants create a ‘pedagogical space’ (i.e. ‘a space for learning and for teaching’; Samuda 2015: 282) to teach and learn the trouble-source bully (line 93). Prior to Excerpt 2 below, Harim has been asking Clara questions related to her book to clarify his understanding. The extract begins with Harim’s information request about what happened to ‘Hason’ when ‘Armi’ (characters in Clara’s book) decided not to save him (line 88). 5.1.2 Excerpt 2 After she indexes trouble in formulating the answer in line 89, Clara responds to Harim that Hason was ‘bullied’ (line 90), thereby bringing the word that she used in Excerpt 1 back into the interaction, but at a slow pace and with the less target-like pronunciation/bIulid/. The slow, less target-like pronunciation shows that Clara is still having trouble pronouncing the word. Then, unlike in Excerpt 1 line 13, the facilitator displays recognition by correcting the pronunciation while putting the progress of the talk on hold (line 91). However, when the correction happens, the facilitator’s gaze is on Harim, not on Clara. In fact, although Clara treats the facilitator’s action as a correction by acknowledging the correction through repeating the trouble source several times until she pronounces it in a more target-like manner (line 92), she also gazes at Harim while doing so. Both participants are facing Harim because he is the recipient of the question that he initiated in line 88. In other words, they are soliciting a display of understanding from Harim on the problematic word. The repairable is now repaired for Clara (in regard to the pronunciation of the word) and they are moving on to see if it is repaired for Harim (in regard to the understanding of what the word means) as well. Specifically, the facilitator asks Harim whether he knows the meaning of the word through an epistemic status check (Sert 2013) in line 93 after looking at Harim’s silent mouth mimicking of Clara’s repetition in line 92 (see the picture). With the question ‘do you know <bully>?’, the facilitator treats the word as a lexical item that Harim may not know and orients to Harim’s L2 competence. In fact, the facilitator in collaboration with the others opens up a pedagogical space by focusing on the meaning of the word. In his response (line 94), Harim makes a non-vocal claim of insufficient knowledge (Sert and Walsh 2013; Sert 2015) of the word bully by shaking his head from left to right. Clara also, by overlapping, co-orients to Harim’s lack of understanding by first using ‘bullying’, that is changing the morphological inflection of the trouble source, which suggests her additional morphological knowledge of the word. She then uses Chinese as a support language by providing a translation of the word (qīfù), while moving her pen and eyebrows up to re-gain Harim’s attention from the facilitator (line 95). In so doing, she is orienting to Chinese as a shared language between the two and to her own knowledge of the vocabulary item. In line 97, Harim treats Clara’s language support as new information with his stressed and elongated rising intonation of ‘uh:↑’ (thereby displaying his lack of relevant knowledge once again). His initiation of another question ‘who- who- who- bullying: him↓’, this time with the form of the word that Clara used before providing the Chinese translation (‘bullying’), shows that Harim’s problem with understanding the meaning of the word has been solved (line 99). By switching back to English after the trouble has been resolved, the participants resume their topical talk, in which they are pursuing understanding of Clara’s book’s content. It is possible that Harim did not recognize the present and past tense forms of bully (line 94), particularly in light of his use of ‘bullying’ instead of the other forms in line 99. He may have understood the meaning of the word after hearing ‘bullying’ from Clara before the translation, which in this case would show his partial knowledge of the word. The situation becomes clearer in the next extract, when Harim refocuses on the word form by asking an explicit question. To recap: Excerpt 2 provides clear evidence that Clara is still having trouble with pronouncing the word even after the facilitator’s correction in Excerpt 1, as well as that Harim has insufficient knowledge of the word bully. Moreover, it shows how the facilitator in co-operation with the others creates a pedagogical space for Harim to learn a new word, which has arisen from the contingencies of the interaction. 5.2 Treating bully as a learning object In the following excerpt (3 min and 21 s passed between the end of Excerpt 2 and the start of Excerpt 3), we see Clara pronouncing ‘bullied’ in a more target-like manner as an outcome of a repair sequence (line 231), thereby showing short-term development of the pronunciation. We also see participants’ orientation to learning the pronunciation and spelling (Excerpt 3, lines 229–242) as well as the morphological form (Excerpt 4, lines 243–263) of the lexical item ‘bully’. 5.2.1 Excerpt 3 Beginning in line 229, we see how Harim initiates an orientation to learning by asking about the trouble word—with a less target-like pronunciation (‘booth’/buθ/)—while simultaneously doing specific embodied actions to secure the floor (leaning forward) and to show persistence (or ‘sustained orientation’; Burch 2016) in an attempt to learn the word (making a fist and doing a light pounding action). This light pounding can be understood as a category-bound predicate for bullying, as somebody punching, thereby bullying, someone. With this pronunciation search (or epistemic search; see Jakonen and Morton 2015), Harim displays his learning of the word meaning while positioning himself as unknowing with regard to its pronunciation, and positioning the addressed recipient (i.e. Clara) as a possible knower. In so doing, Harim is treating Clara instead of the facilitator as authoritative in regard to this knowledge of the word. In her response to Harim’s pronunciation search, Clara demonstrates her ability to pronounce the word in a target-like manner, but also reveals possibly partial morphological knowledge of the word by saying ‘bullied’ instead of ‘bully’ (line 231). Her being able to produce the word with a target-like pronunciation, however, is evidence of pronunciation development over a short period of time. Then, with the question ‘ha- how do I spell:↓’ (line 232), Harim focuses on the word’s spelling. To be more specific, Harim begins his search for the word’s spelling by writing down the spelling (line 235) that Clara produces in line 233. His double-checking of the spelling of the word in line 238, however, shows that he wrote it down incorrectly (one ‘l’ is missing). Harim’s self-initiated self-repair (line 238), where he repairs the second letter of the word (‘o’ to ‘u’), overlaps the other-initiated other-repair by Clara with the correct spelling with double ‘l’ in line 239, thereby possibly leading Harim to miss an opportunity to get the correct spelling. The facilitator’s agreement (‘uh huh’) with her gaze on Harim’s notes (line 240) is thus ambiguous. It could be an agreement that Harim had the right spelling, even though he made a mistake as he read it out loud, or it could be an agreement with Clara’s spelling. The fact that Harim continues to write in line 241 might also suggest that he had not finished writing down the spelling at the time that the facilitator provided an agreement marker, indicating that the facilitator was agreeing to the partial spelling. Excerpt 4 is the continuation of the conversation in Excerpt 3. 5.2.2 Excerpt 4 In line 243, the facilitator asks Clara what the basic form for bullied is by pointing at the word that Harim has written while saying the demonstrative pronoun ‘that’ with rising intonation and repeating the trouble source. Demonstratives along with pointing gestures are interactional resources for eliciting attentional focus (Diessel 2006), as they demand that recipients attend more closely to the focal object. With this question, the facilitator, in collaboration with the others, creates this pedagogical space for teaching and learning a morphological form of the word. The participants’ focus of teaching and learning at this moment has arisen from the contingencies of the interaction. In her response, Clara tries a gerund form of the word (‘bullying’) after her cutoff ‘bull-’ (line 244), which indicates a trouble source (Schegloff 1979). This use of ‘bullying’ was also evidenced in Excerpt 2 line 95, which seems to indicate either Clara’s inaccurate understanding of what the facilitator means by ‘basic form’ or her less of knowledge of the morphological forms of the word bully. The facilitator corrects Clara’s less target-like response by providing the correct form with ‘bully::’ (line 245). She does this while gazing at Harim’s phone while elongating and emphasizing the last syllable of the word, thereby not only correcting Clara but also possibly orienting to Harim’s use of a dictionary on his phone, which he started in line 243 after receiving the correct spelling of the word from Clara (cf. students’ electronic dictionary use in L2 discussion in Hauser 2014 and peers’ smartphone use in their lingua franca English interaction in Greer 2016). Harim is now treating his phone dictionary, not Clara (as in Excerpt 3) or the facilitator, as the most authoritative source of knowledge about the word that he needs to double-check before closing this learning sequence (line 263). Clara then seeks confirmation in line 246 by quietly voicing the word ‘bully’ in correct form with rising intonation while gazing forward. In response, the facilitator spells the word out loud with an emphasis on ‘y’ (line 247), which gets co-constructed by Clara (line 248). After the confirmation, both Clara and Harim show changes of epistemic state with ‘oh’ (Heritage 1984) in lines 250 and 252, indicating that neither of them knew the basic form of the lexical item (or at least, its spelling) beforehand. Next, Harim presses keys on his phone with his right-hand fingers while silently mouthing the spelling ‘b-u-l-l’ (line 254) and then says the word out loud, ‘bully:↓’ with an elongated vowel (line 255). At the same time, the facilitator leans forward toward Harim’s phone and gazes at it (lines 254–259). Harim again portrays his change of knowledge with the change of state token ‘oh’, but in an upgraded manner with longer elongation and an up and down tone while nodding (line 258). He then exaggerates his understanding as a reaction to the facilitator’s confirmation check ‘okay?’ (line 259) through his repeated ohs and embodied actions in lines 260–263. In so doing, Harim is once again treating his phone dictionary as the most authoritative source of knowledge about the word. This act closes the learning sequence. In short, Excerpts 3 and 4 provide clear evidence of short-term development of Clara’s pronunciation and Harim’s knowledge of the meaning of the word. After displaying their lack of knowledge of the word (in Excerpts 1 and 2), both Clara and Harim showed the changes in their lexical knowledge, that is they displayed their achievement of learning. In addition, we also observed how the participants oriented to their learning of the word from several different angles: from a pronunciation focus to a spelling focus (Excerpt 3) and then to the morphological form (Excerpt 4) of the word. This progression shows the speakers engaging with the multifaceted nature of language learning as they display that knowing how to pronounce a word does not mean knowing how to spell or inflect it. Also important is Harim’s shift in who/what he orients to as the source of knowledge: from Clara and the facilitator to his phone dictionary. 5.3 Orienting to shared history of vocabulary pedagogy Excerpt 5 shows Harim’s display of his recognition and target-like pronunciation of the word ‘bully’ while the facilitator is talking about a different book, one that she read. The word is now being used to talk about something else. One minute and 20 s has passed between the end of Excerpt 4 and the start of Excerpt 5. 5.3.1 Excerpt 5 Prior to Excerpt 5, the facilitator was talking about her own book. When she uses the word bullied during her talk (line 300), she nods while gazing at Harim during a substantial pause after producing ‘bullie::d’ with an elongated second syllable. In so doing, she orients to their shared history related to the word (cf. ‘shared repertoire’; Hellermann 2008), thereby eliciting some type of recognition from Harim. The facilitator’s noticeable act prompts Harim to display his recognition of the word by repeating it, but in its basic form, ‘bully’, and, possibly, his smile while nodding is orienting to their shared history with the word (line 302). His repetition of the word in its basic form could be the result of mishearing the facilitator’s pronunciation, particularly because her/d/in the final syllable was less hearable, as she was elongating the final vowel, or it could be his display of knowledge of the basic form of the word, especially as the spelling that he looked up with the facilitator was ‘bully’ (Excerpt 4). Either way, he was able to acknowledge the word that the facilitator used with a target-like pronunciation and orient to their past history with the word. Next, in Excerpt 6, Harim shows his competence in formulating a confirmation-seeking question with the use of the word bully in line 366. This happens during the post-expansion phase of the facilitator’s presentation. 5.3.2 Excerpt 6 In line 366, Harim correctly uses bully with a target-like pronunciation (thereby showing short-term development of his knowledge of the pronunciation and morphological form of the word), perhaps as a noun (although it follows an inaccurate verb form) when he says that the character in the facilitator’s book ‘facen/feIsən/bully’ (by which he seems to mean ‘had to face a bully’, or he might have meant to say ‘was bullied’, in which case this would be an inaccurate use of the word form) while displaying his and the facilitator’s shared orientation to the word being in Harim’s notes. This display of a new use of the word in line 366 could have developed from his dictionary work on his phone (Excerpt 4). Though it is unclear where he learned the form or whether he used the word as a noun or verb, we at least know that his insufficient knowledge of the word has been sufficiently supplemented for him to be able to use the word in constructing his own question, although maybe not in a target-like manner, during this book club session. In sum, the excerpts presented above (Excerpts 1–6) illustrate evidence of students’ orientations to learning and successful short-term language learning behaviors in the context of an ER book club. Evidence for this successful learning includes Clara’s change of her pronunciation from less to more target-like, as well as Harim’s change from his claim of insufficient knowledge to his display of understanding and his use of the word with a target-like pronunciation and possibly in a correct morphological form. 6. DISCUSSION In this article, I showed evidence of how students oriented to the learning of the lexical item bully and of how they expanded their linguistic knowledge of the word through their practices at an ER book club. In Excerpt 1, we observed how Clara changed her pronunciation of the word, bullied from less to more target-like through pronunciation search and repair initiations during her presentation practice. In Excerpt 2, during the post-expansion phase of Clara’s presentation, we saw how Harim initiated a focus on the word in collaboration with the facilitator, creating a pedagogical space to teach and learn the word. We also saw how Clara providing language support to Harim, which may have promoted his understanding of the word meaning. In Excerpts 3 and 4, we saw Harim’s display of the word’s meaning and Clara’s pronunciation of the word in a target-like manner, thereby showing their short-term development of word knowledge. We also observed how the participants oriented to teaching and learning the pronunciation and spelling (where Harim is positioned as unknower) as well as the morphological form (where both Clara and Harim are positioned as unknowers) of the word. In Excerpts 5 and 6, we observed Harim’s display of short-term development of the morphological form and pronunciation of the word during the facilitator’s presentation. Unlike in (quasi-)experimental ER studies, this analysis explored and showed the details of learning processes while displaying the achievements of the learning sequences. In other words, we saw how the participants’ learning orientation functioned as both a transforming act and a substrate (i.e. ‘the materials being operated on’; Goodwin 2013: 9) that opened up the opportunity for the participants to successfully develop their linguistic knowledge (Markee 1994, 2000). Compared to showing how learners orient to learning, tracking such successful language learning behavior over time is a more difficult analytical project (Markee 2008). SLA studies on the negotiation of meaning (Long 1985; Pica 1994) have proposed that negotiation enhances the comprehension of input, which promotes acquisition. My empirically grounded data substantiate how such acquisition could occur (at least in the short term). To be more specific, I showed how Harim’s information request on Clara’s book content (Excerpt 2) and the pronunciation of a word (Excerpt 3) created, in co-operation with others, a pedagogical space where the participants were able to make the incomprehensible input (or unrecognizable referent) comprehensible (or recognizable) and to learn to use a word in a less to more target-like manner. Through the ‘dense coordination of multisemiotic practices’ (Kasper and Burch 2016: 223), including but not limited to their embodied actions, dictionary use, note writing, and using Chinese as a medium repair resource (Gafaranga 2000), participants were engaged with the learning of the word, and successfully demonstrated changes and expansion of their linguistic knowledge. Another point demonstrated by the analysis is that this study indicates that ‘knowledge gaps, or “learnables” (Majlesi and Broth 2012), are not necessarily the same as those learning objects identified by the teacher’s [or facilitator’s] agenda or the curriculum’ (Jakonen and Morton 2015: 90). As mentioned above in the analysis section, the students’ and the facilitator’s focus on form arose from the contingencies of the interaction. In other words, what to teach (Excerpts 2 and 4) and what to learn (Excerpts 1 and 3) emerged in talk. This finding is in line with other investigations in CA studies on (L2) learning that showed how, in various ways in different contexts, participants’ orientations shift from pursuing the activity at hand to L2 learning as they strive to maintain or restore intersubjectivity (Kasper and Burch 2016) or to deal with matters that hinder or permit the progressive unfolding of pedagogic activity (Lee 2010; Jakonen and Morton 2015). This study contributes to the field by further showing how the learning of a word can have several different sides or layers to it; that is, the study addresses the multifaceted nature of language learning. Knowing how to pronounce the word did not necessarily mean that the participants knew how to spell it or use it. We were able to clearly see how different focuses on linguistic resources—there was a pronunciation focus, a morphology focus, and a meaning focus throughout the excerpts—contributed to differential learning-achieving practices that worked together to expand participants’ linguistic knowledge of a word. Moreover, with respect to the facilitator’s role in ER activity, the evidence of teaching and successful learning in my data showed that it is important for a facilitator to take the role of a language expert to foster students’ learning. As we saw in the excerpts, the facilitator was ‘the more proficient, knowledgeable interlocutor who [could] feed the language-learning needs of different students in a wide variety of ways’ (Van den Branden 2009: 284). It was by taking the role of language expert and constantly orienting to the activity at hand as a kind of teacher that the facilitator in co-operation with the others was able to create the pedagogical space for language learning. However, Excerpt 4 also showed how Harim treated another source of knowledge (his phone dictionary) as more authoritative than the facilitator (and Clara). In other words, he treated the other participants as insufficient sources of information. The pedagogical implication is that dictionaries do have uses in L2 learning and teaching environments. The study’s findings overall could be employed for teacher training purposes (Seedhouse 2008; see also a case of interventional CA in Antaki 2011 and applications to applied linguistics in Kasper and Wagner 2014). Teachers and facilitators who know how to apply a conversation analytic lens to their educational settings could become more sensitive to the complexities of the local settings. This article is an initial contribution to what could be a promising line of research on ER. It has been well established in ER studies that students learn to read by reading and develop various types of linguistic knowledge through repeated encounters with reading input (Nakanishi 2015; Jeon and Day 2016). This article sought to show how CA could contribute further to the field by demonstrating how participants accomplish learning in situ and tracing the development of linguistic knowledge, as it unfolds throughout an interaction in a post-reading activity. Such an analytic approach allows researchers to describe how language learning processes are publicly displayed and accomplished (Kasper and Wagner 2011) as observable learning behaviors (Markee 2008). While in this article I have been primarily concerned with participants’ orientation to a particular word as a single-case study, I believe future studies on ER activities could benefit by investigating other kinds of work related to different aspects of language learning or the developmental changes of practices particular to a setting. The cumulative evidence of such research would provide much better understanding of how and to what degree post-reading activities can benefit students’ learning as well as various ways of teaching in situated activities, creating rich resources for teacher training. Acknowledgements The author would like to thank his participants for allowing him to investigate their book club meetings for his research. He is very grateful to Drs. Gabriele Kasper, Hanh Nguyen, Sangki Kim, Josephine Lee, Rue Burch, Richard Day, Betsy Gilliland, Mary Kim as well as the four anonymous reviewers and the editor of this journal (Dr John Hellermann) for their insightful and constructive suggestions for earlier versions of this manuscript. Any infelicities remaining are the responsibility of the author. NOTES Footnotes 1 The facilitator who implemented the book club also called it an ER book club, for the same reason. 2 Members were also asked to borrow their books and read at home as much as they could before coming to the meeting. REFERENCES Antaki C. 2011 . Applied Conversation Analysis: Intervention and Change in Institutional Talk . Palgrave Macmillan . Brouwer C. E. 2004 . ‘Doing pronunciation: A specific type of repair sequence’ in Gardner R. , Wagner J. (eds): Second Language Conversations . Continuum . Burch A. R. 2014 . ‘Pursuing information: A conversation analytic perspective on communication strategies Language Learning 64 : 651 – 84 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Burch A. R. 2016 . ‘Motivation in interaction: A conversation-analytic perspective,’ Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, Honolulu Calzada S. M. 2013 . ‘Reading as a means of promoting social interaction: An analysis of the use of literature circles in EFL teaching ,’ Encuentro: Revista De Investigación e Innovación En La Clase De Idiomas 22 : 84 – 97 . Day R. R. 2015 . ‘Extending extensive reading ,’ Reading in a Foreign Language 27 : 294 – 301 . Day R. R. , Bamford J. . 1998 . Extensive Reading in the Second Language Classroom . Cambridge University Press . Diessel H. 2006 . ‘Demonstratives, joint attention, and the emergence of grammar ,’ Cognitive Linguistics 17 : 463 – 89 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Firth A. , Wagner J. . 1997 . ‘On discourse, communication and some fundamental concepts in SLA research ,’ The Modern Language Journal 81 : 285 – 300 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Firth A. , Wagner J. . 2007 . ‘Second/foreign language learning as a social accomplishment: Elaborations on a reconceptualized SLA ,’ The Modern Language Journal 91 : 800 – 19 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Freebody P. , Freiberg J. . 2001 . ‘Re-discovering practical reading activities in homes and Schools ,’ Journal of Research in Reading 24 : 222 – 34 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Gafaranga J. 2000 . ‘Medium repair vs. other-language repair: Telling the medium of a bilingual conversation ,’ International Journal of Bilingualism 4 : 327 – 50 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Garfinkel H. 2002 . Ethnomethodology’s program. Working out Durkheim's aphorism . Rowman & Littlefield Publishers . Goodwin C. 1996 . ‘Transparent vision’ in Ochs E. , Schegloff E. A. , Thompson S. A. (eds): Interaction and Grammar . Cambridge University Press . Goodwin C. 2013 . ‘The co-operative, transformative organization of human action and Knowledge ,’ Journal of Pragmatics 46 : 8 – 23 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Greer T. 2016 . ‘Multiple involvements in interactional repair: Using smartphones in peer culture to augment lingua franca English’ in Theobald M. (ed.): Friendship and Peer Culture in Multilingual Settings (Sociological Studies of Children and Youth, Volume 21) . Emerald Group Publishing Limited . Hauser E. 2014 . ‘Embodied uses of electronic bilingual dictionaries ,’ JALT Journal 36 : 5 – 24 . Hellermann J. 2006 . ‘Classroom interactive practices for developing L2 literacy: A microethnographic study of two beginning adult learners of English ,’ Applied Linguistics 27 : 377 – 404 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Hellermann J. 2008 . Social Actions for Classroom Language Learning . Multilingual Matters . Hellermann J. 2017 . ‘Talking about reading: Changing practices for a literacy event’ in Pekarek Doehler S. , González-Martínez E. , Wagner J. (eds): Longitudinal Studies in Conversation Analysis . Palgrave Macmillan . Heritage J. 1984 . ‘A change-of-state token and aspects of its sequential placement’ in Atkinson J. M. , Heritage J. (eds): Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis . Cambridge University Press . Ishida M. 2006 . ‘Interactional competence and the use of modal expressions in decision making activities: CA for understanding microgenesis of pragmatic competence’ in Bardovi-Harlig K. , FeIix-Brasdefer J. C. , Omar A. (eds): Pragmatics and Language Learning , Vol. 11 . National Foreign Language Resource Center . Jacobs G. M. , Farrell T. S. C. . 2012 . Teachers Sourcebook for Extensive Reading . Information Age Publishing . Jakonen T. , Morton T. . 2015 . ‘Epistemic search sequences in peer interaction in a content-based language classroom ,’ Applied Linguistics 36 : 73 – 94 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Jeon E.-Y. , Day R. R. . 2016 . ‘The effectiveness of ER on reading proficiency: A meta-analysis ,’ Reading in a Foreign Language 28 : 246 – 65 . Jefferson G. 2004 . ‘Glossary of transcript symbols with an introduction’ in Lerner G. (ed.): Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation . John Benjamins . Kasper G. , Burch A. R. . 2016 . ‘Focus on form in the wild’ in van Compernolle R. A. , McGregor J. (eds): Authenticity, Language, and Interaction in Second Language Contexts . Multilingual Matters . Kasper G. , Prior M. T. . 2015 . ‘Analyzing storytelling in TESOL interview research ,’ TESOL Quarterly 49 : 226 – 55 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Kasper G. , Wagner J. . 2011 . ‘Conversation analysis as an approach to second language acquisition’ in Atkinson D. (ed.): Alternative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition . Routledge . Kasper G. , Wagner J. . 2014 . ‘Conversation analysis in applied linguistics ,’ Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 34 : 171 – 212 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Kim Y. 2012 . ‘Practices for initial recognitional reference and learning opportunities in conversation ,’ Journal of Pragmatics 44 : 709 – 29 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Kirchhoff C. 2015 . ‘Extensive reading in the EFL classroom: Benefits of a face-to-face collaboration activity ,’ The Reading Matrix 15 : 54 – 65 . Krashen S. 2004 . The Power of Reading: Insights from the Research . Heinemann . Laufer B. 2003 . ‘Vocabulary acquisition in a second language: Do learners really acquire most vocabulary by reading? Some empirical evidence ,’ Canadian Modern Language Review 59 : 567 – 87 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Lee Y. A. 2010 . ‘Learning in the contingency of talk-in-interaction ,’ Text and Talk 30 : 403 – 22 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Lilja N. 2014 . ‘Partial repetitions as other-initiations of repair in second language talk: Re-establishing understanding and doing learning ,’ Journal of Pragmatics 71 : 98 – 116 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Long M. 1985 . ‘Input and second language acquisition theory’ in Gass S. , Madden C. (eds): Input in Second Language Acquisition . Newbury House . Macbeth D. 2014 . ‘Studies of work, instructed action, and the promise of granularity: A commentary ,’ Discourse Studies 16 : 295 – 308 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Majlesi A. R. , Broth M. . 2012 . ‘Emergent learnables in second language classroom interaction ,’ Learning, Culture and Social Interaction 1 : 193 – 207 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Mark P. L. 2007 . ‘Building a community of EFL readers: Setting up literature circles in a Japanese university,’ JALT2006 Proceedings. Tokyo. Markee N . 1994 . ‘Toward an ethnomethodological respecification of second-language Acquisition’ in Tarone E. , Gass S. , Cohen A. (eds): Research Methodology in Second-Language Acquisition . Lawrence Erlbaum Associates . Markee N . 2000 . Conversation Analysis . Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers . Markee N. 2008 . ‘Toward a learning behavior tracking methodology for CA‐for‐SLA ,’ Applied Linguistics 29 : 404 – 27 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Markee N. 2015 . ‘Are replication studies possible in qualitative second/foreign language classroom research? A call for comparative re-production research ,’ Language Teaching ; doi: 10.1017/S0261444815000099 . Melander H. , Sahlström F. . 2009 . ‘In tow of the blue whale: Learning as interactional changes in topical orientation ,’ Journal of Pragmatics 41 : 1519 – 37 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Min H. T. 2008 . ‘EFL vocabulary acquisition and retention: Reading plus vocabulary enhancement activities and narrow reading ,’ Language Learning 58 : 73 – 115 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Nakanishi T. 2015 . ‘A meta-analysis of extensive reading research ,’ TESOL Quarterly 49 : 6 – 37 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Peplow D. 2016 . Talk about Books: A Study of Reading Groups . Bloomsbury Publishing . Pica T. 1994 . ‘Research on negotiation: What does it reveal about second-language learning conditions, processes, and outcomes? ,’ Language Learning 44 : 493 – 527 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Sahlström F. 2011 . ‘Learning as social action’ in Hall J. K. , Hellermann J. , Pekarek Doehler S. (eds): L2 Interactional Competence and Development . Multilingual Matters . Samuda V. 2015 . ‘Tasks, design, and the architecture of pedagogical spaces’ in Bygate M. (ed.): Domains and Directions in the Development of TBLT . John Benjamins Publishing Company . Schegloff E. A. 1979 . ‘Identification and recognition in telephone conversation openings’ in Psathas G. (ed.): Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology . Irvington . Seedhouse P. 2008 . ‘Learning to talk the talk: Conversation Analysis as a tool for induction of trainee teachers’, in Garton S. , Richards K. (eds): Professional Encounters in TESOL: Discourses of Teachers in Teaching . Palgrave Macmillan . Sert O. 2013 . ‘Epistemic status check’ as an interactional phenomenon in instructed learning settings ,’ Journal of Pragmatics 45 : 13 – 28 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Sert O. 2015 . Social Interaction and L2 Classroom Discourse . Edinburgh University Press . Sert O. , Walsh S. . 2013 . ‘The interactional management of claims of insufficient knowledge in English language classrooms ,’ Language and Education 27 : 542 – 65 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Shelton-Strong S. J. 2012 . ‘Literature circles in ELT ,’ ELT Journal 66 : 214 – 23 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Sinclair A. M. , Coulthard M. . 1975 . Towards an Analysis of Discourse: The English Used by Teachers and Pupils . Oxford University Press . Song J. , Sardegna V. G. . 2014 . ‘EFL learners’ incidental acquisition of English prepositions through enhanced extensive reading instruction ,’ RELC Journal 45 : 67 – 84 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Van den Branden K. 2009 . ‘Mediating between predetermined order and chaos: The role of the teacher in task-based language education ,’ International Journal of Applied Linguistics 19 : 264 – 85 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Wagner J. , Firth A. . 1997 . ‘Communication strategies at work’ in Kasper G. , Kellermann E. (eds): Communication Strategies: Psycholinguistic and Sociolinguistic Perspectives . Routledge . Yamashita J. 2015 . ‘In search of the nature of extensive reading in L2: Cognitive, affective, and pedagogical perspectives ,’ Reading in a Foreign Language 27 : 168 – 81 . Zimmerman C. B. 1997 . ‘Do reading and interactive vocabulary instruction make a difference? An empirical study ,’ TESOL Quarterly 31 : 121 – 40 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS © Oxford University Press 2017 This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)

Journal

Applied LinguisticsOxford University Press

Published: Feb 1, 2019

There are no references for this article.