Epistemics in Interaction

Dans cette contribution, en nous inscrivant dans l’approche de l’analyse conversationnelle, nous étudions le petit mot "ciò" comme préface utilisée par les locuteurs du dialecte et de la variété d’italien parlés dans la province de Trévise. En particulier, nous focalisons notre attention sur les occurrences de "ciò" en début d'unité de construction du tour (Turn-Constructional Unit) dans des tours de parole multi-unités. Pour les préfaces présentant ce petit mot, une double caractérisation émerge en termes de jonctions explicatives ("perché ciò") et adversatives ("ma ciò"). Cette étude fait suite à des recherches antérieures que nous avons menées sur le même corpus de conversations téléphoniques informelles et de repas en famille. Les analyses présentées dans cette contribution nous permettent d’élargir la description des utilisations de "ciò" et de souligner le rôle joué par cette ressource sur le plan épistémique dans la langue...

Three practices for doing confirmation in French are investigated (repetition, the particle voilà and the adverb/adjective exact(ement)) as responses to inferences, i.e., requests for confirmation that display some understanding of prior talk. While broadly restricted to the context of inferences, at a level of finer action-sequential granularity the paper looks in turn at responses to four different types of inference-making confirmationseeking first pair parts. The analyses show how each confirmation practice does slightly different work depending on the type of initiating action, while some commonalities also hold for each confirmation practice across inference-types. Through repetitional confirmation, confirmers claim authorship over what is inferred. With voilà-confirmations, confirmers attribute some epistemic agency to the interlocutor with respect to the forming of the confirmable understanding. By confirming with exact(ement), confirmers treat the inference-producer as having reached the proffered understanding even more independently. The findings reveal both more context-free and more context-sensitive aspects of the work done by the response forms.

This study examines other-repetitions in Finland Swedish talk-in-interaction: their sequential trajectories, prosodic design, and lexicogrammatical features. The key objective is to explore how prosody can contribute to the action conveyed by a repetition turn, that is, whether it deals with a problem of hearing or understanding, a problem of expectation, or just registers receipt of information. The analysis shows that large and upgraded prosodic features (higher onset, wider pitch span than the previous turn) co-occur with repair- and expectation-oriented repetitions, whereas small, downgraded prosody (lower onset, narrower pitch span than the previous turn) is characteristic of registering. However, the distinguishing strength of prosody is mostly gradient (rather than discrete), and because of this, other concomitant cues, most notably the speakers’ epistemic positions in relation to the repeated item, are also of importance for ascribing a certain pragmatic function to a repeti...

This study examines other-repetitions in Finland Swedish talk-in-interaction: their sequential trajectories, prosodic design, and lexicogrammatical features. The key objective is to explore how prosody can contribute to the action conveyed by a repetition turn, that is, whether it deals with a problem of hearing or understanding, a problem of expectation, or just registers receipt of information. The analysis shows that large and upgraded prosodic features (higher onset, wider pitch span than the previous turn) co-occur with repair- and expectation-oriented repetitions, whereas small, downgraded prosody (lower onset, narrower pitch span than the previous turn) is characteristic of registering. However, the distinguishing strength of prosody is mostly gradient (rather than discrete), and because of this, other concomitant cues, most notably the speakers’ epistemic positions in relation to the repeated item, are also of importance for ascribing a certain pragmatic function to a repeti...

Background: Interactive work with children who have unequal cognitive resources and unequal access to language can be challenging. This article explores the collaborative labor involved in establishing alignment between a child with Down syndrome in combination with hearing impairment (DS-HI) and a hearing peer without DS, during a shared interactive book reading activity in an inclusive educational setting. Method: Video recording of children in a naturally occurring, shared book reading activity is analyzed using conversation analysis. The recording took place in the children's school. Results: The situated shared book reading is regulated by interaction rules. A pattern of collaborative, responsive behavior where the children align to each other's initiatives is identified within these interaction rules. Discussion and conclusion: The shared book reading format has a scaffolding function in the interaction. The findings illustrate how a typically developing peer is able to align to the sensory and cognitive capacities displayed in the child with DS-HI, and how this facilitates co-created meaning-making in the interaction.

Asta Cekaite's research involves an interdisciplinary approach to language, culture, and social interaction. Specific foci include social perspectives on embodiment, touch, emotion and moral socialization. Empirical fields cover adult-child and children's peer group interactions in educational settings, and family. With M. Goodwin she has co-authored 'Embodied family choreography' (Routledge, 2018); with Lorenza Mondada she is co-editing a volume 'Touch in social interaction: Touching moments' (Routledge, 2021). Multisensoriality: Touch, language and body in social interaction Touch is a pervasive human action, which plays an important role in interpersonal relationships, in private as well as in institutional contexts, and which constitutes a fundamental way of sensing the corporeality and materiality of the world. This presentation elaborates on the analytical conceptual framework that addresses multimodality by examining how multiple senses are implicated in moment-to-moment social interaction. It highlights the methodological consequences of the conceptual framework, and emphasizes the contribution of video-based multimodal studies of touch in revealing the social, intersubjective, intercorporeal, and interactional dimension of touch. The presentation exemplifies the multifaceted occurrences of touch as it can be used to express affection, instruction, and enskillment, or control and imposition. Embodied conduct, including the use of touch, is not only normatively but also interactively ordered, interpreted, or disciplined. It is discussed how meaning of touch is part of socialization, and how it emerges within the moment-bymoment unfolding of movements and body orientations, within a sequential organization that includes turns-at-talk, embodied resources, and sensory practices, which are consequential for the intelligibility of actions, as well as the constitution of social roles, relations, and categories in everyday interactions.

Based on fieldwork in an upper-secondary school in Sweden, this paper centers on Swedish as two school-subjects: Swedish (SWE) and Swedish as a second language (SSL), as taught in one class. Adhering to separate curricula, and taught by SWE and SSL teachers respectively, they are often implemented as physically separated subjects. By contrast, this paper explores three different learning spaces in relation to everyday negotiations of belonging and participation among the migrant language learners: combined whole-class teaching, a separate SSL group, and combined book-group discussions. Drawing from the notion of the classroom as a contact zone (Canagarajah, 2020) and theory of spatial repertoire (Pennycook & Otsuji, 2014), I discuss how minoritized second language learners negotiated social belonging and linguistic participation in these differently embodied learning spaces. Engaging a linguistic ethnographic approach, the data production consisted of fieldnotes from classroom obser...

Despite a seemingly fragmented interactional context, teachers and students in classrooms routinely manage to co-construct coherent, interrelated , and individually adapted learning trajectories distributed over days and weeks. The aim of this article is to explore with what interactional resources progressivity is accomplished in learning trajectories by focusing on how participants establish relations of cohesion and change between current and previous occasions that constitute a learning trajectory. Analysis of empirical data shows how participants frequently topicalize aspects of epistemic stance toward a co-constructed learning content. Such epistemic topicalizations play an important role in maintaining cohesion in a learning trajectory, while making it possible for teachers and students to progressively change and differentiate their epistemic stance. Epistemic topicalizations are suggested as a useful analytic concept, grounded in conversation analysis, to describe how cohesion and change are emically managed in interaction to accomplish progressivity in learning trajectories.

Conversation analytic (CA) studies on second language (L2) learning show that known-answer questions posed by teachers form an integral part of the social interaction in L2 classrooms. However, studies on peers asking known-answer questions of each other when orienting to L2 learning have not been conducted. Focusing on L2 learning as social action, and using the CA framework of epistemics in interaction, this study investigates how peers use known-answer questions as interactional practices in L2 learning. In the epistemic framework, known-answer questions can be called incongruent interrogatives; the results show that they appear to initiate instructional sequences and propose epistemically asymmetric positions when peers engage in the joint activity of L2 learning. This study demonstrates that peers are capable of doing L2 learning and illustrates the need to provide students with the opportunity, and responsibility, to do L2 learning with each other.

This chapter introduces a "Rally Course" as a novel CA-inspired approach to teaching a second language. This approach builds on an understanding of language learning as a social process that is closely intertwined with L2 speakers' evolving membership in the surrounding community. It addresses the need to develop experiential pedagogies that widen learners' opportunities for interaction and support the socialisation process. Building on recent pedagogical initiatives supporting language learning in the wild, we illustrate the overall structure of the Rally Course, describe the main materials that were designed to support the learning objectives and present a case analysis of a student carrying out a pedagogical activity supported by the materials.

In this paper, we apply a mixed-methods approach on epistemics and evidence in interaction to the investigation of the unstressed German modal particle wohl and its different functions as a linguistic resource for displaying knowledge in interaction. In addition, the paper takes a regional perspective based on the observation that speakers from the Northwest German area use wohl differently in constructing knowledge stances than speakers of other German varieties. Methodologically, we follow a combined approach of conversation analysis and multivariate statistical analyses of German Face-to-Face interactions. In contrast to traditional classifications of wohl displaying an assumptive [Ke] stance, the results of the sequential analyses in the paper reveal that the modal particle is used to display all functions of the epistemic gradient from a [Ke] to a [Kþ] stance. Moreover, the quantitative analysis shows that there is a regional effect, as primarily Northwestern German speakers use the epistemic [Kþ] function of wohl in interactions. We discuss the results with regard to the role that interaction analysis and regionality should play in investigating modal particles. Finally, we link our findings to the historical and contact induced factors that especially determine the divergent usage of wohl in the Northwestern area.

Este trabajo se ha llevado a cabo en el marco del Proyecto de Investigación Es.Var.Atenuación "La atenuación pragmática en su variación genérica: géneros discursivos escritos y orales en el español de España y América" (MINECO FFI2016-75249-P).

How individuals discursively identify themselves through digital media and augment their claims of knowledge and legitimacy is at the core of this study. This article draws on the tools of Conversation Analysis to show how participants discussing the approval of a Hebrew language charter school in an online community forum claim access to particular kinds of knowledge and expertise through linguistic and interactional means. We ask: given the particular constraints and affordances of an asynchronous, anonymous online forum, how do participants position themselves and others with regard to identity? Despite the asynchronous nature of the forum, we show how such identity work is accomplished interactionally through the use of online affordances, as participants position themselves and others to bolster their epistemic stance, or to weaken the epistemic claims of others.

Steven Levinson in his 2013 remarks on "action formation and ascription" finds a "loose hermeneutics" of "intuitive characterizations" as the "the soft underbelly of CA". It is a remarkable formulation, and by tugging on its filaments we hope to bring into view the radical departures taken by Garfinkel, Sacks and Schegloff from the normative appointments of social science, and also how we may find an impulse to return to those appointments in the literature of the Epistemic Analytic Framework (see below). EAF treatments of assessment sequences show it well. A transcript anchors the argument.

Steven Levinson in his 2013 remarks on "action formation and ascription" finds a "loose hermeneutics" of "intuitive characterizations" as the "the soft underbelly of CA". It is a remarkable formulation, and by tugging on its filaments we hope to bring into view the radical departures taken by Garfinkel, Sacks and Schegloff from the normative appointments of social science, and also how we may find an impulse to return to those appointments in the literature of the Epistemic Analytic Framework (see below). EAF treatments of assessment sequences show it well. A transcript anchors the argument.

Steven Levinson in his 2013 remarks on "action formation and ascription" finds a "loose hermeneutics" of "intuitive characterizations" as the "the soft underbelly of CA". It is a remarkable formulation, and by tugging on its filaments we hope to bring into view the radical departures taken by Garfinkel, Sacks and Schegloff from the normative appointments of social science, and also how we may find an impulse to return to those appointments in the literature of the Epistemic Analytic Framework (see below). EAF treatments of assessment sequences show it well. A transcript anchors the argument.

This conversation analytic study describes the interactional uses of ciò [ʧɔ], a pragmatic particle that is used both in the regional Italian spoken in Veneto (a region of northeastern Italy) and in Trevigiano (Trevixàn [trevi’zaŋ]), an Italo-Romance variety widely used in the Treviso area. Preliminary results show that ciò (derived from the imperative form of the verb ciór/tòr ([ʧor]/[tɔr] ‘to take’) is mostly used as a preface in responsive position and is frequently preceded by the particle eh. In our data, the (eh) ciò-prefaced turns are designed as general, objective, obvious contributions through which participants provide a wider perspective on the topic while treating the preceding talk as defective or not dealing with relevant aspects of the subject under discussion. This study contributes to the documentation of linguistic forms that are used by speakers of an Italo-Romance variety as conversational resources in talk-in-interaction.

This chapter introduces a “Rally Course” as a novel CA-inspired approach to teaching a second language. This approach builds on an understanding of language learning as a social process that is closely intertwined with L2 speakers’ evolving membership in the surrounding community. It addresses the need to develop experiential pedagogies that widen learners’ opportunities for interaction and support the socialisation process. Building on recent pedagogical initiatives supporting language learning in the wild, we illustrate the overall structure of the Rally Course, describe the main materials that were designed to support the learning objectives and present a case analysis of a student carrying out a pedagogical activity supported by the materials.

Despite the abundance of research on teachers' repair practices in language classroom interaction, there are not enough conversation analytic studies on repair organization with the focus on the details of interaction in the context of EFL. Drawing on sociocultural and situated learning theories, this study explores the contingent nature of English language teachers' organizational patterns of repair practices (repair focus, repair completion, repair trajectory and convergence) by adopting the context-dependency of repair as a point of departure. More specifically, we analyzed two classroom interactional contexts: form-oriented and meaning-oriented contexts as well as their realization in student participation. Data were collected through video-and audiotape recordings of 14 lessons from eight EFL teachers at four private language institutes in Iran and they were analyzed based on the framework of conversation analysis methodology. The analysis of lesson transcripts indicated that the teachers varied in their repair practices; however, an organizational repair pattern emerged from the data. The analysis of qualitative data revealed that the teachers largely repaired divergently in form-oriented contexts but convergently in meaningoriented contexts, and deployed other-repair more than self-repair. The pedagogical implications of the study are for language teachers' awareness of the role of repair organization in facilitating learning opportunities and for teachers' professional development.

Despite the abundance of research on teachers' repair practices in language classroom interaction, there are not enough conversation analytic studies on repair organization with the focus on the details of interaction in the context of EFL. Drawing on sociocultural and situated learning theories, this study explores the contingent nature of English language teachers' organizational patterns of repair practices (repair focus, repair completion, repair trajectory and convergence) by adopting the context-dependency of repair as a point of departure. More specifically, we analyzed two classroom interactional contexts: form-oriented and meaning-oriented contexts as well as their realization in student participation. Data were collected through video-and audiotape recordings of 14 lessons from eight EFL teachers at four private language institutes in Iran and they were analyzed based on the framework of conversation analysis methodology. The analysis of lesson transcripts indicated that the teachers varied in their repair practices; however, an organizational repair pattern emerged from the data. The analysis of qualitative data revealed that the teachers largely repaired divergently in form-oriented contexts but convergently in meaningoriented contexts, and deployed other-repair more than self-repair. The pedagogical implications of the study are for language teachers' awareness of the role of repair organization in facilitating learning opportunities and for teachers' professional development.

The development of the Internet and digital tools for interaction has enabled computer-mediated communication as part of the communicative approach to language learning and teaching. This creates affordances for learners of any target language from any location to communicate with each other, for example, through tandem language learning – that is, reciprocal two-way learning in dyads of two students with different first languages. Previous studies on tandem learning have mainly focused on the interaction between tandem partners in informal learning situations. In this study, we explore the teacher’s role in virtual classroom tandem applied to curriculum-based language teaching. The aim is to describe teachers’ engagement in interactional situations in the classroom, including the interplay between the physical classroom and virtual learning environments (VLEs). The data comprise video and screen recordings of teacher activities and interactions. The results reveal that virtual clas...

The development of the Internet and digital tools for interaction has enabled computer-mediated communication as part of the communicative approach to language learning and teaching. This creates affordances for learners of any target language from any location to communicate with each other, for example, through tandem language learning – that is, reciprocal two-way learning in dyads of two students with different first languages. Previous studies on tandem learning have mainly focused on the interaction between tandem partners in informal learning situations. In this study, we explore the teacher’s role in virtual classroom tandem applied to curriculum-based language teaching. The aim is to describe teachers’ engagement in interactional situations in the classroom, including the interplay between the physical classroom and virtual learning environments (VLEs). The data comprise video and screen recordings of teacher activities and interactions. The results reveal that virtual clas...

The development of the Internet and digital tools for interaction has enabled computer-mediated communication as part of the communicative approach to language learning and teaching. This creates affordances for learners of any target language from any location to communicate with each other, for example, through tandem language learning – that is, reciprocal two-way learning in dyads of two students with different first languages. Previous studies on tandem learning have mainly focused on the interaction between tandem partners in informal learning situations. In this study, we explore the teacher’s role in virtual classroom tandem applied to curriculum-based language teaching. The aim is to describe teachers’ engagement in interactional situations in the classroom, including the interplay between the physical classroom and virtual learning environments (VLEs). The data comprise video and screen recordings of teacher activities and interactions. The results reveal that virtual clas...

In interactions where participants share at least two languages, code-switching (CS) is, in many contexts, a mundane and natural activity. Contrary to the common misconception that CS is an outcome of low proficiency in one or the other language, the alternation between languages has been shown to require good command of both (Poplack, 1980). Over the past decades, Conversation Analysis has become influential in understanding why, sequentially, CS is deployed in particular slots in a sequence (Auer, 1998), and studies of CS have shed light on a number of actions that CS contribute to accomplishing, such as escalating a peer conflict among bilingual children (e.g. Cromdal, 2013), aligning or disaligning with a teacher's pedagogical focus in the language classroom (Üstünel & Seedhouse, 2005), or for making or refusing a request (Wei, 2002). Together, conversation analytic studies of CS have demonstrated the necessity of examining the local interactional context in which CS occurs in order to understand the different practices which CS execute.

While Garfinkel has stressed the morality of social knowledge, using his breaching experiments, many studies in conversation analysis have shown in what ways social norms-and participants' knowledge of them-shape their practices and actions in sequence organization (cf. Stivers et al., 2011). This special issue aims to further explore the in-situ accomplishment of moral social order while focusing on interactions with children, building on work that acknowledges children's social competencies in co-constructing their own social worlds (Corsaro, 1985, 1997; Danby & Theobald, 2012). There is a history of conversation analytically inspired research on childhood interaction studying the co-construction and maintenance of social Guest editorial

This chapter investigates teacher management of learner turns in an American second-grade classroom during a read-aloud activity. A read-aloud is a whole-group instructional activity that involves a teacher reading aloud a book to a cohort of students as they listen (Tainio & Slotte, 2017). Using ethnomethodological conversation analysis (EMCA) and drawing on the concepts of alignment and affiliation (Stivers, 2008; Stivers, Mondada & Steensig, 2011; Steensig, 2012), we investigate how embodied practices such as gaze, facial expressions, body positioning and gestures in addition to verbal practices are used by the teacher separately and together to respond to learner turns in ways that keep the learners affectively engaged and, at the same time, ensure the orderly progression of the lesson. Our analysis shows that teacher cooperative management of learners' turns involves 1) orienting to them as affiliative tokens in order to neutralize their disaligning force while still treating learners as cooperative participants in the activity, and 2) managing turns not only according to their sequential positions and the actions they project but, as importantly, to the larger instructional project being accomplished. The study contributes to the re-specification of the everyday grounds of teaching in order to broaden understandings of the specialized nature of such work (Macbeth, 2014).

Among Northern Kampas, the linguistically creative production of tsinam-pantsi by non-kin and affines intends-apart from having fun-to initiate an intimate relationship or affirm the intimacy of the existing interpersonal relationship. Northern Kampa participants of tsinampantsi 'joking' often resort to gender-switching strategies for jocular effects. Creatively playing with linguistic gender marking is characteristic of tsinampantsi-joking conduct. The study's findings revealed that there are variable lexicogrammatical means for accomplishing the man > woman gender switch. Two basic gender switching strategies are deployed: manipulation of person marking indexes and deployment of derivational morphology. The verbal person marking strategy is the most basic and most common means of indicating gender switches, whereas derivational morphology functions as a supplementary technique. In gender reversals, participation structure (production and reception roles) is predominantly coded by third person (other-role) markers on the verb. The woman > man direction of gender reversals is uncommon in joking sequences.

Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in lowland Peru, this study examines interactional functions of Northern Kampa (Arawak) lip funneling gestures. The study has shown that lip funnels have two functions, spatial deictic and upgrading. Spatial deictic lip funnels orient the addressee to a referential target in acts of direct and deferred ostension and abstract pointing; they are accompanied with aligned gaze and coupled with a variety of lexical items (although they need not be). Spatial deictic lip funnels are intense, sometimes held for the duration of the entire utterance. The second function of lip funnels is to amplify the speaker's claim to epistemic authority in upgraded responses. In the upgrading function, lip funnels are paired with a limited range of grammatical constructions (negative-interrogative, polar focus and exhaustive focus); the gesturer's gaze is directed at the recipient, or eyes are shut. Nasalization of vowels is in complementary distribution with eye shutting. 'Upgrading' lip funnels are transitory facial actions, normally lasting a split second.

Identifying precisely what teachers do to elicit desired changes in their
students’ knowledge and skill is a long-lasting challenge of educational
research. Here, we use conversation analysis to contribute to a deeper
understanding of this matter by considering how Finnish-speaking
musical instrument teachers use directives to guide their students. Our
data consist of 10 video-recorded instrument lessons (violin, piano,
guitar, and ukulele). In our findings, we provide an account for the
variance in the musical instrument teachers’ use of six second-person
directive forms in Finnish. We argue that the teachers’ choices between
these directive forms are warranted by three dimensions of the
participants’ conduct: (1) location of the directive within the participants’
wider activity structure, (2) degree of the student’s cooperation at the
given moment, and (3) the institutional priority of action that is being
called for.

In discourse participants ascribe multi-layered, at times contradictory meaning to people, institutions or terms. This chapter presents the microsociological contextualization analysis, which traces how participants of interactions through indexical practices refer to contexts they consider relevant. An analysis of a panel discussion shows how participants in doing so not only speak for themselves as particular people, but as representatives of positions in discourse. At the same time, the analysis shows that positioning of utterances and people depend on the specific sequential context of interaction. Interactants negotiate positions, relations of power and attributes of a “Bologna discourse”, yet participants are unable to elude entirely from what has been said before and elsewhere. The analysis shows how in specific situated interactions participants, on the one hand, attempt to fixate discourse and people within a particular territory of knowledge. On the other hand, resisting practices undermine fixation.

This paper is a rejoinder to a rebuttal, on the topic of "epistemics" in Conversation Analysis (CA).The rebuttal was drafted by John Heritage and posted online (www.Academia.edu), and is scheduled for publication in 207, as part of a special issue of the journal Discourse Studies. I have not yet read the other articles that will appear in that issue, nor do I know who will be writing them, but I understand that they will critically discuss an earlier special issue of the same journal that Douglas Macbeth and I guest-edited on “The epistemics of Epistemics,” which was published in October 206 (Volume 8, Number 5).

Gordon (2009) has demonstrated that intertextuality (e.g., Bakhtin 1981, 1986; Kristeva 1986; Becker 1994; Hamilton 1996; Tannen 2007) and framing (e.g., Bateson 1972; Goffman 1974; Tannen & Wallat 1987/1993) are intrinsically intertwined. This study builds on this work, merging the study of intertextuality and framing with Raymond and Heritage’s (2006) analysis of epistemics in social relations, and simultaneously contributing to the study of ‘intertextual identity construction’ (Hamilton 1996) and ‘epistemic discourse analysis’ (van Dijk 2013). I demonstrate how intertextual ties, specifically media references (to movies, TV shows, songs, videogames, and online memes), contribute to epistemic management and frame shifts, which is conducive to group identity construction in ‘epistemic ecologies’ (C. Goodwin 2013).

The analysis focuses on five conversations of seven hours among ten American friends in their mid-twenties. These data include 116 media references across the five interactions, where speakers use repeated words, phrases, and phonetic and paralinguistic features appropriated from media texts.

Expanding on Gumperz’s (1977, 1982) work on contextualization cues, I demonstrate how these speakers use vowel lengthening, loudness, pitch shifts, laughter, smile voice, regional and foreign accents, singing, and creaky voice to signal media references in talk. I also show that speakers primarily demonstrate recognition of media references through laughter and participating in play frames, and that repetition or explicit affirmation also occasionally demonstrate recognition. I argue that and demonstrate how media references often serve to remedy epistemic imbalances and simultaneously manage frames, thereby negotiating interactional dilemmas (M. Goodwin 1996). Building on Gordon's (2009) understanding of what Goffman (1974) refers to as laminated frames, I show how two kinds of frame laminations are constructed and interrelated in play frames around media references: overlapping (two frames at once) and embedded (a specific frame within a more general frame). Through such play frames, speakers rekey, reframe (Tannen 2006), and re-adjust the epistemic territory of conversation and ultimately construct group identities as speakers with shared experiences. This study demonstrates how shared prior texts that are referenced by a group of people, such as media references, are used as a resource for managing epistemics, shifting frames, and identity construction.

Using a social-interactional perspective on second language learning— founded on a conversation analytic (CA) perspective on social interaction as structured—this thesis investigates second language learning (Finnish or Swedish) in bilingual (Finnish-Swedish) educational settings. Employing CA, the three studies presented in this thesis provide detailed analyses of second language learning in-and-through interaction and discuss both technical
and methodological implications of using video and CA in the study of learning in interaction. The aim of this thesis is to describe and understand practices used to perform social actions that participants orient to as second
language learning. The focus is on practices that participants—themselves—orient to as doing second language learning and on how these practices are structured and sequentially organized in social interaction. In other words,
learning is approached as practices that participants use to perform second language learning as situated actions. This thesis responds to the need for a better understanding of how participants actually do second language learning, and how it is structured and organized in talk-in-interaction. The empirical material consists of video recordings of various bilingual educational settings. These settings include participants’ (7–16 year-old children) everyday at school both in- and outside of the classrooms. The first study discusses three approaches on data construction that emerge from the body of CA studies on learning in interaction and how they affect the subsequent analysis, results, and understanding of learning in interaction. The underlying interests of these studies influence data construction, which, in turn, affects possible analyses. There is considerable variation in the aspects that datasets focus on: an emphasis on setting, participant, or content projects the analytic emphasis. Hence, it is important to be aware of and address this relation between data construction and analysis. The second and third study built on these findings to analyze how participants orient to their own and other’s second language knowledge in social interaction. The studies employ CA’s framework of epistemics in interaction to capture participants’ management of the dynamic epistemic relationships regarding second language knowledge in the production and recognition of second language learning as social action. The second study focuses on situations in which code-switching is not used in an attempt to solve the second language learner’s problems of understanding the second language and current assignment. The aim is to investigate participants’ interactional
management of one another’s knowledge regarding the second language—and the current assignment—when maintaining intersubjectivity and doing second language learning. The study shows that the use of the second language in resolving troubles with intersubjectivity may lead participants to act on diverse second language knowledge and diverse possible understandings regarding the assignments. The use of the second language may result in expanded epistemic discrepancies, as well as restrict doing second language learning on conceptual knowledge, for example, word-meanings. Instead, the participants agree on a minimally required epistemic balance as a way to move on. Building on the understanding of management of dynamic epistemic relationships in situations where participants orient towards doing second language learning, the third study investigates a specific practice— incongruent interrogatives—and how peers use this practice to perform second language learning. The findings indicate that participants—peers—use incongruent interrogatives to initiate instructional sequences and propose epistemically asymmetric positions as participants co-construct situated roles as second language teacher and second language learner as part of doing second language learning. Hence, all studies contribute to the development of an empirical analysis of second language learning as identifiable interactional practices that participants use to perform second language learning as action. These practices are not independent of other practices for maintaining intersubjectivity and meaning-making (such as repair/correction). The practices for doing second language learning and maintaining intersubjectivity are, instead, better understood as co-operating. Doing learning is concerned with instruction and a mutual orientation towards changing a participant’s knowledge of an oriented-to learning object, whereas the management of epistemic relationships, repair, and other practices for meaning-making are resources for participants to establish and maintain a shared understanding of their joint activities, including learning. In sum, the thesis contributes to the development of using CA for the analysis and documentation of participants’ methods and practices for doing learning as observable interactional phenomena that participants actively relate to.

This study examines the interaction of contrastive focus-marking with nominalization in bisected contrastive focus constructions of Alto Perené, a Kampa Arawak language of Peru. It also investigates morphosyntactic means of contrastive focus-marking in two neighboring Kampa languages, Ashéninka Pichis and Ashaninka Tambo. The languages are shown to employ various focus-marking strategies. The Alto Perené polar (truth value) focus construction shows a preference for nominalizing a lexical verb. In Ashaninka Tambo, the expression of polar and modal operator focus (the latter attested in negated clauses) does not require nominalization of the lexical verb, but in clefted content and polar questions and airmative declarative clauses, nominalization is mandatory for the purpose of argument focusing. In Ashéninka Pichis, the argument focus-marking strategies include the syntactic movement of the focus constituent to the preverbal focus position and either an elision of the subject index on the verb, or inflecting the verb for stative aspect.

Using the  rst language (L1) to solve problems in understanding the second language (L2) may be bene cial for L2 learning. However, the overuse of L1 may deprive L2 learners of exposure to the L2. It appears that the question is not whether to use L1 or L2; it is when and how each language can be used to support L2 learning. This study focuses on situations in L2 education in which L1 is not used in an attempt to solve the L2 learner’s problems of understanding the L2 and the current assignment. The aim is to investigate what role participants’ management of each other’s L2 knowledge plays in maintaining intersubjectivity and doing L2 learning in these situations. The results show that participants may act on diverse L2 knowledge and diverse possible understandings regarding the assignments and that the use of L2 risks expanding these epistemic discrepancies. Using L2 also appears to restrict doing L2 learning on conceptual knowledge, for example, word-meanings. The participants agree on a minimally required epistemic balance as a way to move on. The use of L1 as needed in these situations, as a resource for meaning-making, may be bene cial for doing L2 learning.

The focus of this article was to better understand the management of participants’ L2 knowledge in a communicative L2 program—that is, to better understand how participants negotiate rights and responsibilities regarding knowledge of the learning objects that are oriented to when engaging in doing L2 learning. The study presented here can not draw very generalized conclusions, because of a limited set of examples offered in the analysis, and because of only studying one communicative L2 context. However, the findings are based on the larger body of analysed material, but they are exemplified through the three excerpts.

The management of L2 knowledge in the context under scrutiny seems to be smooth when the task and/or content is partially familiar to the children, and when they are situated in the context then and there. However, L2 learners bring in a special set of knowing and not knowing to which all participants need to be sensitive to maintain intersubjectivity (cf. Schegloff, 2000). Therefore, may the teacher’s use of the L2 when resolving the children’s problems of understanding the L2 bring into the situations added epistemic domains that the participants need to be aware of. It appears that the intricate linguistic context and epistemic circumstances regarding who knows what regarding the L2 and the content require participants (both K+ and K-) to be vigilant regarding the management of epistemic congruence, epistemic access and rights to knowledge related to the epistemic domains of the L2 and the current activity.

Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in lowland Peru, this study examines linguistic resources used for coding agreements in Alto Perené (Arawak) conversation. The study draws on the anthropological tradition of conversation analysis-informed ethnographies. The investigation of agreeing responses is limited to those which allow a projectedly 'knowing', or K-plus, participant to raise his or her epistemic status from the sequentially second position. It is shown that Alto Perené K-plus response formats include the evaluative property word kametsari 'good' with an intensifier and/or upgraded prosody, argument focus structures, two polarity verbs ari 'it is the case' and omapero 'it is true', and the verb ñakiro 'as you can see'. This analysis demonstrates a relationship between the Alto Perené practices of expressing K-plus agreements and the collateral effects arising from the particular meanings and functions of structures which are used for accomplishing an agreeing action.

A growing body of studies on learning argue that CA's analysis of social interaction can help to better understand learning in interaction. One way of analysing both intersubjectivity and learning in interaction is by analysing participants' epistemic stance and its change. Topicalising ones own and others epistemic stance is an integral part of the organisation of social interaction and socially shared cognition. What one knows and how one knows something are important issues in teaching/learning situations. The empirical material is of a Finnish as L2 program for 7-year-old Swedish-speaking children in Finland. The teacher used the L2 as the language of instruction. The program was organised four days (45 minutes/day) per week. This paper discusses how the participants handle situations in which the children explicitly display problems of understanding the L2. The aim is to analyse and discuss possibilities and limitations for doing L2 learning as an interactional activity when the L2 is the language of instruction. The focus is on the children's explicitly topicalised epistemic stances regarding the problems of understanding the L2 and their trajectories during the situations.

The paper examines a range of conceptual metaphors which serve as key elements of Ashéninka Perené (Arawak) myths and folk tales, and aims at situating them in the context of Amazonian high jungle dwellers' culture. Based on fieldwork conducted in 2009-2011 in lowland Peru, the paper gives a brief outline of the current sociolinguistic status of the language, indigenous economy, and aspects of speakers' cultural beliefs. The bulk of the paper is devoted to the discussion of three conceptual metaphors which underlie oral native texts, namely body is animal prey; body is clothing; body is fabrication. Seeking to account for the attested metaphors, the paper concludes with a discussion of indigenous conceptual frameworks of cosmocentric animism and perspectivism.

The paper reports on the speaker-oriented demonstrative clitics =ka 'near speaker', =ra 'not in the speaker's interactional space', and =nta 'far from the speaker'. It is shown that in situational (deictic) use, the most relevant criteria for the three-way choice are the referent's spatial contiguity to the speaker, touching or direct contact with the referent, pointing with a hand or chin, and eye gaze. Apart from serving as markers of nominal definiteness, the bound forms are found to be used anaphorically, as well as to introduce new participants and mark 'discourse-new-but-hearer-old' information. The bound forms are also used on the syntactic levels of predication and subordination. On the predication level, =ka, =ra, =nta function either as adverbial locality clitics or modal operators, whereas in clause combining the bound forms occur as subordinating temporal or locative conjunctions.