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4 - Patterns of Word Search Sequences at the Group Level

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2026

Aki Siegel
Affiliation:
Uppsala Universitet, Sweden
Paul Seedhouse
Affiliation:
Newcastle University
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Summary

In Chapter 3, we introduced the broad, general perspective on how human spoken interaction is organised as a complex adaptive system. We also saw that repair is the primary mechanism for maintaining intersubjectivity. In Chapters 4 and 5, we present the narrow, particular view of human interaction through word search sequences, which are a specialised application of the mechanism of repair for the location and production of target lexical items. We display how the speakers in the corpus as a group have adapted the mechanism of the word search in ways that enable social actions in this particular ELF context. In this chapter, we examine the sequential organisation of the L2 speakers’ word search sequences in an informal ELF context. Previous studies on word search sequences in English initiated by L2 speakers have frequently focused on the repair work (or lack of it) by the L1 speaker in interaction (Hosoda 2006; Kurhila 2006). However, the field has started to shift its focus towards what L2 speakers do in achieving mutual understanding when one lacks the linguistic resources in completing their utterances (e.g., Carroll 2005; Hauser 2013a; Pekarek Doehler and Berger 2019; Pekarek Doehler and Skogmyr Marian 2022). Using the following framework of a typical sequential organisation of a word search sequence introduced in Chapter  (e.g., Koshik and Seo 2012), we analyse the ways in which participants initiate word searches and candidate solutions are provided, and how these candidate solutions are responded to:

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