Introduction

The research in this volume has advocated focusing on classroom language learning as a contextualized and situated process through action-oriented investigations of language, language learning and language-learning classrooms. In the previous three chapters, I have set the analytic lens for a rather powerful focus on details for micro-level social actions that adult language learners accomplished in their dyadic task interactions in their language learning classrooms. In concluding, I will step back with a much broader focus in discussing classrooms as communities of practice before coming back, at the end, to the details of face-to-face interaction in these communities to show the existence of the macro features within the micro practices (Steve Reder, pers. comm.).

How Language Learning is ‘Situated’

The investigations in this volume focused on learners, their talk-in-interaction, and their co-construction of social practices for ordering their interactions in language-learning classrooms using theoretical perspectives on social organization and research findings from conversation analysis and situated learning. CA research has focused on describing how talk-in-interaction itself is a social organization worthy of investigation. That program’s focus on indigenous methods for social order making through talk-in-interaction led to my attempt to uncover similar indigenous methods of organization through language that occur in the language learning classroom accomplished by adults with various competencies in the use of English. By describing these practices at different points in time, I attempted to show evidence of language development in micro-level language practices. The social practices uncovered and analyzed here were accomplished by adult language learners in their peer classroom dyadic interaction without instruction from the teacher and have not been the focus of the bulk of research on additional language learning (Kasper, 2006).

This is a notable gap in the research program of classroom language learning researchers.