The recent advancement in media technology has dramatically enhanced our data collection, analysis, and sharing procedures. Hellermann’s work, based on a sizable corpus of video-recorded classroom interaction, exemplifies how fine details of learner-learner interaction can be documented by fully utilizing the available technology. Readers can also access via the Internet the video clip of each excerpt introduced in this book and thereby confirm prosodic and nonverbal features of the learners’ practices discussed in the analysis.

Hellermann approaches this set of data, which features adult immigrant English as a second language learners, armed with two major frameworks: community of practice theory and conversation analysis (CA). Whereas previous classroom studies have often focused on how learners engage in tasks designed by teachers, this study illuminates how the learners, in pairs, launch task interactions (chapter 3), how they initiate, or respond to, story tellings that happen to emerge during task interactions (chapter 4), and how they disengage from task interactions (chapter 5). The management of these transitional talks is not typically treated as the main target of instruction, but it constitutes a critical component of the classroom community of practice, the understanding of which enables learners to become members of the community. Using CA techniques, Hellermann describes commonly observed practices in these sequences, comparing different levels of complexities observed in novice and intermediate classes; he further demonstrates how a particular learner changed his practices over time.

This book makes a timely contribution to the ongoing debate as to how CA, either alone or combined with a learning theory, can capture language learning. Hellermann’s study proposes one model to follow in this endeavor, and, at the same time, it triggers further questions regarding learners’ life outside of the classroom. How exactly does the learners’ longitudinal development in the classroom community of practice affect their increased participation in the broader community of fluent English language users, and vice versa? This book suggests plausible but speculative answers to this question. Empirical studies of the out-of-the-classroom experience, following the model proposed by Hellermann and complementing his findings, present a promising direction for future research.