INTRODUCTION
Adopting the perspective that children's second language (L2) acquisition is situated within the social events and interactional practices of a classroom community (Duff, Reference Duff2014), the present study examines how child language novices develop interactional competences and broaden their interactional repertoires in a Swedish as a second language classroom. The analysis is of two 7-year-old girls’ (Thai and Kurdish) learning trajectories and presents a longitudinal account of their L2 as it develops, in classroom discursive activities during a school year. Video data were collected in a language immersion classroom for 7- to 10-year-old nonnative children, who had recently arrived in Sweden and who had no Swedish language skills at the outset of the school year.
The present study takes an approach to second language acquisition that foregrounds the social context as a necessary condition for language learning. Such an approach emphasizes the need to take into account (individual) learners’ goals, aspirations, and identity work, locating and connecting these to socialization into and mastery of the particular repertoires of participation and language use in the language classroom and language community. Analyses of children's L2 learning must therefore take into consideration the child-related characteristic features of social interaction and account for the social conditions, activities and interactions, interests, and social or academic concerns of children as factors that contribute to the L2 learning opportunities created for children and that children seek out themselves. Drawing on work looking at children acquiring an L2, several studies (Philp & Duchene, Reference Philp, Duchene, Philp, Oliver and Mackey2008) discuss, in particular, the ways in which individuals may be motivated to learn an L2. They show that children are not passive recipients of adults’ teaching; rather they are active in how they position themselves, approach, and interact with their peers and teachers (as social or learning partners). In the L2 classroom, there is thus no such thing as “the Learner.” Instead, there are different individuals with different learning experiences and aspirations.
Children of various ages exhibit different aspects of social or cognitive development compared to adults, and they engage in child- and age-specific communicative practices (Blum-Kulka & Snow, Reference Blum-Kulka and Snow2004; Cekaite, Blum-Kulka, Grøver, & Teubal, Reference Cekaite, Blum-Kulka, Grøver and Teubal2014; Philp, Oliver, & Mackey, Reference Philp, Oliver and Mackey2008). The teachers and children's peer groups can play different roles in creating opportunities for L2 learning. Children's interactions are often characterized by spontaneity, collaborative creativity, and playfulness. For instance, language play is a cultural tool (Vygotsky, Reference Vygotsky and Kosulin1986) that allows children to explore language in a series of entertaining ways, which may, in their turn, have an educational impact in promoting L2 interaction (Cekaite & Aronsson, Reference Cekaite and Aronsson2005). Peer interactions can thus be considered a “double opportunity space” that serves both as a locus for the construction of children's social worlds and social relations and as an arena for the development of language skills (Björk-Willén, Reference Björk-Willén and Theobald2016; Blum-Kulka & Snow, Reference Blum-Kulka and Snow2004; Cekaite et al., Reference Cekaite, Blum-Kulka, Grøver and Teubal2014). However, children's interactions function as a productive site for L2 learning for children who have already achieved some language proficiency (Blum-Kulka & Gorbatt, Reference Blum-Kulka, Gorbatt, Cekaite, Blum-Kulka, Grøver and Teubal2014). Gaining social acceptance from peers who are competent language speakers might pose a challenge to beginning language learners (Rydland, Grøver, & Lawrence, Reference Rydland, Grøver, Lawrence, Cekaite, Blum-Kulka, Grøver and Teubal2014), who may therefore appreciate and prefer social interactions with teachers or adults.
L2 LEARNING IN CLASSROOM INTERACTIONS: DISCURSIVE ACTIVITIES AND INTERACTIONAL COMPETENCES
Language classrooms not only teach L2 knowledge, but they also constitute contexts in which children are socialized “through language” and to “use language” (Ochs, Reference Ochs, Gumperz and Levinson1996). They present twofold—learning and participatory—opportunities. In this way, learning an L2 in a classroom is inextricably related to being a student and managing a range of classroom activities, that is, developing mastery of variously structured interactional repertoires. For L2 novices, participation in classroom activities requires complex interactional competences, consisting of skills for configuring actions within classroom discursive practices (Cekaite, Reference Cekaite2007; Hall, Hellerman, & Pekarek Doehler, Reference Hall, Hellerman and Pekarek Doehler2011). Namely, learners need to recognize classroom turn-taking procedures, interpret ongoing talk, produce linguistically elaborate and topically relevant contributions, construct topic openings, and select an appropriate place for launching one's turn.
A number of longitudinal ethnographic studies on children's L2 learning have provided in-depth descriptions of L2 development by taking account of the linguistic and the interactional, sociocultural context. For instance, Kanagy (Reference Kanagy1999) showed that classroom practices that were shaped as interactional routines (teacher-led greeting activities) provided an accessible lexical and turn-taking structure for L2 Japanese novices; the recurrent and predictable organization of the classroom activity scaffolded the children's L2 learning over time (see also Watanabe, Reference Watanabe2016). Multiparty conversational format is a discursive activity that has the potential to foster creative L2 use. For instance, a longitudinal case study tracking a young L2 learner's development of interactional competences in a Swedish L2 classroom (Cekaite, Reference Cekaite2007) showed that successful participation in multiparty discourse was characterized by the novice's learning to design verbal contributions by indicating their thematic cohesion with ongoing talk and by selecting appropriate places for turn-taking. Student L2 talk in classrooms can be increased by teachers acknowledging and building on what students know and allowing students to direct and elaborate on a topic.
A significant aspect of interactional competences involves the affective indexing of social acts. Speakers in different communities have varying normative expectations regarding affect expressions associated with the particular discursive practices, settings, and social roles of speakers (Goodwin, Cekaite, & Goodwin, Reference Goodwin, Cekaite, Goodwin, Peräkylä and Sorjonen2012; Ochs, Reference Ochs, Gumperz and Levinson1996). For instance, learning (or not) to design lexically elaborate responses to teachers’ directives and instructions, and to mitigate refusals with mildly negative affective stances, was crucial to L2 novices’ development of problematic versus successful student identities (Cekaite, Reference Cekaite2012, Reference Cekaite, Kasper and Prior2017). In this way, the teacher's notions of language learners’ abilities leads to constructions of a positive or problematic learner identity for each child, which in turn shapes the learning affordances the teacher makes available (Hall, Reference Hall1997; Hawkins, Reference Hawkins2005; Rymes & Pash, Reference Rymes and Pash2001). These studies foreground the importance of examining how the discursive practices of language classrooms afford or constrain students’ verbal participation and teacher feedback, and thereby create differential opportunities for students’ L2 learning.
Taking as its point of departure longitudinal, ethnographically inspired research, the present study tracks the development of young Swedish L2 learners’ verbal and nonverbal participation—their L2 repertoires—over a school year. It focuses on how novices’ verbal contributions are structured, accepted, or evaluated, and what social identities are ascribed to them in classroom activities. By deploying a comparative perspective, the longitudinal case study will examine novices’ L2 learning trajectories and discuss how they are related to the children's shifting linguistic and interactional competences over time.
METHOD
Data, Setting, and Analytical Perspective
The data consist of video and audio recordings of everyday interactions in a Swedish L2 class for refugee and immigrant children—a so-called mottagningsklass (literally: “reception classroom”)—in a regular Swedish school. The fieldwork also involved repeated interviews with the teachers about the children's L2 learning. Swedish was the lingua franca of schooling. The group included nine children (7 to 10 years old) who were beginner learners. However, their time spent in Sweden varied, and they differed in their L2 proficiency. They came from Iraq, Kurdistan, Lebanon, and Thailand. The present study concerns two 7-year-old girls: Nok (Thai) and Fusi (Kurdish). They were the youngest children in the group, both with very limited skills in Swedish at the beginning of the recordings. The main teacher, Vera, was a native Swedish speaker and a teacher's aide; Fare (Swedish-Arabic bilingual), assisted her. The names of the participants have been fictionalized to ensure anonymity. Classroom interactions and recess activities were videorecorded during three periods, covering an early (autumn), middle (winter), and late phase (late spring) of the school year (90 hours of recordings). Recurring patterns of the girls’ interactions were identified through detailed analysis of selected videotaped classroom activities. For the present article, I selected interactions that represent the girls’ interactional participation during a school year.
Methodologically, the study combines a language socialization perspective with detailed approaches to social interaction to engage in an in-depth exploration of language learners’ performances over time, locating changes in a richly contextualized description of discursive activities in the classroom (Cekaite, Reference Cekaite2007, Reference Cekaite, Kasper and Prior2017; Philp & Duchene, Reference Philp, Duchene, Philp, Oliver and Mackey2008).
FINDINGS
The analysis shows that the L2 novices, Nok and Fusi, started off with a “silent period” (an early stage of L2 development when young learners do not take an active part in interactions; DaSilva Iddings & Jang, Reference DaSilva Iddings and Jang2008), using simple summons and nonverbal actions, and that, during the school year, both girls broadened their range of interactional repertoires. For instance, they contributed to and initiated interactions with teachers and peers, and they participated in a growing range of classroom discursive activities. However, the longitudinal analysis also demonstrates the L2 novices’ varying learning trajectories. The girls differed in their L2 resources and pragmatic skills (including affective stances) and in their local identities as successful or unsuccessful language learners (identities ascribed to them by the teachers).
Beginning of the School Year: Basic Interactional Repertoire
At the beginning of the school year, the girls’ verbal participation in the classroom was limited to interactional routines of summoning, that is, calling for the teacher's attention during individual work on task (when children worked individually on drawing or writing assignments). Their initial period in a new language was not entirely silent (e.g., DaSilva Iddings & Jang, Reference DaSilva Iddings and Jang2008; Blum-Kulka & Gorbatt, Reference Blum-Kulka, Gorbatt, Cekaite, Blum-Kulka, Grøver and Teubal2014), however, the L2 means available to the girls were too limited to sustain and contribute to the L2 interaction. They included deictics här (“here”), numerals (1 to 10), and a handful of verbs associated with routine classroom activities (titta/look, kom/come, klar/finished). Both girls relied on material artefacts (books, sheets of paper, and drawings) and embodied resources (laughter, body posture, and prosody) to indicate the importance for the teacher to respond to their summons (Cekaite, Reference Cekaite2007). The following excerpt, representative of both learners, is selected from a typical classroom writing activity. Nok solicits the teacher Vera's attention to her completed assignment (line 1).
The teacher responds with a series of positive and linguistically elaborate assessments that both describe the manner (nicely) and speed (fast) of Nok's work on task (lines 2–3). Generally, teachers’ responses to novices’ summons varied from minimal acknowledgments to affectively upgraded assessments, designed as lexically and grammatically more complex utterances. However, such exchanges usually did not result in the novices’ uptake and sustained verbal interactions.
Middle of the School Year: Reliance on Predictable Classroom Discursive Activities
After the initial period of Nok's and Fusi's verbally limited, primarily visually based interactions, they widened their L2 linguistic and interactional repertoires, joining in and verbally contributing (albeit minimally) to a broader range of classroom discursive practices. They expressed themselves with an increasing but still very restricted number of words, connecting them by pragmatic principles of discourse organization and using a rudimentary syntax (cf. Pallotti, Reference Pallotti, Luzio, Günthner and Orletti2001). The novices largely relied on repetitions for joining others in interactional activities and used formulaic expressions for initiating new encounters. Their L2 lexical repertoires were associated with classroom task-related vocabulary, that is, conventionalized expressions linked to various interactional routines: for example, titta alla fint (look all nice), jag mycket (I a lot), kom klar jag (come ready I), which were loosely transformed for situationally relevant purposes.
The girls only occasionally made contributions to teacher-led multiparty discourse, where creative language use and elaborate turn-taking skills were required. They primarily took active part in teacher-fronted display questions or “known-answer” vocabulary examination and rehearsal activities (Cekaite, Reference Cekaite2007). Here, they contributed with short, one-word responses to the teacher questions (e.g., training new Swedish words). This classroom activity did not encourage complexity and lexical novelty in the L2, but provided an accessible interactional scaffolding structure for the novices’ verbal participation with minimal L2 means (see also Kanagy, Reference Kanagy1999; Watanabe, Reference Watanabe2016).
The girls also participated in individual work on task, here broadening their possibilities for L2 use (cf. Excerpt 1). These activities, where the speakership and conversational topics were not strictly regulated by the teacher, allowed the learners, whose L2 vocabulary was growing, to initiate their own interactions and provided a considerable freedom to use L2 in various and, at times, creative ways. Here, the children were less bound by the classroom task conditions, and they initiated alternative modes of participation that included language play. In their peer group interactions, both girls primarily relied on each other's company and their dyadic physical, rather than verbal, activities. Interestingly, despite the similarities in the scope of their interactional repertoires, the two language novices demonstrated considerable differences in their mastery. There were also significant differences in how the teachers responded to their L2 initiatives and in the identities the teachers ascribed to the students (in social interaction and in interviews).
Nok: Language Play, Formulaic Expressions, and Positive Stances
Individual work on task was Nok's most recurrent interactional activity. Here, she initiated entertaining language play to approach the teachers or her more L2 proficient peers. Nok creatively recycled classroom formulaic expressions, language drills, and counting phrases, substituting parts of them with pragmatically and semantically incongruent elements, and in this way she was able to do something interesting for others. In Excerpt 2, the children are working individually on mathematics exercises.
Nok playfully addresses her teacher Fare and her classmates (lines 1–2), smilingly using extended summons. She employs several features of a teacher-talk register, including the diminutive endearment address routine, “little + child's name.” Address terms signal different degrees of formality and age/knowledge hierarchies, and one aspect of classroom interactional competence is to master the implicit rules of classroom pragmatics. Nok uses language play and on-task commentaries (Look you much you come little) as competence displays that upgrade her position within the local classroom hierarchy, where age and academic and L2 proficiency are key categories in the lives of child L2 learners (see also her All baby I not baby line 2). Although entertaining, her talk manifests the initial states of “basic variety” (Perdue, Reference Perdue2000): She does not use copula or tenses, or correct adverbials, and her contributions are repetitious. Layla responds to Nok (line 8), but she rejects her competence claims using a new verb, you don't understand, to specify her argument. However, Nok moves on and unsuccessfully introduces a new topic, again using a classroom formulaic expression, look it you (pointing at Layla's book). She then changes recipient and smilingly summons the teacher Fare using yet another formulaic expression, what shall we do? (incorrectly using plural pronoun “we” instead of “I”) and securing his response (lines 11–14). As demonstrated, Nok's verbal initiatives toward her more L2 proficient classmates only occasionally resulted in sustained interactions and short-time acceptance within their social networks (cf. Blum-Kulka & Gorbatt, Reference Blum-Kulka, Gorbatt, Cekaite, Blum-Kulka, Grøver and Teubal2014). Her conversational initiatives were routinized, and she only minimally exploited the lexical features of the interlocutors’ turn. However, by using positive affective resources—smiling, laughter, soft speech, playful prosody, and language play—the novice was successful in capturing the interlocutors’ attention and indexing a positive and competent student-language learner identity.
Nok's verbal initiatives generally dealt with “here-and-now” classroom events. Excerpt 3 demonstrates one of the very few contributions—It fall—that she successfully issues during a free-floating (teacher-led multiparty) classroom conversation. Here, Nok addresses the teacher Vera, telling her “Det ramla” (It fall) and showing a paper tag that belongs to her (implying that it has fallen down from her clothes rack).
The teacher ratifies Nok's contribution and by repeating her utterance makes salient and confirms Nok's choice of verb “ramla” (fall), which is used rather rarely in the classroom discourse (line 3). Nok, upon receiving an appreciative response, recycles her prior—successful—utterance, adding an adverbial “too” (Sawan too fall) to build coherence with limited linguistic means, but does not get a response. In line 5, the teacher further develops the topic in her multiple and varied turns: routinized imperative directives (characteristic of the teacher register), “kom här,” “sätt dig” (come here, sit down), and a casual exclamatory utterance, we're lucky!, indexing her overly positive stance. However, Nok does not respond to this appreciative turn or to the teacher's question, which one do you want? and the teacher recasts the question in a simplified form, using a verb “peka” (point) to clarify the requested action (lines 5–8). Abdi seconds her directive, scaffolding Nok's understanding using a visual clarification (pointing at the pictures). Later, Nok repeats her previous turn verbatim (line 13, see line 4), and the teacher's positive evaluation of the student's knowledge of fall (although it is used in uninflected form) is publicly demonstrated through her numerous assessments: She knew the word. It was very good.
As demonstrated, Nok manifested her interactional and social competences by recognizing and adhering to the rules for turn allocation as well as by monitoring others’ conduct and the classroom order. Her minimal and repetitive L2 initiatives received overly positive evaluation, and the teachers positioned her as a successful and capable language learner.
Fusi: Conversational Initiatives as Aggravated Turns of Disagreement
Similarly to Nok, Fusi relied on limited L2 resources and participated in similar interactional activities. In addition to the repetitive use of classroom formulaic expressions, Fusi produced partially novel contributions by using simple objections to the antecedent turns. Fusi's utterances were very loud and, in many cases, broke the turn-allocation rules and diverged from the affective expectations for neutral affect that characterize non-conflict-oriented classroom discourse. In addition to turn-initial opposition markers “nej,” imperatives, adjectives (e.g., recycled from the previous speaker's turn), “nej + x” (no + noun) was her commonly used nonstandard format deployed to respond by disputing the prior speaker's turns.
Excerpt 4 shows Fusi's participation in individual work on task. Although on the surface her L2 contributions resemble Nok's (Excerpt 2), by using outright disagreements with the teacher Fare and loud self-evaluations, Fusi does not show the required interactional competences associated with the student register.
As Fusi works on math exercises, she loudly engages in play with language by producing an extended string of Swedish numerals one, two, three . . ., also summoning the teacher, Fare seven! It is a simple online verbal commentary, where self-talk/private speech is both used as a cultural tool for thinking (Vygotsky, Reference Vygotsky and Kosulin1986) and to publicly affirm her progress on task (Kohler & Thorne, Reference Kohler, Thorne, Hall, Hellerman and Doehler2011). Fusi even makes a loud positive self-assessment: good (recycling teacher register). Importantly, she consistently uses affectively upgraded turns (loud and shouting), aggravated with outright objections to the teacher's directives telling her to stop (lines 1–2; 4–5). The teacher disciplines her several times, Fusi you are very loud, using prohibitive imperatives, Don't scream like this! that Fusi disputes (line 6–8). In this way, the L2 input that is directly addressed to the girl primarily consists of prohibitives that deal with her inappropriate conduct, rather than with verbal expansions and recasts of her talk.
In the following, I will discuss some of Fusi's few verbal initiatives, that is, teacher unsolicited self-selections during teacher-fronted, whole-group conversational activities. In Excerpt 5, the teacher labels an object in a picture of a puppy and its reflection in a puddle of water. At this point, the children can self-select, with a repetition practicing the word or by extending the topic. Fusi joins the conversation with novel information, designed as a rudimentary disagreement.
Fusi overlaps Abdi's turn, disagreeing with the teacher's labelling in a nearly screaming voice: No one dog! Two dog here! (line 3). Mitigation is a conventionalized way to design a disagreement, but Fusi's turn—a turn-initial polarity marker, No, and a correction (two dog)—challenges the teacher's labeling (Cekaite, Reference Cekaite2012, Reference Cekaite, Kasper and Prior2017), to which the teacher responds with further disagreement (a determined and tense voice, line 6). Fusi's subsequent contributions—the imperative stop and objection no in a screaming voice—restate her disagreement, and she then leaves her desk, heading toward the teacher (lines 7, 9, 11). Whereas Fusi, throughout the episode, manifests her adequate understanding of the teacher's talk and responds to it; she repeatedly aggravates her oppositional version, providing ground for the teacher's repeated and escalating opposition (lines 8, 10, 12). Such marked features of disagreement contributed to a negative identity ascription, casting Fusi as a socially inept student and poor language learner.
End of the School Year: Narrative Attempts or Minimal Repetitive Contributions
At the end of the school year, the two girls demonstrated growing mastery of L2 interactional repertoires. They occasionally joined ongoing multiparty conversations with thematically coherent contributions that were ratified by interlocutors. At this point, both were ascribed positive learner identities by the teachers (documented in the interviews with the teachers, and in the teachers’ classroom conduct). However, a close analysis of Fusi's and Nok's verbal participation show that they differed in terms of the complexity and novelty of their L2 contributions, as well as mastery in these interactional formats. The girls’ peer group contacts were limited, and they interacted with each other, the least competent L2 speakers in the classroom. Their dyadic interactions gave them continuous access to social acceptance, although the L2 used in their playful off-task or recess interactions was rather semantically and interactionally repetitious (based on coherence markers, e.g., I too; formulaic interrogatives, or imperatives, e.g., Hi what are you doing).
In her interactions with the teachers (the largest share of her L2 talk), Fusi markedly increased her participation—both in frequency and manner—in a broad range of interactional activities and shifted from employing aggravated oppositional stances to thematically relevant, levelled conversational initiates. Interestingly, Nok's linguistic competences were largely the same as earlier (comprising classroom formulaic expressions) (see also Rymes & Pash, Reference Rymes and Pash2001). Though, during the school year, Nok has learned to apply L2 scripts from familiar routines to various situations, her creative language use—by which I mean being able to initiate or contribute topics that go beyond the immediate classroom activities—remained limited. Her knowledge of classroom L2 routines and techniques (x too) appeared to be sufficient to enable her to achieve success in basic interactional goals in classroom activities. She participated in teacher-fronted display questions and short dyadic exchanges with the teacher.
Nok: Self-Selections With Lexically Minimal, Interactionally Relevant Contributions
Throughout the school year, Nok was intently attuned to classroom routines and the institutional agenda, thereby establishing a “good student” and language learner identity in relation to the teacher. In Excerpt 6, Nok smilingly delivers a correct answer to the teacher's question about the alphabetical order of the students, listed on the whiteboard. She volunteers one word—a personal name—“Bai.”
The teacher's response is an overly positive assessment of Nok's literacy skills. In such self-selections, Nok chose what to talk about, selecting a topic that she could linguistically deal with. With her lexically simple, but topically relevant contributions, she was able to participate verbally in predictably structured classroom activities, doing the right thing in an appropriate conversational slot.
Nok produced very few attempts to join freely organized multiparty conversations, also here using conventionalized lexical resources: In Excerpt 7, the teachers and the children converse about candies that they are all eating (the candies are shaped like the Eiffel Tower). When the teacher has eaten half of her candy, she displays it for the class asking, What has happened to my tower? At this point everybody can self-select and volunteer an answer.
Nok self-selects with a deictic and shows her candy. However, it is Hiwa's verbally elaborate self-selection, It has broken, that is expanded on (with a partial correction) by the teacher (line 4). Nok competes for the floor by calling for the teacher to look at her and by expanding her turn: Vera look. I eat I came same as you (line 6). Her utterance includes information that is relevant to the general topic and it contributes a novel feature: Smiling, Nok suggests that she has eaten candy in such way that the shape of her candy looks similar to the teacher's. Noticeable here is the lack of morphological features and the simple, repetitive lexis. Now, the teacher responds with aligning laughter as she expands the student's turn: she labels a relevant object (“benen,” the legs), time and quantity adverbials (line 9). Nok thus succeeds in establishing a short dyadic conversation with the teacher and continues it by smiling and adding yet another formulaic initiative (with a recycled adverbial now from the teacher's turn), Now comes nothing (line 10). Her utterance implies that there will be nothing left when she has eaten the candy and the teacher again positively ratifies (slightly correcting) Nok's self-selection. While Nok is successful in launching timely and thematically relevant contributions, demonstrating her understanding of the ongoing conversation, she makes rather limited use of the lexical and syntactic features of the teacher's turn in her attempts to sustain the conversation.
Fusi: Self-Selections With Rudimentary Narratives
In contrast to Nok, Fusi participated actively in teacher-led multiparty conversations and individual activities, timely self-selecting and producing expanded responses that contained relatively novel, nonimitative phrases. Her changing participation in terms of markedly increasing mastery of interactional repertoires was linked to a range of features (interactional competences), such as mastery of a wider lexical repertoire, growing lexicomorphological complexity, turn-taking skills, and, importantly, abandonment of oppositional acts and aggravated disagreements with teachers.
Fusi moved on from the repetition of words and formulaic, conventionalized expressions to commenting on the ongoing situation and dealing with here-and-now topics to a more decontextualized range of topics and making multiple attempts at the interactional activity of “just conversing.” She made repeated attempts at organizing her verbal participation as a prolonged, cosustained course of conversational action and produced verbal contributions that were original and informative (albeit with rudimentary syntax) (Cekaite, Reference Cekaite2007). Fusi skillfully used elements and novel features from the teacher's turns when constituting a narrative and the teacher's ratification of her L2 contributions.
Next, I will examine the interactional competences that enabled Fusi to initiate and construct rudimentary narratives as thematically relevant exploratory talk. When classroom pedagogical content was linked to the children's prior experiences, for example, from their homeland, which was typically ratified by the teachers as a salient topic. In Excerpt 8, individual work on task, the children have to cut various shapes from paper. The teacher Vera gives Fusi the task of cutting out a heart and instructs about the meaning of the noun heart. Rather than resuming the paper-cutting task, Fusi self-selects with an extended turn that expands the topic, she recycles the keyword heart and introduces novel information (lines 2–3).
The teacher asks a follow-up question and comments on Fusi's turns, scaffolding her rudimentary narrative (lines 5, 11, 16, 18). The noteworthiness and relevance of Fusi's contribution is achieved by her specifying a relevant location, on Kurdistan, and by her repeated use of the newly learned L2 word heart as a focal referent for the teacher–student conversation. Fusi's talk, albeit syntactically incorrect, includes adverbials to mark temporality, adjectives (green), and a new category of subjects (all children). Throughout the dialogue, Fusi is able to self-select with relevant and novel conversational contributions that amount to a simple narrative that deals with her experiences from her home country (beyond the here-and-now). She is also successful in answering the teacher's scaffolding questions (And what did you do with the heart?). When the teacher tries to close down the exchange, So it'll be almost like in Kurdistan (line 11), Fusi once again self-selects with a new short narrative introducing new information on the topic, I went to school on Kurdistan (using past tense verb constructions, the newly learned word and the main topic, then I colored the heart). In this conversation, Fusi's lexically and grammatically more complex and affectively levelled self-selections (as compared to Excerpts 4 and 5) provide a ground for the teacher's expansions, further scaffolding of Fusi's talk, and importantly, for positioning her as a capable and competent student/L2 learner (cf. period II).
CONCLUDING DISCUSSION
The present study has employed a fine-grained, ethnographically inspired approach that allowed consideration of both the micro-level of linguistic and pragmatic aspects and the micro-level of social actions, relationships, and institutional practices, when tracking the girls’ L2 learning trajectories over an extended period of time. The study has explored the two children's verbal initiatives (e.g., self-selections) and interactional repertoires by taking account of the novices’ social aspirations in the classroom, demonstrated in their interactions with teachers and peers. Specifically, the study has shown the situated interplay of the novices’ emergent language and interactional skills in L2, including the affective—positive or oppositional—stances taken over time, that all together contributed to the learner identities ascribed by the teachers. Importantly, the teachers were the significant social and learning partners, sought after by the two beginner learners, and classroom discourse constituted their main L2 learning affordances.
The study has documented a general learning trajectory, that is, a transition in the child language learners from highly repetitious and formulaic contributions to formally and semantically more diverse discourse and a widening of the girls’ classroom interactional repertoires. There has been a clear evolution in Fusi's interactional competence, from her reliance on interactional routines (e.g., summons) to her growing abilities to self-select and engage in acts of “just conversing” and to productively exploit novel lexical features in the interlocutors’ antecedent turns. Midway through the school year, Fusi's interactional skills and learner identity seemed to be evaluated on the basis of their interactionally inappropriate design and negative affect, rather than on their linguistic features and novelty. Fusi's failure to get the teacher's positive acknowledgment may have resulted from the interplay of the linguistic and pragmatic features of her talk (Excerpt 5). On a tentative note, it can be suggested that Fusi's repeated (albeit rejected) contributions did not preclude her from L2 learning and that the teachers’ corrections gave her further resources to maintain and develop language and, presumably, interactional competences.
Nok, on the other hand, demonstrated a more limited mastery of interactional repertoires at the end of the school year. She was the child learner who understood a considerable amount of classroom discourse and demonstrated her classroom procedural knowledge, but who still expressed herself with routinized linguistic resources. She was able to skillfully select appropriate interactional places for her topically relevant, but minimal, routinized L2 contributions. Intriguingly, such interactionally relevant, albeit semantically and grammatically repetitious, contributions contributed to her “passing” as a competent language learner throughout the year, without the teachers discerning her limited progress in L2 (Excerpts 6 and 7; cf. Rymes & Pash, Reference Rymes and Pash2001).
The present analysis provides evidence that over time, through participation in classroom discourse (interactional routines), the learners were able to extend their L2 and interactional repertoires and develop their interactional competences. The data thus suggest an intricate and synergistic, rather than clearly unidirectional, relationship between the learners’ interactional competences, social skills, and linguistic development. They emphasize that children's socialization into interactional repertoires in formal learning settings involves learning not only what to say, but also how to say it, the rules of deference when talking with teachers, including which affective stances/resources are appropriate in formal versus informal relations. As demonstrated, the novices’ language acquisition is not simply a matter of reconstructing a code, but a process dependent on their development of interactional competences, mastery of classroom discourse, and the participants’ identity work.
Acknowledgments
This study was written with the financial support from Swedish Research Council (VR).
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