This conversation-analytic study illustrates a longitudinal and retrospective approach to documenting a student’s access to a past learning object in an L2 classroom setting over the course of multiple moments of interaction. Drawing on video-recorded interactions from an EFL classroom, the analysis demonstrates the temporal and cumulative nature of learning.
This study explores a student's access to a particular grammatical learning object from the perspective of CA-SLA, which views language learning as a situated, emergent and observable behaviour evident in the turn-by-turn unfolding of social interaction. CA-SLA studies have been gaining momentum with a focus on the developmental processes of L2 interactional competence or L2 linguistic patterns (Pekarek Doehler, 2018). However, more studies are needed to document learning processes over the course of multiple moments of interaction (Markee, 2008). Therefore, drawing on video-recorded interactions from an EFL classroom at tertiary level, this micro-analytic study tracks a specific student's access to a past learning object over a period of two weeks across four moments at different times, which are observably connected through the participants' retrospective orientations. The analysis shows not only student orientation to the past learning object but also how and when the learning object was introduced into the classroom talk by two different teachers. It is not until the last instance that the student being tracked displays full access to the past learning object by producing it correctly followed by her elicited metalinguistic explanation about the object displaying her understanding. The analysis of the four instances demonstrates the process of learning the language item by the same student and the way she undergoes an epistemic change in her learning state over time. Most importantly, the findings demonstrate how the teacher establishes connection across the different moments with reference to past learning events and how the students observably orient to what was brought up in the earlier learning events, thus illustrating both a longitudinal and a retrospective perspective. Finally, the analysis demonstrates the temporal and cumulative nature of learning and highlights that learning is not only situated but also transferrable (Jakonen, 2018).
