Drawing on data from an intervention study in L2 English classrooms employing monolingual, bilingual, and multilingual pedagogies, the study centers on occasioned vocabulary trouble during peer group activities, focusing on the linguistic and embodied resources learners draw upon in creating opportunities for learning and teaching.
Participation in social activities is key to second and foreign language learning (e.g. Douglas Fir Group, 2016). In multilingual settings, interactants have access to several languages for social action (Cenoz & Gorter, 2015); however, our knowledge of non-institutional multilingual practices far exceeds our understanding of them as resources in the classroom (Wagner, 2019), such as in group activities. The present study targets peer L2 vocabulary learning, where learners collaboratively transform moments of non-understanding or trouble into occasions for teaching and learning. Following a conversation analytic (CA) approach to language learning (e.g. Nguyen & Malabarba, 2019; Kasper & Wagner, 2011), we examine vocabulary-centered peer activities in multilingual L2 English classrooms in Sweden (≥5 students with another L1 than Swedish/classroom), years 7–9. Data are drawn from an intervention study that employed monolingual (English), bilingual (English/Swedish), and multilingual (English/Swedish/Other) pedagogies in six classrooms. Classrooms were videorecorded prior to (15 lessons) and during intervention (36 lessons; 12/treatment). In sequences where a lexical item is made the business of talk due to a problem of understanding, we analyze the occasioning of the trouble and the joint problem-solving practices in which participants engage, focusing on the resources learners draw upon in moving past trouble. Findings reveal that learners draw on English, Swedish, and embodied action, employing other-initiated repair, teasing, and code-switching. While background languages constitute potential resources, only English and Swedish are explicitly oriented to. The situated management of lexical trouble constitutes a rich site for the empirical investigation of what constitutes learnables and teachables (Eskildsen & Majlesi, 2018), opening a window into learner orientations to their language repertoires in doing teaching and learning. Such insights are important in designing activities that facilitate unplanned, locally occasioned learning opportunities in multilingual classrooms, which we argue have a place in supporting learners’ broader language awareness (Svalberg, 2007).
