The study investigates learner agentivity and collaborative learning practices in foreign language classrooms of less commonly taught languages at an American university. Language learning can be located in practices within single interactions as references to instances of prior learning (Jakonen, 2018). We study the role of learnables (Majlesi & Broth 2012; Eskildsen & Majlesi, 2018) emerging in the social interaction unfolding in the classroom, specifically past shared experiences invoked in the learning activity. While earlier studies (Jakonen 2018; Lilja & Piirainen-Marsh, 2019) have looked at individual past experiences, we focus on invoked past experiences that are shared by the peer group.
We present multimodal conversation analysis of classroom talk by small groups of students. The data consist of video recordings of Finnish and Estonian classrooms conducted over one semester. In the reflective task on independent learning, as students presented self-selected material, interaction with teacher and peers steered the attention to specific learnables. Although the task instructions mostly targeted individual learning, new learnables emerged that referenced past shared experiences. An individual retrospection turned collaborative as a peer was a knowledgeable participant thanks to prior shared classroom talk. Another student invoked a shared history of incidental learning of a phrase during his individual project talk, which led to the teacher repurposing the item as a new learnable. In addition to the retrospective tasks, other group talk contexts featured instances of spontaneous references to past shared learning experiences, as learners oriented to what was needed for the learning project (Kotilainen & Kurhila, 2020). Thus in a task planning talk, routine classroom language got repurposed when a peer pinpointed it as a resource, and shared passive knowledge was turned into a learnable for active use.
The instances of emerging learning projects function as ways of maintaining and restoring intersubjectivity in group talk, organizing social relationships and contributing to collaborative learning. The analysis shows learners drawing on collective past experiences as resources for the task at hand, and demonstrates in detail how distributed cognitive processes are made visible in social interaction between learner peers and the teacher. The focus on shared, collective prior learning experiences contributes to the growing body of work on learnables and retrospective orientation to past learning in classroom interaction.
References
Eskildsen, S., & Majlesi, A. (2018). Learnables and teachables in second language talk: Advancing a social reconceptualization of central SLA tenets. Introduction to the special issue. The Modern Language Journal, 102 (Supplement 2018), 3-10. https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12462
Jakonen, T. (2018). Retrospective orientation to learning activities and achievements as a resource in classroom interaction. The Modern Language Journal, 102, 758-774. https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12513
Kotilainen, L. ,& Kurhila, S. (2020). Orientation to language learning over time: a case analysis on the repertoire addition of a lexical item. The Modern Language Journal, 104: 647661. https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12665
Lilja, N., & Piirainen-Marsh, A. (2019). Connecting the language classroom and the Wild: re-enactments of language use experiences, Applied Linguistics, 40, 594–623.
https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amx045.
Majlesi, A. R., & Broth, M. (2012). Emergent learnables in second language classroom interaction. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 1, 193–207.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lcsi.2012.08.004
