This paper reports on interactional practices (1: collaborative multi-turn units (Lerner, 1991) with synchronized shifts in bodily deixis, 2:performance of being a “with” (Goffman, 1971) around an iPhone, and, 3: the recombinatory reuse of words and constructions in the process of building a discourse object during augmented reality game play.
Drawing on recent conversation analytic research on mobility in interaction (Haddington et al. 2013), embodied approaches to cognition and communicative action (Goodwin, 2017), and innovations in place-based language learning in the wild (authors, 2015), this paper investigates practices for routinization in situated, temporally unfolding language learning tasks. The data for analysis are intensive video recordings (two head-mounted cameras and a third camera capturing the entire group’s interaction) of three English language learners playing an augmented reality game in a city using an iPhone. The game asks players to take on the identity of an agent from the future and to find examples of green technology at five locations in the city. When located, players are to make an unscripted video-recorded ‘report’ about the technology. The recordings were transcribed and analyzed using multimodal conversation analysis (Mondada, 2014). The analysis focused on the co-construction of this oral report which, due to technical difficulties, was repeated three times. Analysis reveals emergent interactional dynamics for language learning that include 1) collaborative multi-turn units (Lerner, 1991) with synchronized shifts in gaze and bodily deixis, 2) performance of being a “with” (Goffman, 1971) around an iPhone, and, 3) the recombinatory reuse of words and constructions in the process of building a discourse object (their report). This empirical investigation has shown that progressively and collaboratively building a language learning task is dynamic without a pre-defined telos or trajectory for the talk-in-interaction. The grammar for the task is semi permeable in that it is assembled in increments of gesture, gaze, touch, and linguistic construction. The analysis highlights how the usage-based process of language learning is collaborative. We conclude by arguing that these highly cooperative multi-turn units co-occur with close physical proximity and provide evidence for expanding the individualist frame of embodied cognition toward ‘interbodied cognition’.
