This study draws on multimodal conversation analysis to emically account for moments in second la... more This study draws on multimodal conversation analysis to emically account for moments in second language (L2) English interaction in which speakers appear to be visualizing text as they talk. One way they do this is by slotting out elements of a turn‐in‐progress in the air, shifting their hand in a slotting gesture from left to right as they say each word to display to their recipient that they are visualizing certain elements of the turn. In other cases, participants use their fingers to ‘write’ elements of the turn‐in‐progress on their palms or in the air. The embodied practices of visualizing a turn component by component as it is formulated therefore make public the temporality of its in situ grammatical production. These multimodally accomplished visualizations also provide the speaker with access to a recalled text that helps them produce the spoken equivalent. The study suggests that English‐as‐a‐foreign language (EFL) learners may therefore support their spoken interaction by...
Proceedings of the 4th Annual CAN Asia Symposium on L2 Talk, 2021
Some EFL students possess a remarkable ability to interact, despite their limited access to Engli... more Some EFL students possess a remarkable ability to interact, despite their limited access to English grammar and vocabulary. This paper will document the way one such novice English user is able to participate in conversation by expertly deploying syntactically simple turns in combination with embodied interaction. One of the usages he relies on to accomplish a broad range of sequentially situated actions is [so + loanword + gesture]. The study provides evidence to suggest that meaning-making is not reliant on access to language alone, and perhaps not even primarily, and that language learners should therefore be assessed not only on their linguistic proficiency, but also on interactional competence and engagement. The data are taken from a corpus of Japanese learners of English in a discussion test setting.
Journal of School of Languages and Communication, Kobe University, 2020
This study documents the piloting of a video-recorded exemplar-based rubric in relation to the co... more This study documents the piloting of a video-recorded exemplar-based rubric in relation to the construct of engagement within EFL education. The data consist of 73 video recordings of paired discussion tests between Japanese students in a first-year university EFL program, as well as recorded conversations between teacher-raters viewing those tests. The rubric highlights specific interactional practices that point to engagement within the test setting and demonstrates how incorporating conversation analytic (CA)-style observations can facilitate an emically grounded assessment. The deeply descriptive rubric draws on segments of exemplar video-recordings to account for how test-takers incorporate such resources into their talk. The study also conducts a qualitative content analysis of an inter-rater hermeneutic dialogue to consider the extent to which non-CA-specialist raters are able to use these exemplars to operationalize and assess the concept of engagement.
Study abroad homestays are generally assumed to provide visitors with opportunities to learn lang... more Study abroad homestays are generally assumed to provide visitors with opportunities to learn language ‘in the wild’ by participating in the host family’s everyday life. Ultimately such participation is accomplished via individual episodes of interaction as the visitor is socialized into the family’s mundane routines and rituals. Building on research into second language interaction in the lifeworlds of learners beyond the classroom, this study considers (1) how interactants in one homestay context draw on a range of ecologically available resources to co-accomplish participation and membership, and (2) how such participation affords the guest with an expanding repertoire of resources, including linguistic elements and new participatory practices. The study uses multimodal conversation analysis (CA) to discuss two extended extracts from naturally occurring interaction collected between a novice L2 English speaker and his homestay family. The analysis suggests that language learning i...
Study abroad homestays are generally assumed to provide visitors with opportunities to learn lang... more Study abroad homestays are generally assumed to provide visitors with opportunities to learn language 'in the wild' by participating in the host family's everyday life. Ultimately such participation is accomplished via individual episodes of interaction as the visitor is socialized into the family's mundane routines and rituals. Building on research into second language interaction in the lifeworlds of learners beyond the classroom, this study considers (1) how interactants in one homestay context draw on a range of ecologically available resources to co-accomplish participation and membership, and (2) how such participation affords the guest with an expanding repertoire of resources, including linguistic elements and new participatory practices. The study uses multimodal conversation analysis (CA) to discuss two extended extracts from naturally occurring interaction collected between a novice L2 English speaker and his homestay family. The analysis suggests that language learning is more complex than the mere provision of linguistic input: new lexical items and practices emerge within the interactants' respective lifeworlds in relation to locally situated contingencies, and can be occasioned and explained via recourse to a range of material and embodied affordances beyond just language. Input, therefore, is sequentially and ecologically located in the broader business of an ongoing collective sociality and primarily serves the two key interactional imperatives of progressivity and intersubjectivity.
Social Interaction. Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality, 2022
This study explores the multimodal action formation of second language (L2) apologies, particular... more This study explores the multimodal action formation of second language (L2) apologies, particularly in relation to the members’ orientation to the significance of the misdemeanour. Although talk is the primary means through which participants accomplish apologies, embodied and paralinguistic interaction also play an integral role in conveying the proportional intensity of the apology. Members may bolster a second language apology with gestures from their first language, such as the Japanese gassho gesture. The study draws on conversation analytic research on L2 use as situated within a complex ecology of multimodal social interaction to reflect on the notions of interactional competence and interactional repertoires. The sequences were video-recorded among Japanese homestay visitors and their American host families.
Second Language Pragmatics and English Language Education in East Asia, 2020
General and explicit test prompts 195 test-takers orient to the test prompt in order to further t... more General and explicit test prompts 195 test-takers orient to the test prompt in order to further the topic they have been asked to discuss. Previous research into test prompts and topic management in EFL discussion tests Considering that tests of oral proficiency aim to assess unscripted interaction, it is not surprising that researchers pay careful consideration to the talk that is generated in such settings, particularly with regard to what we know about related issues in ordinary L1 talk. In order to provide a basis for our investigation, this section will explore some of the key research findings within conversation analysis and EFL testing, including topic management, the test format and the test prompt as an affordance for interactional progressivity. 1 CA research into topic management is integrally linked to the organisation of talk, including turn design and allocation, action formation, sequential practices and the mechanics of repair (Sidnell & Stivers, 2013). Analysis of naturally occurring talk between L1 speakers has revealed that topics can be generated through the use of topic initial elicitors like "So, what's been happening?" (Button & Casey, 1984), or are nominated and pursued via itemised news enquiries or news announcements (Button & Casey, 1985). Alternatively, topics can gradually transition in a stepwise fashion (Jefferson, 1984) through the connection of the current topic to a new one. When a current topic reaches a natural conclusion, its attrition can be marked by assessments and terminal laughter, and therefore necessitate a shift to a new topic (Jefferson, 1993). A news-of-the-day telling can be initiated to begin a conversation where none currently exists, via a question such as "How was your day?" (Greer, 2019), and these can be seen as similar to the sorts of prompts tasks commonly used in EFL discussion tests to elicit interaction from test-takers. Although similar practices for maintaining and shifting the topic are undoubtedly at work in interview-style oral proficiency tests, interview tests also feature asymmetrical topic management rights (
Although identity has become a key topic in second language research, it is a problematic notion ... more Although identity has become a key topic in second language research, it is a problematic notion to research when considered to exist only in the individual’s head. By operationalizing identity as the social display of self in relation to others, discourse analytic approaches such as Conversation Analysis (CA) and Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) instead locate identity in interaction. hus, this makes identity observable through the sequential details of talk. his paper (1) introduces the CA/MCA approach to identity as a social accomplishment and then (2) applies it to identity ascriptions in a study abroad context and an online English-speaking practice chat room. he analysis initially focuses on the role of epistemics and how discursive displays of knowledge help accomplish identity. It then goes on to demonstrate some of the ways that participants use identity categories as an interactional resource.
This study draws on multimodal conversation analysis to emically account for moments in second la... more This study draws on multimodal conversation analysis to emically account for moments in second language (L2) English interaction in which speakers appear to be visualizing text as they talk. One way they do this is by slotting out elements of a turn‐in‐progress in the air, shifting their hand in a slotting gesture from left to right as they say each word to display to their recipient that they are visualizing certain elements of the turn. In other cases, participants use their fingers to ‘write’ elements of the turn‐in‐progress on their palms or in the air. The embodied practices of visualizing a turn component by component as it is formulated therefore make public the temporality of its in situ grammatical production. These multimodally accomplished visualizations also provide the speaker with access to a recalled text that helps them produce the spoken equivalent. The study suggests that English‐as‐a‐foreign language (EFL) learners may therefore support their spoken interaction by...
Proceedings of the 4th Annual CAN Asia Symposium on L2 Talk, 2021
Some EFL students possess a remarkable ability to interact, despite their limited access to Engli... more Some EFL students possess a remarkable ability to interact, despite their limited access to English grammar and vocabulary. This paper will document the way one such novice English user is able to participate in conversation by expertly deploying syntactically simple turns in combination with embodied interaction. One of the usages he relies on to accomplish a broad range of sequentially situated actions is [so + loanword + gesture]. The study provides evidence to suggest that meaning-making is not reliant on access to language alone, and perhaps not even primarily, and that language learners should therefore be assessed not only on their linguistic proficiency, but also on interactional competence and engagement. The data are taken from a corpus of Japanese learners of English in a discussion test setting.
Journal of School of Languages and Communication, Kobe University, 2020
This study documents the piloting of a video-recorded exemplar-based rubric in relation to the co... more This study documents the piloting of a video-recorded exemplar-based rubric in relation to the construct of engagement within EFL education. The data consist of 73 video recordings of paired discussion tests between Japanese students in a first-year university EFL program, as well as recorded conversations between teacher-raters viewing those tests. The rubric highlights specific interactional practices that point to engagement within the test setting and demonstrates how incorporating conversation analytic (CA)-style observations can facilitate an emically grounded assessment. The deeply descriptive rubric draws on segments of exemplar video-recordings to account for how test-takers incorporate such resources into their talk. The study also conducts a qualitative content analysis of an inter-rater hermeneutic dialogue to consider the extent to which non-CA-specialist raters are able to use these exemplars to operationalize and assess the concept of engagement.
Study abroad homestays are generally assumed to provide visitors with opportunities to learn lang... more Study abroad homestays are generally assumed to provide visitors with opportunities to learn language ‘in the wild’ by participating in the host family’s everyday life. Ultimately such participation is accomplished via individual episodes of interaction as the visitor is socialized into the family’s mundane routines and rituals. Building on research into second language interaction in the lifeworlds of learners beyond the classroom, this study considers (1) how interactants in one homestay context draw on a range of ecologically available resources to co-accomplish participation and membership, and (2) how such participation affords the guest with an expanding repertoire of resources, including linguistic elements and new participatory practices. The study uses multimodal conversation analysis (CA) to discuss two extended extracts from naturally occurring interaction collected between a novice L2 English speaker and his homestay family. The analysis suggests that language learning i...
Study abroad homestays are generally assumed to provide visitors with opportunities to learn lang... more Study abroad homestays are generally assumed to provide visitors with opportunities to learn language 'in the wild' by participating in the host family's everyday life. Ultimately such participation is accomplished via individual episodes of interaction as the visitor is socialized into the family's mundane routines and rituals. Building on research into second language interaction in the lifeworlds of learners beyond the classroom, this study considers (1) how interactants in one homestay context draw on a range of ecologically available resources to co-accomplish participation and membership, and (2) how such participation affords the guest with an expanding repertoire of resources, including linguistic elements and new participatory practices. The study uses multimodal conversation analysis (CA) to discuss two extended extracts from naturally occurring interaction collected between a novice L2 English speaker and his homestay family. The analysis suggests that language learning is more complex than the mere provision of linguistic input: new lexical items and practices emerge within the interactants' respective lifeworlds in relation to locally situated contingencies, and can be occasioned and explained via recourse to a range of material and embodied affordances beyond just language. Input, therefore, is sequentially and ecologically located in the broader business of an ongoing collective sociality and primarily serves the two key interactional imperatives of progressivity and intersubjectivity.
Social Interaction. Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality, 2022
This study explores the multimodal action formation of second language (L2) apologies, particular... more This study explores the multimodal action formation of second language (L2) apologies, particularly in relation to the members’ orientation to the significance of the misdemeanour. Although talk is the primary means through which participants accomplish apologies, embodied and paralinguistic interaction also play an integral role in conveying the proportional intensity of the apology. Members may bolster a second language apology with gestures from their first language, such as the Japanese gassho gesture. The study draws on conversation analytic research on L2 use as situated within a complex ecology of multimodal social interaction to reflect on the notions of interactional competence and interactional repertoires. The sequences were video-recorded among Japanese homestay visitors and their American host families.
Second Language Pragmatics and English Language Education in East Asia, 2020
General and explicit test prompts 195 test-takers orient to the test prompt in order to further t... more General and explicit test prompts 195 test-takers orient to the test prompt in order to further the topic they have been asked to discuss. Previous research into test prompts and topic management in EFL discussion tests Considering that tests of oral proficiency aim to assess unscripted interaction, it is not surprising that researchers pay careful consideration to the talk that is generated in such settings, particularly with regard to what we know about related issues in ordinary L1 talk. In order to provide a basis for our investigation, this section will explore some of the key research findings within conversation analysis and EFL testing, including topic management, the test format and the test prompt as an affordance for interactional progressivity. 1 CA research into topic management is integrally linked to the organisation of talk, including turn design and allocation, action formation, sequential practices and the mechanics of repair (Sidnell & Stivers, 2013). Analysis of naturally occurring talk between L1 speakers has revealed that topics can be generated through the use of topic initial elicitors like "So, what's been happening?" (Button & Casey, 1984), or are nominated and pursued via itemised news enquiries or news announcements (Button & Casey, 1985). Alternatively, topics can gradually transition in a stepwise fashion (Jefferson, 1984) through the connection of the current topic to a new one. When a current topic reaches a natural conclusion, its attrition can be marked by assessments and terminal laughter, and therefore necessitate a shift to a new topic (Jefferson, 1993). A news-of-the-day telling can be initiated to begin a conversation where none currently exists, via a question such as "How was your day?" (Greer, 2019), and these can be seen as similar to the sorts of prompts tasks commonly used in EFL discussion tests to elicit interaction from test-takers. Although similar practices for maintaining and shifting the topic are undoubtedly at work in interview-style oral proficiency tests, interview tests also feature asymmetrical topic management rights (
Although identity has become a key topic in second language research, it is a problematic notion ... more Although identity has become a key topic in second language research, it is a problematic notion to research when considered to exist only in the individual’s head. By operationalizing identity as the social display of self in relation to others, discourse analytic approaches such as Conversation Analysis (CA) and Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) instead locate identity in interaction. hus, this makes identity observable through the sequential details of talk. his paper (1) introduces the CA/MCA approach to identity as a social accomplishment and then (2) applies it to identity ascriptions in a study abroad context and an online English-speaking practice chat room. he analysis initially focuses on the role of epistemics and how discursive displays of knowledge help accomplish identity. It then goes on to demonstrate some of the ways that participants use identity categories as an interactional resource.
Uploads
Papers by Tim Greer