| This conversation analytic study, concerned with the communicative and interactional competence of non-native speakers, examines the discursive practices of novice-level language learners engaged in collaborative group project work in an English as a foreign language classroom. The core database consists of approximately six hours of videotaped group-work in which three students were engaged in a map-making project as part of an English class at a Japanese college. The video data were closely transcribed and analyzed. While empirical claims are based on the observable videotaped behavior of the participants, the analysis is informed by ethnographic data and observation.; An examination of the talk and embodied action (including gesture and eye-gaze) reveals several sequentially organized practices. Embodied completions involve the initiation of a turn-at-talk with a partial turn-unit that is left incomplete as talk and brought to pragmatic completion solely through the use of embodied action. Okay questions (e.g., "Is this okay?") are used to check with other group members on the acceptability of a completed, in-progress, or proposed project-related action. Within a collection of other-initiated repair sequences, repair practices following what?- or huh?-type initiations include repeats, gesturally-enhanced repeats, and reformulations of the trouble source turn. In collaborative writing episodes, negotiation practices were identified, including trying candidate draft language outloud, which is used to elicit judgments about proposed draft segments by saying them with a rising intonational contour.; These novice-level speakers, who at times struggle to communicate, nonetheless possess important interactional skills, including: (a) constructing and projecting the emerging structures of turns-at-talk in real time; (b) using normative practices of turn-taking and sequence organization, including preference organization; and (c) successfully using practices for other-initiated repair, even in cases where initial repair attempts fail. Findings with implications for language pedagogy include: (1) evidence that collaborative group projects involving the creation of material products provide a rich context for the practice of interactional skills and (2) the identification of speaking practices that allow language learners to negotiate language form without the explicit use of grammatical meta-language. |
