Tim Greer explores some of the ways that people treat a word as "learnable".
Learning language in the wild involves a diversification of linguistic resources and pragmatic repertoires while (and for) completing other non-language-oriented activities. In the case of cooking classes, for example, an instructor might pause his explanation of the sub-steps in a recipe if a recipient does not understand something that was said. This might instead lead to an explanation of a lexical item that is grounded in the cooking task.
In some of my recent work, I have been looking at a series of sequences in which L2 speakers of English in a cooking class treat the expression “(be) generous” as one such learnable (Eskildsen, 2018). They notice it and flag it as learnable (Greer, 2019), and the instructor initially delivers his explanation through talk and depictive gestures, but later also enlists environmentally available objects and student actions to serve as (non-)examples of the learnable’s definition.
In subsequent sequences where the learnable becomes relevant in related contexts, the instructor flags its delivery in a way that makes it noticeable to the learners and therefore amenable to further inspection. The learning of this phrase therefore involves an intricate interweaving of spoken, embodied and physical resources within an incrementally evolving interactional ecology.
Such re-occasionings can be thought of in terms of format-tying (Goodwin & Goodwin, 1987), recycling and cannibalization (Markee & Kunitiz, 2013) and interactional histories (Depperman, 2018). This sort of analysis contributes to recent micro-longitudinal conversation analytic inquiry into the jointly accomplished nature of lexical development within settings where language learning is not the primary focus.
References
Deppermann, A. (2018). Changes in turn-design over interactional histories–the case of instructions in driving school lessons. In P. Auer (Ed.), Time in embodied interaction: Synchronicity and sequentiality of multimodal resources, 293, 293-324.
Eskildsen, S. W. (2018). ‘We're learning a lot of new words’: Encountering new L2 vocabulary outside of class. The Modern Language Journal, 102, 46-63.
Greer, T. (2019). Noticing words in the wild. In J. Hellermann, S. Eskildsen, & S. Pekarek Doehler & A. Piirainen Marsh (Eds.). Conversation analytic research on learning-in-action: The complex ecology of L2 interaction in the wild (pp. 131-158). Springer.
Markee, N., & Kunitz, S. (2013). Doing planning and task performance in second language acquisition: An ethnomethodological respecification. Language Learning, 63(4), 629-664.
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