Tim Greer looks at how participants treat a linguistic item as "learnable" within the course of some broader activity, such as a cooking class.
Research on L2 interaction has investigated the local occasioning of learnables within naturally occurring talk (e.g., Eskildsen, 2019; Eskildsen & Majlesi, 2018; Majlesi, 2022). Such learning “in the wild” involves situated noticing of language within some broader activity, often drawing on resources from the material environment to address issues of intersubjectivity. Once an orientation to a learnable has been displayed, it is frequently re-occasioned in subsequent talk and may be flagged as “recently learned” on such occurrences.
During a data session on 22 October 2022, Tim Greer explored the notion of “marked re-occasionings” in a video of talk recorded at a cooking school in Okinawa, Japan. We first examined the initial occurrence of a phrase (“in charge of”) that the teacher ("Sid") used appeared and that was subsequently treated as learnable by the recipients (Noa and Ren). We considered its temporal placement and how various resources shaped the trajectory of the activity.
By embedding learnables within sedimented multimodal gestalts, Sid provides the learners with further opportunities to experience the target phrases used in a variety of ways. For example, he initially offered Ren a spoon as he said, "Would you like to be in charge?", and later adds a verb+gesture gestalt as he reformulated his request to make it clearer ("in charge of the stirring"), or shows an object while repeating the target phrase ("in charge of the wine").
Sid also prosodically decomposes his turns to highlight target language, which has repercussions for ensuing learner-initiated usages. By co-opting (Goodwin, 2018) the teacher’s turns to form new gestalts, the learners display their evolving understandings of the learnables and contribute to the progression of the activity.
We anticipate this analysis will contribute to recent CA investigations into how interactional and semiotic resources are used to construct (language) knowledge in L2 cooking-for-learning contexts (Kurhila & Kotilainen, 2020).
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