Rue Burch introduces the new dataset we have been collecting in a cooking school.
In parallel to our data collection at TGG (discussed in other squibs), we have also gathered recordings at Cookin Talk, a cooking school where lessons are taught in a language other than Japanese (often English, but also including Korean and French). The cooks who teach in English are often lingua franca users of English themselves, creating a site where most or all of the participants are non-L1 speakers using the language to work towards a goal that is not language focused.
From December 2021 until March 2022, we collected data at their (unfortunately now closed) studio in Kobe. Volunteer students from Kobe University joined the classes, choosing the chefs or dishes they were most interested in. During this time, we gathered approximately 16 hours’ worth of video-recorded data, which generally included “getting acquainted” talk at the beginning of the class, the process of cooking, and any small talk that took place as they ate the dishes they had prepared.
Cookin Talk also invited us to visit their studio in Naha, Okinawa in June 2022. There we gathered 8 more hours of data, from students and chefs. Unlike in Kobe, where the learners were all 1st year university students, the learners in Okinawa ranged in age and background, which luckily gave us a chance to see a different kind of interaction.
Currently, we are looking through this data for various phenomena, including:
· how demonstrations and instructions are given,
· points where the learners are able to take opportunities to speak beyond times that they are prompted to do so, and
· instances where a word or phrase (such as when the participants in the above image were asked to be “in charge of” certain tasks) are taken up by the learners.
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