Search

In this study, we present and analyze co-constructions from L2 English data collected at the European School in Luxembourg. Co-constructions are morpho-syntactic structures split across two speakers, in which a second speaker completes a grammatical structure initiated by the first speaker in conversation. The corpus features multilingual 13-14 year old language learners interacting in an English classroom as they work on a collaborative group-writing task. Five types of co-constructions emerge in our data: "locative phrases," "want/let," "copulas," "transitives," and "nominal compounds." The analysis centers on the morpho-syntactic structures involved, with consideration of the sequential environment where co-constructions occur. The featured examples complement and expand what we know about co-constructions in two ways. First, the data suggest that L2 language learners engage in co-constructions just as native speakers (NS) do, irrespective of their L2 learner status. Second, L2 co-constructions, similar to previously reported NS examples, appear to orient to both a) the morpho-syntactic constraints of the language used, as well as to b) the social-interactional context surrounding and structuring the task-in-progress such as the back and forth of talk during a collaborative writing task.

This paper investigates the use of multilingual resources by plurilingual participants in two English language classrooms in Luxembourg. Using Conversation Analysis and drawing on transcriptions of video-recordings, we present three examples of student use of multilingual resources and their respective teacher next turn management (through modified repetition, monolingual reformulation and meta-talk about language). We show that the students' use of multilingual resources aligns with the ongoing interaction (pedagogical focus and classroom micro contexts), is significantly discourse-related and allows for doing emphasis and topic placement. We argue that our multimodal analysis brings critical insights into the study of multilingual resources in language classrooms, which has implications for the investigation of teaching and language learner/language user participation in instructed learning environments.

A correction to the article published in November 2012, Classroom Discourse issue is presented.