Expertise, language competencies and the L2 user.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the relationship between embodied experience in the world and language competence. Primary data consists of audio and video recorded team meetings among NS and NNS engineering students in an English-speaking American university and ethnographic fieldwork. Based a micro-interactional analysis of the primary data and a consideration of how this analysis is embedded within the macro-social context, findings demonstrate how the L2 user is locally constructed as legitimate and as expert relative to the L1 user in terms of engineering competence and language competence. In the end, these two engineers co-construct a unique way of engaging in engineering teamwork that follows from an acceptance of positionalities that allows opportunities for learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]