Bilingual and second language interactions: Views from Scandinavia

Abstract

Studies of social interaction are intimately concerned with the variety of ways in which people draw on language and other semiotic resources to produce and make sense of locally situated courses of action. Through this conduct, they inevitably 'produce and manage settings of organised everyday affairs' (Garfinkel, 1967), and so ultimately studies of social interaction can be seen as explorations of the 'settinged' (Sacks, 1992, Vol. 1, p. 516) nature of social life.This special issue hosts a collection of original studies of social interaction taking place in a variety of settings, spanning from preschool playgrounds through social work offices to police sta- tions. The disparity notwithstanding, one common feature immediately catches the eye: the inter- actions examined in the studies make relevant a number of issues typically glossed as 'multilingualism'. This may involve the use of several languages together or, alternatively, the use of a single language variety which constitutes a 'second'1 or 'foreign' language for at least one of the interlocutors. More importantly, the primary goal of the articles is not merely to highlight the multi-languageness, second languageness or other languageness of the interactions but to offer in- depth accounts of the social and inescapably contextualised nature of the participants' conduct.Over the years, academic excursions into the area of bilingualism have chiefly been routed -- or, one might argue, de-toured -- 'through the heads' of language users. In spite of the thoroughly observable practices of social life, where people go about their business using more than one lan- guage, researchers have routinely attended to their language use only insofar as this would allow them to comment on the mental structures and processes involved in knowing and using several languages. This is particularly the case in studies of persons communicating in a second language. Here, the focus is almost inevitably on the various mental strategies allegedly drawn upon by speakers to overcome all kinds of impositions which presumably arise with the sheer fact that one is not speaking their 'mother tongue' (cf. Kasper & Kellerman, 1997). Such a mentalistic position rests on the assumption that people's actions need to be understood firsthand by reference to the workings of the mind, particularly its language faculty and any spheres involved in storing, pro- cessing and otherwise operating linguistic information.This is not merely a chronicle record of the field. The mentalist stance remains something of a paradigm in contemporary bilingualism and second language research (e.g. Meisel, 2011), as it does more generally in mainstream social and behavioural sciences. Nonetheless, new, radically social approaches are today contributing to broaden the field, and doing so with increasing legiti- macy. Although academic change is a cumulative and collegial achievement, it is possible to iden- tify two landmark events in this development.The first one comprises Auer's (1984) approach to bilingual talk and language alternation in particular. Auer, who was also inspired by Gumperz' (1982) work on code-switching and contex- tualisation, was first to apply conversation analytic (CA) principles to the study of bilingual social interaction. His analysis of Italian immigrants' children in Germany demonstrates in considerable detail how language alternation serves as a means for interlocutors to organise their interaction in particular ways, for instance, when reconfiguring participation frameworks, managing discourse cohesion or organising subordinated sequences. Thus, by locating the study of bilingual talk within a framework of sequential analysis, Auer's work offered a unique account of members' own pro- cedures for organising their conduct by drawing on the local availability of multiple languages.This procedural approach to bilingualism has its roots in an ethnomethodological view of lan- guage and its role in social conduct. …