Bilingual lexical interillumination in the foreign language classroom

Abstract

Foreign language (FL) education has been marked by a monolingual principle that has favoured ‘intralingual’ methodologies. Bakhtin's view of language interillumination – that languages throw light on each other – challenges such language teaching practices radically. Using conversation analysis methods, this article examines transcripts of interactional sequences from one eighth-grade French lesson for evidence of reciprocal lexical elucidation. Analysis suggests that participants accomplish interillumination by constructing frameworks of corresponding sets of French and Swedish lexical items which support interlingual exploration and participant (re)orientation to the words in relation to each other. Understanding foreign and familiar words is enhanced by bilingual countering which enables students to fit an unknown or unclear utterance meaningfully into their semantic networks. Patterns of interlingual contact and coordination, indeed bilingual interaction, serve sense-making processes and challenge the privileging or the subordination of any one language in language learning.