How Learning Occurs in an Extensive Reading Book Club: A Conversation Analytic Perspective

Abstract

Extensive reading (ER) has been implemented in various second language (L2) teaching and learning contexts, and studies in the field have provided a wealth of empirical evidence that a large amount of L2 reading over an extended time improves students’ reading ability and benefits other areas of language learning (Nakanishi 2015; Jeon and Day 2016). However, despite the large amount of research on ER, there is still a lack of studies that show how or whether students accomplish learning during ER activities. To begin to fill this gap, this study applies a conversation analytic lens to investigate cases of local L2 learning and linguistic development during ER book club interactions. The analysis of the selected excerpts shows how the participants themselves shift the interactional focus from book talk to a lexical item during talk-in-interaction (i.e. orientation to learning), and how they deploy the learning object in subsequent speech events (i.e. short-term development). The analysis also shows how the participants orient to emergent learning objects from several different angles (e.g. pronunciation, meaning, spelling, and morphological form).