Plurilingual teamwork practices in an internationalised setting at a Catalan university

Abstract

This chapter explores the plurilingual interactive practices of teamwork at a Catalan university in an EMI setting. By using conversation analysis, the chapter examines how the participants, local and international students, organise sequentially their actions through multimodal and plurilingual resources. The participants, despite the asymmetries in their language competence in L2 (English), manage to successfully orient to the completion of the ongoing activity by deploying a set of tools that include ‘let it pass’ and ‘make it normal’ practices, as well as the development of all the semiotic resources at their disposal, including code-switching, gestures, artefacts, and bricolage. This interactive organisation, together with the mobilisation of the plurilingual resources available, seems to result in (1) increased participation regardless of initial categorisations of (non)expertise; (2) more ability to reach interactional order; and (3) greater focalisation in scientific content.