Scandinavian bilingual and L2 interaction: A view from afar

Abstract

Who better to write a concluding commentary on a collection of Scandinavian studies than an Australian living in Japan? While I was honored to be asked, my immediate reaction was, What do I know about Scandinavia? My entire experience with the region to date consists of a week in Sweden and a 2-h stopover in Copenhagen. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that an outsider could perhaps offer a broadening perspective on the question of how Scandinavian bilingual and second-language users interact; after all, sometimes, you have to stand back in order to get a better view. My own research is based on Japanese bilingual speakers and learners of English, but on reading the articles in this collection, I realized that there is a lot more in common with my situation than I first thought. While this is a collection of articles based in Finnish, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian contexts, the microcontext of bilingual interaction has plenty of implications for other pairs and for second speakers all over the world.The authors make use of conversation analysis (CA)-an approach that began with the work of Sacks in the United States in the 1960s.1 Although the vast majority of CA research today has been carried out among L1 speakers of English, recent years have seen considerable advances in CA studies in non-English contexts, many of which have been made by Scandinavian researchers (e.g. Cromdal, 2003; Kangasharju, 1996; Kurhila, 2006; Lindstrom, 1994; Steensig, 2000). CA has its roots in sociology, so rather than focusing on per se, it is first and foremost interested in how people accomplish a variety of actions by and through talk. Some of the actions highlighted in the current collection, for example, include reformulations (Svennevig), receipts (Foegtmann), clarifications (Osvaldsson et al.), explanations (Slotte-Luttge et al.), and disagreements (Cekaite and Bjork-Willen).CA's radically emic approach enables analysts to observe talk from the perspective of speakers themselves. Central to the analysis is a holistic, bottom-up approach to looking at naturally occurring interaction, allowing the analyst to document a variety of practices that participants use to achieve intersubjectivity, or mutual understanding, including such features as the organization of sequence, turn-taking, repair, and preference.The CA approach has been used to examine bilingual interaction for over 25 years now, beginning with Peter Auer's groundbreaking work on code-switching (Auer, 1984). This generated a variety of CA investigations into other pairs, including those by Li Wei (1994), Alfonzetti (1998), Sebba and Wooffitt (1998), Bailey (2000, 2002), Torras (2005), Cashman (2005), Cromdal (2001, 2004), and Gafaranga (1999, 2000, 2001, 2005, 2007). Generally speaking, these authors have been interested in the way that alternation can be used to achieve various socio-interactional functions and the part it plays in the discursive display of identity. Justifying their findings through the next-turn proof procedure, CA studies of bilingual interaction have focused on real-time participant displays of understanding, which led Gafaranga and Torras (2002) to respecify code-switching as interactional otherness, suspending the notion of language until a point in the talk when the participants themselves orient to their languages.Applied linguists, on the other hand, have only relatively recently begun to recognize the potential of the CA approach for analyzing second-language talk. Two Denmark-based researchers, Firth and Wagner (1997), called for a reconceptualization of second-language learning-one that dedicates itself to the sociointeractional rather than the cognitive. This article was met with considerable debate, but it has also led to a renewed interest in the use of CA as a methodological approach for documenting second-language learner talk, including a variety of edited collections and special issues (Gardner & Wagner, 2004; Hua, Seedhouse, Wei, & Cook, 2007; Markee & Kasper, 2004; Richards & Seedhouse, 2005) and a recent special issue of The Modern Language Journal that looks at the effect of Firth and Wagners' call 10 years on (Wagner & Firth, 2007). …