Volume 33 Issue 1 February 2012

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Legitimate Talk in Feedback Conferences

FIONA COPLAND
You Know Arnold Schwarzenegger? On Doing Questioning in Second Language Dyadic
Tutorials
HASSAN BELHIAH
Proficiency and Sequential Organization of L2 Requests
SAAD AL-GAHTANI, CARSTEN ROEVER
Sentence Reading and Writing for Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition
FRANCOIS PICHETTE, LINDA DE SERRES AND MARC LAFONTAINE
FORUMS
Reconceptualizing Strategic Learning in the Face of Self-Regulation: Throwing Language
Learning Strategies out with the Bathwater
HEATH ROSE
REVIEWS
Tara W. Fortune and Diane J. Tedick (eds): Pathways to Multilingualism: Evolving
Perspectives on Immersion Education
DAVID LASAGABASTER
Namhee Lee, Lisa Mikesell, Anna Dina L. Joacquin, Andrea W. Mates, and John H.
Schumann: The Interactional Instinct: The Evolution and Acquisition of Language
SALIKOKO S. MUFWENE
Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow (eds): Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image,
Space
MARK GOTTDIENER
Notes on Contributors
Volume 33 Number 1 February 2012
Adaptation and Validation of Self-regulating Capacity in Vocabulary Learning Scale

ATSUSHI MIZUMOTO AND OSAMU TAKEUCHI
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NOTES TO CONTRIBUTORS
Ken Hyland, Director, Centre for Applied English Studies, KK Leung Building,
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Jane Zuengler, Nancy C. Hoefs Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison,
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APPLIED LINGUISTICS
Articles
FIONA COPLAND
You Know Arnold Schwarzenegger? On Doing Questioning in Second
Language Dyadic Tutorials
HASSAN BELHIAH
21

SAAD AL-GAHTANI and CARSTEN ROEVER
Sentence Reading and Writing for Second Language Vocabulary
Acquisition
FRANCOIS PICHETTE, LINDA DE SERRES and MARC LAFONTAINE
66
FORUMS
Adaptation and Validation of Self-regulating Capacity in Vocabulary
Learning Scale
ATSUSHI MIZUMOTO and OSAMU TAKEUCHI
83
Reconceptualizing Strategic Learning in the Face of Self-Regulation:

Throwing Language Learning Strategies out with the Bathwater
HEATH ROSE
92
REVIEWS
Tara W. Fortune and Diane J. Tedick (eds): Pathways to
Multilingualism: Evolving Perspectives on Immersion Education
DAVID LASAGABASTER
99
42
Namhee Lee, Lisa Mikesell, Anna Dina L. Joacquin, Andrea W. Mates,

and John H. Schumann: The Interactional Instinct: The Evolution and
Acquisition of Language
SALIKOKO S. MUFWENE
Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow (eds): Semiotic Landscapes:
Language, Image, Space
MARK GOTTDIENER
102
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
112
107
Applied Linguistics 2012: 33/1: 120

Oxford University Press 2011
doi:10.1093/applin/amr040 Advance Access published on 3 November 2011

FIONA COPLAND
Aston University, UK
E-mail: f.m.copland@aston.ac.uk
Feedback on performance is a feature of much professional training. Trainee

doctors, nurses and solicitors, among others, all receive critical comment on
their performances by more experienced, and sometimes qualified, trainers/
mentors. Feedback, however, is particularly prevalent in education, where all
teachers in the UK context, from primary school teachers to university lecturers, can now expect to have their lessons observed and to receive critical
comment on them.
In many educational contexts, feedback on practice is part of the teaching
practicum. In the practicum, teachers in training (from here on called trainees) can expect to be observed by a mentor (usually from the school in which
the practicum is taking place) or by a tutor (usually from the institution
awarding the teaching qualification). Trainees usually receive feedback on
their practice in two ways: through a written report and in a post-observation
conference with the mentor or tutor observer (from here on called trainer).
While the written report will often be made public to some extent, perhaps in
the trainees portfolio of work, or as part of standardization meetings amongst
mentors and trainers, the conference is largely hidden from view in a similar
way to health visitor/client talk (Heritage and Sefi 1992: 362).
Unlike classroom practice, which has come under the microscope in recent
years, there has been less interest in either the organization or the discourse
Downloaded from http://applij.oxfordjournals.org/ at Izmir Ekonomi University on February 28, 2012
Feedback on performance is a feature of professional training. Much feedback is

delivered in post-observation conferences where a trainer will discuss the
trainees performance with him/her. What transpires in these conferences,
however, is hidden from view (Heritage and Sefi 1992: 362) and the norms
of interaction are largely unexamined in the literature. Even less is known about
feedback conducted in groups, yet many teachers training to teach English experience feedback in this way. This article provides a discourse analysis of four
extracts from group feedback conferences on a pre-service programme for teachers of English language. Drawing on the concept of legitimate talk, the analysis
shows how topics and speaking rights are established and negotiated and how
participants orientate to and contest both the forms of knowledge that emerge
and the speaking rights. While the study was not initially designed to support
trainers in their professional development, the argument is made that data from
linguistic ethnographic studies can be used by research participants and others
for these purposes, thus enhancing the relationship between the researcher and
the researched.
2 LEGITIMATE TALK IN FEEDBACK CONFERENCES
DATA AND APPROACH

The data on which the article is based are drawn from 14 hours of audio
recorded feedback conferences from two 20-day CELTA programmes: one a
practices of the post-observation feedback conference. Qualitative research by

researchers such as Waite (1992, 1995), Farr (2006), and Hyland and Lo
(2006) buck this trend to some extent, as does the more quantitative work
by Dow et al. (2009). Nevertheless, empirical research remains scarce (Vasquez
2004; Vasquez and Reppen 2007) and the research that does exist tends to be
based in the USA (Bailey 2006). What is more, the research that exists tends to
be in the area of dyadic feedback (one mentor/tutor to one trainee teacher)
rather than in the area of multiparty feedback (one tutor and a number of
trainees). Yet the latter is the norm on many of the English language teacher
training certificate programmes, which are taken by approximately 7,000
people each year (Brandt 2006). In other words, the research does not reflect
the experiences of a large number of English (as a foreign or second language)
trainees and trainers.
In contrast, this article reports on the discourse practices in feedback conferences in a multiparty setting. Specifically, it presents an analysis of feedback
conferences recorded during two pre-service English language teacher training
programmes. The coursethe Certificate in English Language Teaching to
Adults (CELTA)is a well-known and mostly well-regarded (Brandt 2006)
initial training programme endorsed by Cambridge ESOL. It is the baseline
qualification for those wishing to teach English to adults in private language
schools in the UK, or in a range of institutions abroad. It is a mostly practical,
professional course of about 120 hours, which provides trainees with a toolkit
of strategies for teaching English to adult learners as well as the opportunity for
trainees to develop their own knowledge and understanding of the technicalities of the English language. Trainees undertake a teaching practicum of six
hours, all of which is observed, discussed in feedback conferences, and assessed. It is a pass/fail course.
This article aims to uncover the discourse practices that are legitimised in the
feedback conference. It will do so in two ways: first by showing the areas of
English language teaching methodology that trainers and trainees discuss and
which trainers in particular evaluate as important to the profession. Second, it
will show how the discourse practices of the trainers and trainees enable particular voices to be heard and others silenced. The concept of legitimate talk
will be introduced in order to explain how topics and speaking rights are established and negotiated and to show the ways in which participants
both orientate to and contest topics, epistemic knowledge, and speaking
rights. Finally the article will suggest that the relationships between researcher and researched could be enhanced by the researcher making data
available to trainers who could access it for their own professional development purposes.
F. COPLAND
Ethnography can be seen as humanising language study, preventing linguistics from being reductive or shallow by embedding it in
rich descriptions of how the users of a given variety adapt their
language to different situational purposes and contexts (Rampton
2007: 10).
Writing from a linguistic ethnographic perspective can be a challenge: what
data should be foregrounded and how should the analysis be made explicit? In
this article, in order to develop the concept of legitimate talk, four extracts of
feedback talk are subjected to a close microanalysis. Following each analysis is
a discussion section in which the concept of legitimate talk is elaborated, with
field notes and interview extracts embedding the linguistic analysis and the
discussion in descriptions of context of use. This emphasis means that the
linguistic data become the primary unit of analysis with fieldnotes and interviews playing a supporting role. This balance is not ideal, but neither is it
unusual in linguistic ethnographic studies, where a space restrictions and epistemological leanings will lead researchers to emphasise one data set over
10-week semi-intensive programme (twice a week), the other a four-week

intensive programme (week days). Interview data from interviews with the
supervisors (before and after the courses) and trainees (in groups, after the
courses) are also included. The researcher, who observed all feedback, also
made field notes.
Four trainers and nine trainees took part in the research. All trainers had
taught English to speakers of other languages for many years, both in the UK
and abroad, and had the professional teaching qualifications, CELTA and
Diploma in English Language Teaching to Adults (DELTA). In addition, three
of the trainers had Masters qualifications in either Applied Linguistics or
Education. All trainers had at least two years training experience and had
undergone a period of training for this role.
Most of the trainees had no teaching experience at all. However, one trainee
had a BA in Education and two others had taught English abroad for up to a
year. Eight of the nine trainees had degrees and the ninth had level three
qualifications (A levels). In order to be accepted on to the CELTA programme,
trainees had undergone a fairly rigorous selection process comprising a language awareness task, pair and group discussions, and one-to-one interviews
with the trainers.
The study was situated within linguistic ethnography, an emerging discipline
in sociolinguistic research which brings together linguistic and ethnographic
tools of data collection and analysis (Rampton 2007; Creese 2008). Situated
within the new intellectual climate of later modernity and post-structuralism
(Creese 2008: 1), Rampton et al. (2004: 4) characterizes the relationship between linguistics and ethnography as tying ethnography down and opening
linguistics up so that the value of discourse analysis in ethnography is foregrounded (Creese 2008: 1). In this way:
another [see the status of data sets in work by Creese (2003) and Rampton
(2006)].
Drawing on three data sources also goes some way to ensuring triangulation that is the employment of multiple methods in the analysis of the same
empirical events (Denzin 1989: 13). While triangulation does not guarantee validity, through enabling interactionally grounded interpretations
(Denzin 1989: 246) it can be argued that it promotes rigour in both analysis
and findings.
The post-observation feedback conference can follow a number of models,

depending on the purpose of the feedback. Gebhard (1990) lists six of these,
ranging from a directive model, where the supervisors role is to evaluate the
teachers mastery of defined behaviour (Gebhard 1990: 156) to a self-help
explorative model in which teachers carry out peer observation in order to
explore teaching . . . to gain an awareness of teaching behaviours . . . and to
generate alternative ways to teach (Gebhard 1990: 163). On training programmes in which teaching practice is assessed, the supervisor must fulfil a
number of roles simultaneously, from offering support and advice, to formally
assessing the quality of the teachers work (Farr 2006).
In the feedback conference reported here, feedback took place 30 minutes
after the observation and lasted for about an hour. Trainers offered support and
advice about teaching as well as acting as gatekeepers (Erickson and Schultz
1982) to the English language teaching profession, through assessing the
teaching as pass, borderline or fail. Trainees were expected to comment on
their own lessons and on those of their peers (Copland 2010) in order to develop their ability to teach and to reflect.
LEGITIMATE TALK
The concept of legitimate talk as discussed in this article has emerged
from close and repeated examination of the data. Legitimacy as a theoretical
construct, however, is not new. Drawing on Bourdieu (1977), Lave
and Wenger (1991), for example, describe legitimate peripheral participation
as being the process of learning through sharing in a community of practice
while Chun (2004: 263) uses ideologies of legitimacy to uncover how Asians
can simultaneously uphold and subvert racial stereotypes through mocking
Asian accents. For Heller (1996), legitimate language describes the linguistic
forms deemed appropriate in a French immersion school in Canada. In all
cases, legitimacy refers to the acceptability of practices within particular
contexts.
THE FEEDBACK CONFERENCE: AN OVERVIEW
F. COPLAND
Here, legitimate talk also refers to acceptability of practices within a particular context. In this case, the context is the feedback conference as described
above, while the practices refer to the topics discussed and the turn-taking
rights of the participants. To be more precise, drawing on Heller (1996), legitimate talk is defined as:
In other words in this data, legitimate talk is both process (by whom; to
whom; in what way) and content (what can be discussed and what knowledge
counts).
In the following sections, I will show through an analysis of their discussions
how participants in feedback conferences create and contest legitimate talk.
Four extracts will be analysed. The first two show how the trainers take control
in feedback, establishing, and creating legitimate talk in the feedback conference. These two extracts are typical in that, in the data I collected, there are
many other instances of talk where trainers and trainees behave in similar
ways. They are, then, telling examples (Silverman 2001: 34). The third and
fourth extracts are unusual, in that they show how trainees contest legitimate
talk. Such instances in my data are much less common. However, it is when
contestations arise that the the rules that are, in fact, defined by one group
and which are seen as natural, normal, universal and objective and in everyones interests to accept (Heller and Martin-Jones 2001: 6) are shown to be
anything but neutral
DATA ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION

Extract 1aims talk
The following extract occurred about half-way through the semi-intensive
programme. Five people were taking part in the feedback conference (the
trainer and four trainees) and I observed. One of the trainees has just spent
some time discussing what she had found successful and less successful in her
(1) spoken by a legitimate speaker (that is, a person who is allowed to take
part in the feedback conference and has speaking rights. Trainers and
trainees have different speaking rights but, an external examiner, for
example, may not have speaking rights);
(2) under specific social conditions (that is, the feedback conference, which
is time-bound);
(3) addressed to other legitimate speakers (these are, the other participants
in the feedback conference, who may also be hearers);
(4) about particular topics (that is, on to the pedagogy of English language
teaching, with a particular emphasis on what is commonly referred to as
communicative language teaching); and
(5) where particular knowledge (about English language teaching) is
privileged.
own lesson. The talk then turned to a consideration of the trainees aims for
the lesson, instigated by the trainer:
Trainer:
Trainee:
Trainer:
Trainee:
Trainer:
Trainer:
but lets think about your overall ai:ms for the lesson cos I mean I
know however people sort of hear the =
= mhm =
= word aims and shudder but I mean thats the starting point its
what I want my learners to achieve what I want them to get better
at what I want them to take away from the lesson so what were
you hoping that your learners would get better at?
Just like I was hoping that they would sort of be able to get
together and plan a role play together () and use ((inaudible))
[
is being able to pl ((quickly)) sorry to
interrupt is being able to plan a ((slowly)) ro:le play () an
appropriate aim for a language lesson?
(..) mmm (. . ..) no
Extract 1: analysis
In this extract, it is the trainer who introduces the aims topic (line 1). She
acknowledges that it is not a popular subject for discussion (line 4) and she
makes explicit what she means by the term aims in a three-part description
(lines 57). She then uses a phrase from her own explanation to pose a question to the trainee (so what were you hoping that your learners would get
better at?).
The trainee then takes up her turn at this transition relevance place (Sacks
et al. 1974), and explains that she wanted the students to get together and be
able to plan a role play (lines 8 and 9). However, she is not allowed to finish
her explanation as the trainer firmly and successfully interrupts (line 11) to
challenge the legitimacy of the aim (planning a role play) to a lesson which
should be designed to improve language skills (lines 1113). The other trainees
do not contribute to the talk.
The trainers interruption accomplishes a number of interactional jobs. First,
it signals the strength and urgency of the trainers feelings regarding the legitimacy of role-play-as-aim: had she waited till the end of the trainees turn to
voice her disagreement, these feelings would have had less force (Greatbatch
1992).
Second, the interruption contains an apology. Given the institutional nature
of the feedback conference, in which asymmetrical speaking rights exist, an
apology by the trainer is not needed. So why does she apologise? It could be
that the trainer is making a concession to the trainees negative face: interrupting is a face threatening act (Brown and Levinson 1987) and the strength
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
F. COPLAND
Extract 1: discussion
Legitimate talk is both present in and generated by this short extract. The
extract clearly demonstrates the first three tenets of legitimate talk: the trainer
and the selected trainee have a right to be taking part in the discussion; the
particular social conditions of the feedback conference are in place, an informal
discussion around a table; and the other trainees are positioned as legitimate
of the face threat will be greater because of the presence of other trainees in
the feedback conference (Holmes et al. 1999: 369, also report on apologies used
by powerful interlocutors to soften the directness of requests to subordinates, a
negative politeness strategy).
The final point I wish to make about this interruption concerns its effect.
Although the trainers turn is formed as a question it is nonetheless a criticism,
albeit indirect. The emphasis on the term ro:le play supports this interpretation. It is appropriated from the trainees turn (line 9) and pronounced with
an elongated vowel and slowly, thus marking it out as the important unit of
meaning in the question. There is no neutrality here, particularly when compared with the stress pattern which would pertain if the question were a
genuine request for information. What is more, the question, which juxtaposes
the positive adjective (appropriate) with the trainees admission that she
wanted students to do a role play in a closed question, invites a negative response as the preferred second. The trainers pronunciation of the term together with the wording of the closed question, alerts listeners to the fact that
it is the role-play-as-aim that is problematic: it is not appropriate for a language
lesson.
The trainers turn is both an indirect criticism and a closed question, and
these factors have implications for the trainees response. First of all, questions
require answers (Hutchby and Wooffitt 1998), and closed questions often require yes or no answers. Secondly, the trainees understanding of what
constitutes an appropriate aim in a language lesson has been challenged and
a response must be given to this challenge. Thirdly, the trainee must pay attention to the trainers face needs. The trainer has the power to pass or fail the
trainees lesson and to influence whether she passes the course. Disagreeing
with the trainers views on aims might not be in the trainees best interest.
It is not surprising given these conditions that the trainees response begins
with a lengthy silence (line 14). This is followed by a hesitant mmm before
another lengthy silence. Finally, the trainee gives the only answer that produces a response favourable to all conditions, no. Levinson (1983) points out
that preferred seconds, that is, responses that provide the response that the first
part of the adjacency pair seems to require, are typically not marked. The
trainees second, however, is marked with pauses and hesitations, casting
doubt on its veracity. It could be argued then that the trainees response is a
dispreferred second dressed up as a preferred second, albeit with hesitation.
(I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this addition to the analysis.)
Extract 2the nicest thing to do would be . . .

The following extract also took place towards the middle of the course. There
were four people in the feedback, the trainer and three trainees, and I
observed. The discussion is centred round a lesson wherein the trainee had
organized his students to perform a silent movie activity while acting out verbs
of body movement such as twiddle your thumbs, scratch your back,
slouch, and so on.
1.
2.
3.
Trainer:
Yeah yeah I agree totally I think I think its that issue of ()

putting it into a text rather than just saying isolated words so
you know what a lo:vely activity I just think it could have been
hearers. With regard to the fourth tenet, content (topics pertinent to English
language teaching), the discussion revolves around aims. Talk about aims is
current in many main-stream education discourses and teachers are now
encouraged to write them, tell their students what they are and align assessment tasks to them (Biggs 2003). In terms of English language teaching, the
centrality of aims is expressed in the CELTA syllabus, which repeatedly mentions aims and states that trainees should, amongst other things, be able to
identify and state appropriate aims/outcomes for individual lessons. Aims
talk, then, is legitimised both locally and nationally.
Aims seem, then, to be a legitimate topic. What emerges from this extract,
however, is that aims have a particular meaning in this type of language lesson
(tenet number 5). Aims in this pedagogic world must have a language learning
focusa mere interactional one (get together and plan a role play) is not
acceptable. The aims talk which fulfils this condition is that of the trainer: it is
her talk that is legitimised.
The legitimacy of talk is not only apparent in the topic of discussion, however. It is also made present in the processes of talk, particularly here in
turn-taking. In extract 1, the trainer introduces the topic and then asks two
questions (what did you want your students to get better at? and is being
able to plan a role play an appropriate aim for a language lesson?). The trainee
is positioned as the answerer, responding to the trainers topics rather than
being able to raise her own. What is more, before she is able to respond fully to
the first question, the trainer asks the second. Not only is she the answerer but
as answerer she is not fully heard.
Through both discourse acts (questioning and interrupting) the trainees
representation and interpretation of aims is undermined by the trainer. The
trainers version of aims is thus legitimised through the interactional processes
as well as through the words she speaks. At the end of this extract, there is no
doubt as to whose evaluation of the lesson counted and to whose version of
aims all the trainees should commit.
F. COPLAND
Trainee:
Trainer:
Trainee:
Trainer:
Trainee:
Trainer:
Trainee:
Trainer:
Trainee:
Trainer:
tweaked by them =
= ((quietly)) yes =
= rather than just () saying the actions that they saw () saying
okay () it was a job interview () somebody came in () and
pointed er the the man the interviewer pointed at the des
the chair () er he sat down um he slou:ched in the chair () you
know so that you know they had to actually put it into a context
context () I mean it was in a context but to put it into a
te:.xt () so that they used the language more
[
I mean I could have asked them with more time perhaps
I could have asked them to actually write =
= yeah =
= descriptions of the action they saw =
= yeah
like a mo:vie review or something
Yeah I mean wri although the the I mean writings ni::ce cos it
its more () um controlled in a way isnt it and it makes it sort
of forces the language out a little bit more (.) but at at the same
time it kind of slows up the whole process
[
mm the aim was to discuss ((inaudible))
[
for me it felt the nice the nicest thing to
do would be they both do their scenes and then they chat in
their groups they talk in their groups they try to review exactly
what happened
Extract 2: analysis
From line 1 to line 13, the trainer takes a long turn which takes the form of
what is known in the profession as the sandwich. He first of all criticises the
activity (line 1) and then he praises it (line 3) before criticizing again (line 3
and following). The trainee seems to take the criticism on board when he
interrupts the trainer at line 14, to make his own suggestion.
The trainer encourages the trainee to continue with the minimal response
token (Farr 2003: 73) yeah at lines 16 and 18. Then, at line 20, the trainer
offers a positive evaluation (writings nice), although the shaky start (Yeah I
mean wri although the the . . .) signals that negative evaluation may follow.
This is borne out at line 22 when compliment turns to criticism with the trainer
suggesting that writing activities slow things down. This compliment/criticism
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
10
LEGITIMATE TALK IN FEEDBACK CONFERENCES
Once again, legitimate talk is evident in both topic and process. The topic is
how improvements to the silent movie activity could have been made and it is
the trainers opinion on the improvements that is legitimised here. It is the
trainer who introduces the ideas of students using the new vocabulary in a
text, and this is maintained as the key theme through his reiterating it twice
more in the short extract. However, as the extract unfolds, it becomes clear
that it is not just using the words in text that is important. When the trainee
suggests that the text could be a written film review, the idea is rejected by the
trainer. Instead, an oral text is declared the nicest thing to do and it is this idea
which is expounded on by the trainer.
The trainer helps to establish his topic as the legitimate one through the
interactional processes he engenders. First of all, he dominates the extract,
taking three long turns. There are few clear transition relevance places
(Sacks et al. 1974) and hence there is little opportunity for the other trainees
to take part in the interaction. Indeed, to make himself heard, the trainee
whose lesson is under consideration must interrupt the trainer (line 14),
quite a bold move. The interruption is effective: the trainer listens to his contribution and makes an effort to positively evaluate it. He also allows the
trainee to complete what he wants to say.
At this point, line 20, there is potential for the discussion to become dialogic
(see, for example, Mercer 2004; Alexander 2005) with the trainer working
with the trainees idea of a movie review as a potential text for the target
vocabulary and involving the trainee in the construction of this knowledge.
However, the trainer does not take up this opportunity. Instead, he uses his
turn to reject the legitimacy of movie review as a topic, albeit gently.
pattern is extremely common in my data (see, too Farr 2006) and seems to be
designed to encourage the trainees at the same time as developing their teaching skills with suggestions of how to do things better (cf. clinical supervision).
The trainee reacts swiftly to the fact that he is being criticised (he interrupts
before the actual criticism is delivered, perhaps responding to the trainers
initial hesitancy and maybe also to the (.) but structure). He begins to
defend his lesson by starting to explain the aims, a subject which, as we
have seen in extract 2, can be a legitimate topic in feedback talk. However,
before he can state what these aims were, the trainer again takes the floor,
interrupting the trainee in the process (line 27). The trainer provides an idea of
his own for putting words in to a text: for the students to chat in their groups
to review exactly what happened and that would bring out all of the language
(lines 29ff). Although there is not room to show the remainder of the discussion here, the trainee takes little part from here on in, only providing
back-channels as appropriate while the trainer expounds on his idea of an
oral activity to practise the new language. As in extract 1, the other trainees
do not contribute.
F. COPLAND
11
we hadnt had any exchange of ideas for at least the last week of his
fortnight and I thought, you know, a change of scenery would
help.
The trainees view, that the feedback conference should allow an exchange of
ideas, is contradicted by most of the data in my study. Trainees do have
opportunities to voice their opinions and thoughts, but trainers often take
the floor with long turns, which transmit the syllabus and the pedagogic
norms of the CELTA as natural, normal, universal and objective and in
everyones interests to accept (Heller and Martin-Jones 2001: 6). Rather
than an exchange of ideas, trainees ideas are often critiqued by the trainers,
who then provide their own opinions about how the lessons could have been
better taught, as in this example. What is more, this extract, like extract 1, is
indicative of much of the feedback talk: unless called upon, the other trainees
in the group do not participate, despite the multi-party nature of the feedback.
Extract 3is that not feedback?

The next extract shows what happens when legitimate talk is contested by a
trainee. Although it is rare in my data for participants not to adhere to the rules
of engagement in legitimate talk as outlined above, on occasion the rules are
broken, as can be seen in this extract. In terms of context, the trainer has
started to feedback to the trainee about the lesson, and she is criticising the
trainee for not providing what she calls feedback to the students. To the
trainer, feedback seems to mean that students have the opportunity to share
their pairwork discussions in plenary with the trainee and the other students
in the class:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Trainer: hh um but as there wasnt really any feedback on any:: of those little
tasks that you set um you moved straight on to the next sort of
activity um how do you feel that students might feel as a result of.
that () so theyve been given a nice personalised task thats there to
get them to kind of really think about the meaning and talk about
The trainee interrupts again (the aim was, line 25) in an effort to
re-establish himself as a legitimate participant in the discussion of his own
lesson. However, this time he is not allowed to complete his contribution.
The trainer himself interrupts almost immediately to bring the focus of the
discussion back to his own ideaan oral text. This has the effect of silencing
the trainee. His contributions are reduced to some desultory back channelling
as the trainer expounds on his idea for an oral text, which lasts some time.
That the trainee felt silenced in the feedback conferences is confirmed in a
post-course interview that I conducted with his group. During this interview
he stated:
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
it =
Trainee: = ((laughs)) yeah =
Trainer: = and then you move on to the next activity how do you think they
what do you think the effect might be on students
Trainee: Um you know my when ask I went through the correct answers with
them
Trainer Mhmm
Trainee: ((becoming quieter)) erm thats not sort of feedback?
Trainer: ((loud)) Well going through the correct answers is feedback in the
sense that its checking all people have got the answers to the activity
right
Extract 3: analysis
Lines 13 begin a description of the trainees lesson from the trainers perspective. However, the description embeds a criticism (despite the softeners really
and little), signalled by but and made apparent in the wasnt really any
feedback, a statement which draws the trainees attention to a key component
of successful language learning lessons, which she has omitted. The trainers
first question (line 3) is followed by a pause, and as the turn is not taken up by
the trainee answering the question, the trainer continues, this time with a
compliment (line 4). The compliment draws a laugh and an agreement from
the trainee, who, it could be argued, is being co-opted into the paradox, that
she has designed a useful task but then not fully developed it in class.
The trainer continues with her description at line 7 but then repeats the
question which did not earlier receive an answer, what do you think the effect
might be on students? (line 8). Instead of answering the question, the usual
response, the trainee lowers her voice and then asks the trainer a question of
her own (line 15). This is a serious move on the trainees part. In asking the
question, she rejects both the supposition on which the question is based (that
she did not do feedback) and challenges the legitimacy of the question itself
(instead of providing an answer, she asks another question). She also positions
herself as knowledgeable about language teaching pedagogy.
The trainers response (line 13ff) begins with a loud, concessive well, signalling that the response she will give will be dispreferred (Levinson 1983).
However, this is delayed as she first indicates that the trainees interpretation is
allowable (it is feedback in the sense . . .) before explaining what feedback
means in this pedagogical context, that is, giving the learners the opportunity
to make a personal connection with the material. Her turn continues for some
time as she provides other examples of how to create opportunities for this
kind of feedback.
12
F. COPLAND
13
The main advantage would be the fact that hopefully people . . .

could take on board things from other peoples lessons.
In other words, despite the seeming one-to-one nature of much of the feedback talk, there is a clear role for the other trainees as legitimate hearers.
The final extract presented in this article is again unusual in that the legitimate processes of the feedback conference seem to be challenged.
This extract begins fairly prosaically in terms of feedback talk: the trainer critiques the trainees lesson using a criticism/compliment pattern and attempts
to author the trainees response when she asks the question, what do you
think the effect might be on students? (line 8). However, instead of providing
the appropriate answer to the question (or admitting ignorance), the trainee
queries the trainers version of what she saw in the lesson and intimates, that
she did do feedback, or at least, what she understood to be feedback. In doing
so, the trainee challenges the legitimate talk both in terms of process (that
trainees answer questions but do not ask them), and content (that the trainer
holds the epistemological high ground in terms of what happens in the class).
Nevertheless, the trainees challenge is neither overt nor disrespectful. When
she asks her question she hesitates and then lowers her voice. The question
form is less direct, even in this context (as an answer to another question), that
a direct counter claim would have been (I did do feedback), particularly in the
group setting. The hesitation signals that she is not sure of her ground while
the lowering of the voice has the effect of turning a public discussion between
the trainer and the trainees (what Goffman calls a platform event, 1981) into
a private one, between this trainee and the trainer. These three pragmatic
devices enable the trainee to position herself as a trainee (as someone who
is learning) at the same time as contesting the legitimate talk, demonstrating
that she has a sophisticated understanding of the power relationship between
herself and the trainer.
The trainer seems to decline the trainees invitation to a quiet discussion
between themselves when she brings the discussion back into the group
domain with her loud well (line 14). In doing so, she signals that her comments are relevant to all the trainees, not only to the trainee who taught the
lesson. She then goes on to provide a definition of what the trainees should all
understand the word feedback to mean in this context, rejecting the understanding that the trainee has offered (although this is done sensitively,
acknowledging that the trainees interpretation is reasonable). In doing so,
she clearly indicates to the group what the legitimate content of the talk
should bea discussion of feedback which relates to personalised learning
and that the process of feedback is a public, not private discussion. This interpretation is corroborated by the interview data in which this trainer stated her
views about the advantages of group feedback:
14
Extract 4can I just ask a quick question?
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Trainer:
Trainee 1:
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
Trainer:
((turning to trainee 2)) Do you want to go on to trainee 1?

Um can I just ask a quick question um and the only reason Im
bringing this up is because it was brought up after my after I did
my listening thing because its about playing the tape again ()
cos I mean the main difference um he [trainee 3]only played the
tape once and then kind of went through it which was part of
the
reason um Id picked up on it but I did notice he actually went
round and pretty much made sure that theyd pretty much
understood
what theyd heard the first time before doing it which I didnt
do I
admit but under those circumstances is it still a good idea to like
play the second tape again or should you is it acceptable to leave
it if you feel theyve got it
I think thats a really good question actually.
Extract 4: analysis
After the trainer directs trainee 2 to provide feedback to trainee 1 (line 1),
trainee 1 interrupts the process. He asks the trainer a question (line 2) but
seems to recognize this is unusual as he first hesitates (um) then asks permissioncan I just ask a quick question? [Schegloff (1980) calls this a preliminary to a preliminary]. He then hesitates again (um) before going on to
justify his question by linking it to his own performance when playing tapes
and to the performance of trainee 3, whose lesson has just been under discussion (line 5). His question is quite a difficult one, given the circumstances. In
the first place, it could incriminate trainee 3, so he is at pains to praise trainee
3s performance (line 7) and to denigrate his own (which I didnt do I admit,
line 9). Secondly, it could be seen as a criticism of the trainer. The trainees
question is about how many times to play the tape. Trainee 3 has only played it
once and has been praised for this (line 5). Trainee 1 implies in his question
that he has been told to play it more than once (although this is never formally
stated, it is recoverable from the discourse, for example, in statements such as
In terms of the context for the following exchange, the trainer has asked
trainee 2, who had not taught that day, to take notes and to provide feedback
to her peers. She had already provided feedback to trainee 3 and a discussion
about his teaching had followed. At this point, the trainer asked trainee 2 to
provide her comments on trainee 1. She was just about to do so, when trainee
1 interrupted to ask a question about how many times trainees should play
listening tapes in lessons:
F. COPLAND
15
In this extract, legitimate talk is contested by trainee 1. He becomes the speaker
rather than the hearer and the questioner rather than the answerer. He interrupts the legitimate speaker to have his question heard (trainee 2) and risks
alienating his peers by seeming to criticise what one of them has done in class.
What is more, in terms of topic, he initiates and exemplifies an issue on which
the trainer has seemingly contradicted herself and ensures that this issue is
taken up and discussed.
It should be noted that trainee 1 uses a good deal of skill in order to challenge the legitimate talk without threatening the face (Brown and Levinson
1987) of peers or the trainer. First of all, the trainee indulges in a long
pre-sequence, which seeks to justify the interruption to trainee 2, demonstrating that he is sensitive to the fact that his interrupting question is unusual and
potentially problematic in terms of the legitimate talk. Furthermore, he is
careful to suggest that trainee 3 has not done anything wrong, through explaining the trainees practice and praising it. Finally, in order to facilitate a
response to his question from the trainer, he must ensure that it is not construed as a criticism of the trainers advice. This requires delicate negotiation,
but he manages it by appealing to the trainers expertise. He frames the question through using the phrase in those circumstances, providing the trainer
with the affordance (Erickson 2004) of being able to corroborate both her
earlier advice to trainee 1 and her latter advice to trainee 3.
The trainer, for her part, accepts the question. In so doing, she affirms that,
despite fundamental turn-taking rules (Sacks et al. 1974) and the participation
structures that have been established in the feedback conferences, that the
trainee has a right to ask it. Her positive evaluation of the question also legitimises the content of the question, which she then goes on to answer at some
length and in some detail.
it was brought up after I did my listening thing, line 3, and is it still a good
idea to play the second tape again, line 10). The trainers advice, then, could
be construed as contradictory.
The trainer (line 13) responds positively to the question. However, her
answer also shows that she thinks that the question is unusual. Instead of
responding to the question with an answer, she answers it with a comment
on the question (I think thats a really good question actually). The inclusion
of the word actually too is telling. Smith and Jucker (2000) argue that actually as a discourse marker seems mainly to function to negotiate propositional attitudes rather than propositional content. That is, interlocutors use it
when they wish to contradict expectations about perspectives towards facts
rather than the facts themselves (Smith and Jucker 2000: 222). In using actually here, the trainer acknowledges that the trainees question is unusual
while her positive evaluation communicates to the trainees that it is
appropriate.
16
Like extract 3, this extract illustrates the delicacy required by those who
wish to challenge the legitimate talk, whether this is process or content. The
challenge may be rejected (extract 3) or accepted (extract 4) but in both cases
the atypical nature of the challenge is marked by both the challenger and the
challenged.
LEGITIMATE TALK AND DEVELOPMENT
The purpose of feedback is to erm to get the trainees to evaluate the

lesson that theyve just given and develop those sort of critical skills
and improve their own performance as a result of it.
From the feedback conference data presented here, it can be seen that despite
the seemingly informal context in which feedback takes place, there are clear
expectations about who is allowed to speak, to whom, about what, and whose
knowledge counts. In other words, the standards of legitimate talk are firmly
established and maintained. These rules are thrown into relief when there is a
challenge to them, such as in extract 3, where a trainee questions the trainer
about her interpretation, and in extract 4, where a trainee interrupts another
to ask a question.
Trainees are always given the opportunity to comment on their own lessons
(Copland 2008), and so it could be argued that they have some control over
the content of the feedback. However, as has been shown in extracts 1 and 2, it
is not so much the topic of discussion that is controlled by trainers but how the
topic presented is to be understood. The trainers seem to have strong views on
language teaching pedagogy, and these are transmitted through their talk to
the trainees. They give clear statements regarding best practice (content) and
they privilege these views through self-selections, interruptions and long turns
(process). Trainees, for their part, must be seen to listen to the trainers and,
preferably, to take on board their views (even if they do not share them). Often
the trainees seem to be either manoeuvred into accepting the trainers views or
even silenced by the discourse practices of the trainers. Trainees learning
agendas are rarely heard.
Of particular note given the multi-party nature of the feedback is the fact
that it is rare for there to be multi-party discussions. Talk tends to be between
the trainer and one trainee, with the other trainees positioned as listeners
(though see Copland and Mann 2010 for a discussion of a section of feedback
where a more dialogic approach is taken). This may be due to the time restrictions and the way the feedback is organized, with all participants taking a turn.
However, it is notable that trainees tend to direct both their talk and their
attention to the trainer, who also has the right to self-select, interrupt, and
nominate who will speak (Copland 2008).
The realities of feedback seem to be in some contrast with avowed desires of
trainers in terms of what they wish to achieve in feedback. One trainer
summed up these hopes in the pre-course interview:
F. COPLAND
17
Would you, would you do it differently in that situation? How

would you, would you, erm, you know, if you could re-run
it would you, what would you do in that situation? Perhaps I
would (.) perhaps I would see if we could get (.) if he [the trainee]
could have the floor more at that moment when hes introduced
the idea of writing.
Despite the fact that, there was no intention on my part to develop the trainers pedagogy, there is evidence here that the trainer is confronting
taken-for-granted behaviour, and is considering a change to a turn-taking
practice (that is, not interrupting the trainee to make a point). It has been
the opportunity to listen to the recorded data and to comment on it which
has afforded the trainer the opportunity to reflect in this way.
The pressures on both trainers and trainees to complete the course successfully
and to learn how to do English language teaching may account for why
developing the trainees critical skills becomes less of a priority in feedback
conferences. The analysis and discussion presented here shows how trainers
and trainees work together to meet the first of these two outcomes, at the
expense, it could be argued, of the third. In other words, the strictures imposed
by time and assessment, in particular, create talk that recontexualises
(Bernstein 1990) the accepted pedagogies of practice so that trainees graduate
from the course with some understanding of how to teach English according to
current notions of good teaching. The same strictures, however, hinder more
exploratory, reflective talk which, it has been argued, leads to development
and change (Farr 2006; Brandt 2008).
The disjuncture between trainers hopes for feedback and its realities uncovers an opportunity to answer Robertss (2003) call to develop applied linguistics research, which is practically relevant (Roberts 2003: 133). Roberts
argues that those who are researched should benefit in a concrete way from
the research process and that this is the essence of applied linguistics. In this
case, data collected in the feedback could be used by trainers to develop understanding of how their talk (both content and process) controls what is learned
and how it is learned. For example, scrutinising the feedback talk for
turn-taking devices could act as an estrangement device (Garfinkel 1967,
cited in Stubbs 1983), leading trainers to notice features of taken-for-granted
behaviour.
While there is no guarantee that analysing data in itself will lead to development, there is some evidence that it can be valuable. Vasquez and Reppen
(2007), for example, show how analysing interactional data from their own
feedback practice led to fundamental changes in turn-taking and in the nature
of their talk. In my own study, the potential for such work was made apparent
when, as part of the follow-up interviews, I shared recorded data from feedback with trainers. After a lengthy discussion of extract 2, I asked the trainer in
passing what he would have done differently given the opportunity. In reply,
he mused:
18
CONCLUDING COMMENTS
Research on feedback remains scarce. Despite the role of feedback in many
educational settings, and its potential to both support (and damage) learning,
understanding feedback remains a minority interest. What is more, the research that is undertaken tends to be either quantitative in nature (for
example, Dow et al. 2009) or concerned with the technicalities of feedback.
This is particularly true of medical education where researchers have examined the supervisors role (Durguerian et al. 2000); the setting for
feedback (Bruijn et al. 2006); and the frequency of supervision (Grant et al.
2003). In teacher education, more attention has been given to the processes
of feedback (for example, Waite 1992, 1995; Vasquez 2004; Hyland and
Lo 2006), but the analysis and discussion presented here suggests that
close analysis of feedback talk warrants attention not only in order to analyse the impact of the trainers feedback (Hyland and Lo 2006) or to highlight the politeness strategies of trainers when delivering their feedback
(Vasquez 2004) but also to uncover how messages about pedagogical practice are conveyed, particularly in multi-party contexts. Both pedagogic
topics and speaking rights are important in this respect, as the analysis has
shown.
Linguistic ethnographic approaches call for linguistics to be tied down
and for ethnography to be opened up (Rampton et al. 2004) in order to
produce detailed and nuanced accounts of talk in their contexts of use.
This article has shown that linguistic ethnography can also have particular
relevance when answering the call to produce an applied linguistics that
can be applied (Roberts 2003), through sharing data sets with research
participants and others in order to support professional development. More
provocatively, it has also suggested that the success or otherwise of such
approaches may depend on developing sensitivity to the dynamics of
legitimate talk.
It could be argued that linguistic ethnographic research is particularly

well-placed to be of practical relevance to research participants and others
because of the range of data that the researcher collects. The data in this
study, for example, could be drawn on by both trainers and trainersin-training for practical ends. While analysing, transcriptions and recordings
could be useful in making the familiar strange for trainers in the field (as in the
example above), fieldnotes and interviews could be used to introduce the
world of the trainer to trainers-in-training, making the strange familiar.
Furthermore, through working collaboratively and reflexively (Roberts
2003:147) from the outset with research participants, researchers could go
some way towards developing research that is valued in both academic and
professional communities.
F. COPLAND
19
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author would like to thank colleagues on ESRC RDI Ethnograpy, Language and
Communication programme, and Dr Keith Richards for insightful comments on the data presented
in this study, and for generous feedback on earlier versions of this article. She would also like to
thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments.
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doi:10.1093/applin/amr030 Advance Access published on 10 September 2011
You Know Arnold Schwarzenegger?

On Doing Questioning in Second
Language Dyadic Tutorials
HASSAN BELHIAH
This study analyses questionanswer (QA) sequences in second language

tutorial interaction. Using conversation analysis methodology as an analytical
tool, the study demonstrates how the act of questioning is a dominant form of
interaction in tutoring discourse. The doing of questioning is accomplished
through a myriad of forms other than interrogative questions, such as declaratively formatted utterances, and-prefacing, b-event questions, and embodied
practices. QA sequences are fundamentally remedial in nature in that they
revolve around tutees linguistic needs. In this regard, questions that do not
address tutees linguistic needs are framed as being somewhat disjunctive or
out of order. Through the fine-grained analysis of the QA sequences in
four videotaped tutoring sessions, this study contributes to the line of scholarship that seeks to demonstrate how the investigation of questions as interactional products has a bearing on our understanding of the connection between
grammar and social organization.
INTRODUCTION
In recent years, a sizeable body of research has been undertaken into the
nature of questions used by or addressed to second language learners.
These studies have dealt with a variety of issues, including native language
interference (Lightbown and dAnglejan 1985; Picard 2002), the emergence,
processing, and comprehensibility of wh-questions among second language
learners (Park 2000; Yuan 2007; Jackson and Bobb 2009), and the degree to
which second language learners questions reflect aspects of interlanguage
or native-like competence (Vander Brook et al. 1980; Williams et al. 2001).
These studies and others focused their energies primarily on the cognitive
aspects of acquisition with a view to pinning down the mechanisms or machinery underlying the process of question formation. As such their approach
to data analysis is etic in nature (i.e. research centric): it is driven by the analysts external interpretation of what an utterance accomplishes (i.e. whether it
is a question, a request, a denial, and so on).
In contrast, other studies (e.g. Markee 1995; Gardner 2004; Koshik 2005a, b)
have embraced an emic approach (i.e. participant centric) to the study of QA
Department of Education, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Al Hosn University,

P.O. Box 38772, Abu Dhabi, UAE
E-mail: h.belhiah@alhosnu.ae
22
QA SEQUENCES
DEFINING QA SEQUENCES
In their authoritative book, A Grammar of Contemporary English, Quirk et al.
(1985) identify different types of questions based on their syntactic and
sequences. These studies situate themselves in the relatively recent line of

scholarship, which investigates the way second language learners and their
interlocutors come to an understanding of the micro-interactional organization of their talk. In this line of scholarship, interactional practices such as
turn-taking, repair, and body movements are treated as an integral part of
the participants language behavior. By focusing on the joint deployment of
talk and embodiment, these studies and others (e.g. Markee 2005; Mori and
Hayashi 2006; Belhiah 2009; Hellermann 2009) seek to gain insight into how
second language interaction unfolds in real-time.
This study adopts the second approach (i.e. participant-centric). It provides a
fine-grained analysis of QA sequences in ESL tutorial interaction on the basis
of conversation analysis (CA) methodology. The analysis pays close attention
to how utterances are framed and oriented to by participants as questions.
Embodied practicesparticularly gaze and body orientationare also examined with respect to their relevance to the act of questioning. In this analysis,
participants actions take precedence over the analysts subjective interpretation
of what an utterance accomplishes. As a result, all instances of questioning are
treated as local and sequential accomplishments that . . . [are] grounded in
empirically observable conversational conduct (Markee and Kasper 2004: 495).
A handful of studies have examined questions as interactional products in
L1 interaction (e.g. Clayman and Heritage 2002; Raymond 2003; Clayman
et al. 2006), in L2 (see above), and in L1 and L2 (i.e. contrastive analysis)
(Egbert and Voge 2008). Among these, only two (Fox 1993; Benwell and
Stoke 2002) focused on tutorial interactions. The two studies concur that
QA sequences are a fundamental form of interaction in tutoring discourse.
This is hardly surprising given that tutoring discourse is inherently remedial;
the student and the tutor meet because the former needs assistance to improve
his or her language skills. Because of the research foci of their studies, Benwell
and Stoke (2002) and Fox (1993) do not deal at length with the organization
of questionanswer (QA) sequences. This study thus expands on their findings
by examining turn-by-turn how the act of questioning is accomplished in
real-time, second language tutorial interaction. In addition, the participants
in the aforementioned studies are native speakers of L1, and as such the
focus of the studies was on tutoring on other subjects other than ESL (e.g.
science, mathematics, and psychology). On the other hand, in my study the
tutees are learners of English; therefore, the current study has implications,
not only for tutorial interaction, but also for second language discourse.
The study thus contributes to our understanding of how the investigation of
questions, including their grammar, as interactional products can be a catalyst
to comprehending the connection between grammar and social organization.
H. BELHIAH 23
intonational properties. For instance, a yesno question is said to involve

subject-verb/auxiliary inversion along with a rising intonation, whereas a
wh-question is marked by subject-verb/auxiliary inversion accompanied by a
falling intonation. While relying on the formal aspects of an utterance such
as syntax can be helpful in identifying a question, this might not be the
case when dealing with questions that emerge in naturally occurring talk.
As Schegloff (1984) eloquently puts it:
For talk participants, as well as subsequent analysts, determining whether a

certain linguistic form carries out the act of questioning is contingent upon its
sequential placement. An utterance will be qualified as doing questioning if it
is treated by participants as the first-pair part (FPP) of a QA sequence. Some of
the studies that have analyzed the structure of questions from an interactional
perspective lend support to this view since they demonstrated that the act of
questioning can be achieved through a myriad of forms other than questions,
such as declaratively formatted utterances (Koshik 2005b), b-event questions
(Labov and Fanshel 1977), and and-prefacing (Heritage and Sorjonen 1994).
Other studies (e.g. Heritage and Roth 1995; Heritage 2001, 2002a, b; Clayman
and Heritage 2002; Raymond 2003; Clayman et al. 2006; Monzoni 2008;
Tracy 2009) have also illustrated how the investigation of questions ought
take into account the sequential context in which the question is embedded,
and how this context plays a crucial role in its treatment as a question by
participants.
Therefore, for us to obtain a thorough understanding of what causes some
specific turn-at-talk to be treated as a question though it masquerades as a
declarative sentence, we have to look not only at its syntactic formatting and
intonation contour, but also at its sequential organization, that is, how it is
constructed and projected, as well as how it is oriented to as a question by
participants. Orienting to an FPP as a question carries with it the expectation
that recipients will either provide an answer to it or in case they do not, their
silence or ensuing turn-at-talk will be somehow represented or treated as a
dispreferred course of action. In this article, a question will be defined as the
FPP of a QA sequence. The form of the answer will somehow be occasioned
by the kind of question that is being asked (Koshik 2007). For instance, a
yesno answer is expectable of a yesno question, whereas an answer that
selects one of the alternatives would be projected when an alternative question
is asked.
Whatever defines the class questions as a linguistic form will not

do for questions as conversational objects, or interactional objects,
or social actions. If by question we want to mean anything like a
sequentially relevant or implicative object, so that in some way it
would adumbrate the notion answer;. . . then it will not do, for a
variety of reasons, to use features of linguistic form as sole, or even
invariant though not exhaustive, indicators or embodiments of such
objects. Sequential organization is critical. (4950)
24
QA SEQUENCES
DATA AND METHODOLOGY
ANALYSIS
Initiating QA sequences
In my data, QA sequences regarding a particular aspect of English (e.g.
vocabulary or pronunciation) are typically preceded by a turn-in-talk that
terminates the ongoing task while simultaneously projecting the upcoming
one. The following excerpt elucidates this point:
The methodology employed in this study is based primarily on the tenets of

conversation analysis. CA research seeks to delineate the type of common sense
and constitutive practices that the members of a community appear to take for
granted although they make use of these on an ongoing basis. The meaning of a
turn-at-talk is determined by examining the ways that recipients themselves
construct an understanding of it, taking into account the sequential context in
which the turn is embedded. CA researchers first collect spoken data through
audio and video recordings, transcribe it, then start looking for patterns, segments, constellations, and embodied practices that seem to offer the richest
ground for investigation in relation to their research focus (Markee 2000).
Data for this study come from video-recordings, drawn from tutoring sessions
involving tutors who are native speakers of American English and students who
are in the process of improving their communication skills in English. Eight
subjectsfour American tutors and four Korean studentsall students at the
University of Wisconsin in Madison agreed to let me videotape one or two of
their tutoring sessions between 2003 and 2005, for a total of six sessions. I chose
to focus on one ethnic group of learners in order to be able to come up with
generalizable insights and findings since sociolinguistic research suggests that
ones L1 and culture have an impact on his or her linguistic behavior. I transcribed in detail all the QA sequences in the six sessions (a total of 65), then
analyzed how they are oriented to by participants as QA sequences.
H. BELHIAH 25
At the beginning of this excerpt, the tutor is observed dictating words to the
student (i.e. disappear, pushers), who is writing them down on his notepad. In
line 10, the task of copying down vocabulary items and making certain the
students spelling is accurate is brought to a closure when the tutor prefaces his
turn with Okay, which is hearable as making a transition to the new task of
defining words. The tutors turn in lines 1013 consists of a description of
the new task, which involves going over the words that the student has
jotted down on his notepad, then putting them in a sentence or providing a
definition for them, in an apparent bid to verify whether the student understands their correct meaning in English. Note that the tutors turn, by using
we, does not specifically mention how the roles will be allocated. It simply
states that participants will jointly elaborate on the meaning of the words
under scrutiny.
However, once the task has been described and the second participant
has registered orientation to it by passing up an opportunity for a fuller turn
by issuing an acknowledgement token (Schegloff 1982), the QA format becomes established and the turn-types allocated (Atkinson and Drew 1979).
Consequently, one participant will predominantly initiate the questions,
while the other will provide the answers. In this excerpt, the tutor is the
party launching the questions while the student is the one providing the
26
QA SEQUENCES
One is also a number, the single case is also a quantity, and statistical significance is but one form of significance. Indeed, it is significance in only the technical sense that a finding in a sample may
be taken as indicating the likely presence of an element of order in
the larger universe being studied . . . And no number of other episodes that developed differently will undo the fact that in these
cases it went the way it did, with that exhibited understanding.
(101)
Single-case analysis1
The majority of what transpires in the ESL tutorial data in this study can be
understood by examining what is called an adjacency pair, a term that
describes two turns that are normatively positioned one after the other in
such a way that if one is uttered, the other will be expected to follow
(Schegloff 2007). The FPP of the adjacency pair that is the locus of my
analysis here is initiated by the student, a native speaker of Korean. In it,
the student seems to be inquiring about the quality of the vowel that follows word-initial /z/, especially that he cannot use the communicative strategy of avoidance (Schachter 1974), since the word zero is of high
frequency in mathematics, a subject that he tutors.2 He is therefore expressing his interest in learning how to pronounce it correctly and accurately.
The adjacency pair under scrutiny occurs in the middle of the following
answers. For instance, in line 15, the tutor launches a display question quizzing the student about the meaning of proposal. The student supplies an
answer in line 18 in the form of a candidate synonym (i.e. suggestion),
which is evaluated by the tutor as being correct. Then he asks the student to
provide a verbal contextualization for proposal apparently to verify the students ability to use the word appropriately. The next question is introduced in
lines 2526. Here, the tutor asks the student about the meaning of legislature.
The student displays his understanding by providing a definition (lines 2829),
then supplying a word that belongs to the same semantic field (i.e. legal). It is
primarily the allocation of turn types in this phase and the orientation to this
participation structure that causes several turns to be treated as questions. In
what follows, I provide examples of QA sequences launched by tutors as well
as students to show the various forms that questions take.
My analysis starts with a single-case analysis of an episode that can be
viewed as the quintessential exemplar of what is constitutive of tutorial
dialog. The practice of providing a detailed account of a single case is a
well-established tradition among CA researchers. Because face-to-face interaction is presumably conducted in an orderly and methodic manner, it is expected that every case that exemplifies a certain discursive practice will
somehow conform to this social order. As Schegloff (1993) has argued, we
should bear in mind that:
H. BELHIAH 27
spate of talk (lines 12 through 15):
What is interactionally remarkable about the sequence extending from lines

1215 is that the students turn (lines 1213) is treated as the FPP of a QA
sequence although the tutor does not seem to have understood it as such
immediately after it has been completed. To be more specific, at the end of
the students turn (line 13), there is a (0.8) second pause before the tutor offers
her assessment of the students pronunciation (line 14). This pause is not
accompanied by any body language, such as a thinking face (Goodwin and
Goodwin 1986), to communicate that the tutor has immediately perceived the
students turn as a question and that she is engaged in the action of pondering
about how to answer the students question.
One possible reason behind the tutors delayed orientation to the students
turn as a question is that although his turn is syntactically hearable as complete, it is not in conformity with the interrogative syntax of wh-questions in
English (i.e. insertion of a wh-pronoun and/or subject-verb inversion what is
the pronunciation of zero?). This gives it the facade of a declarative statement
rather than an interrogative sentence, and therefore the possibility of it being
treated as a declaration rather than a query. As a matter of fact, the students
turn seems to be hearable as a preface or a pre-expansion to a question
(Schegloff 1980). And had the student initiated more talk during the pause
(e.g. do we say zero or zi:ro?), it would have been an obvious preamble to the
subsequent question.
28
QA SEQUENCES
This leads to the following question: what prompts the tutor to ultimately
treat and understand the students turn as a question? Apparently, this
understanding has been occasioned by a combination of factors including
the sequential environment surrounding this adjacency pair, the students
gaze and body comportment, and the participants shared orientation
to the business of tutoring as being fundamentally remedial in that the students turns will be attended to as requests for assistance with his linguistic
needs.
Beginning with the sequential environment, at the beginning of this
session, the student gets down to the business of tutoring by glancing at
his sheet and asking his first question what is the pronunciation of water.
After spending some time discussing the appropriate or correct way to
pronounce it in American English, the student gazes down at his sheet and
starts the turn in line 12. What is striking here is that unlike the first question,
which meets one of the formal descriptions for defining a question (i.e.
interrogative syntax), the second one does not. Yet, it is ultimately treated
as a question regarding the appropriate pronunciation of zero. This stems
from the fact the second action clearly piggy-backs on the structure of the
first. In other words, line 12 is presented as a second-in-series question by
clearly labeling it a second question and by prefacing the turn with and.
Apparently, the framing of the second question takes account of the first
question, which motivates the tutor to respond to the students turn as
a question.
Second, considering gaze and body orientation (Figure 1), in line 12 as the
student starts launching his turn, he withdraws his gaze and subsequently
performs a series of actions with his body as he moves toward the end of his
turn. To be more specific, he leans forward, gazes down at the paper, tilts it
slightly outward in the direction of his tutor, and points to the word zero with
his pen. By performing this amalgamation of body movements, the student
seems to extend an invitation to the tutor to join him in attending to the item
on the sheet, which is about the pronunciation of zero.
This, then, raises the following question: what evidence exists to demonstrate that the student has been successful in coordinating talk, gaze, and body
comportment to secure the tutors orientation to this task, thereby presenting
his turn as a referential question that is awaiting an answer?3 There are at least
three pieces of evidence, two of which are germane to the deployment of gaze
by the student.
First, in line 12, the student prefaces his turn with the connective and.
Heritage and Sorjonen (1994) explain that and-prefacing is a characteristic of
question design that invokes a sense of the questions it prefaces as routine, as
a part of a line or agenda of questions, and as a component of a course of action
that is being implemented in and through them (22). The students deployment of and-prefacing could thus be a precursor that what will follow is
H. BELHIAH 29
(a)
Figure 1: Participants gaze and body orientation during the production

of the students turn in lines 12 and 13.4
(another) question. It can also project that such question design has a routine
character in that it will sustain orientation to the tutoring activity as being
composed primarily of QA sequences.
Secondly, in line 12 (see also Figure 1a), there is a notable convergence of
the participants gaze in the direction of the sheet. Once the student has withdrawn his gaze from the tutor, and shifted it to the sheet held in his hand, the
tutor follows suit. Change in gaze orientation has occurred almost in tandem,
with the student being the one initiating this shift: about (1.3) seconds before
asking his question, the student switches his gaze to the sheet, and even before
he utters the conjunction and, the tutor exhibits alignment with this activity
by directing her gaze to the students sheet, which is, so to speak, the locus of
the current activity.5
Thirdly, as Figure 1b clearly illustrates, toward the end of the students
turn in line 13, precisely on the preposition of, the student starts shifting
(b)
30
QA SEQUENCES
QA sequences
In what follows I provide examples of QA sequences launched by tutors as well
as students to show the various forms that questions take. The questions in my
data can be grouped into three categories: (i) questions formed on the basis
of interrogative syntax; (ii) questions formed on the basis of intonation; and
(iii) b-event questions.
Interrogatively formed questions

Several of the QA sequences in my data are initiated on the basis of
questions that are in compliance with the syntax of interrogatives. These fall
under three major categories: Yesno questions, wh-questions, and polar
alternatives.
a. Yesno questions: When using these questions, speakers expect either confirmation or negation from the part of the addressee. According to Schegloff
(2007), confirmation is conveyed through yes or synonymous tokens such as
yeah and uh huh, whereas negation is expressed through no or similar
tokens such as nuh-uh and nope (7879). In the example that follows,
his gaze back to the direction of his tutor. His right hand is also returned to
its initial position prior to starting the new turn, which results in him
holding the sheet of paper with both hands instead of just one. This may
be an indication that his turn has come to completion and so has his orientation to the sheet. Indeed, the tutor aligns herself with this orientation by
gazing back at the student on the word zero, therefore, exhibiting not only
her attendance to the students gaze work, but also her availability to
supply an answer to his question. It is interesting to note here that the
tutor briefly (0.8 s) gazes down at the students sheet of paper before
providing her feedback in line 15.
So far, I have argued that what may not be initially hearable as a complete
turn constructional unit (TCU) in the form of a question is treated as
such thanks to its framing as a second-in-a-series question, and to participants attendance to each others gaze and orientation to the students sheet of
paper as a primary site for launching questions. Apparently, once the student has launched what is hearable as a first-in-a-series question and
the tutor orients herself to the role of expert, she treats the students subsequent turns as questions because they are always launched after gazing down
at the shared artifact of the sheet first. Such orientation, it will further be
shown below, accounts for how a wide range of turn types that do not conform with the syntax of interrogative questions are still understood as
questions.
H. BELHIAH 31
the student initiates (and repairs) a yesno question on line 4, and the tutor
responds in line 5 with the affirmative token aham, implying that there
is a difference in meaning between solving an equation and simplifying an
equation.
c. Alternative questions: This type of questions involves a choice between two or

more alternatives. Each alternative receives a rising intonation, with the exception of the last one which is characterized by a falling intonation.
Questions accomplished on the basis of intonation

Sometimes questions are realized through rising intonation, even when
the turn through which this is accomplished does not make use of
interrogative syntax. These turns are sometimes phrasal questions,
whereas in other cases they are fully fledged sentences with a subject
and predicate. Line 8 in Excerpt 6 provides an exemplar of this kind of
questions, which are often referred to in the literature as declarative
b. Wh-questions: They are headed by a wh-pronoun (e.g. how and what) and
they usually end with a falling intonation.
32
QA SEQUENCES
questions.
B-event questionsdeviant cases

The practice of asking questions that revolve around students linguistic needs
becomes so routinized or normative within these tutoring sessions that the
very fact of introducing questions that are not directly relevant to the current
task is oriented to as being in violation of this discursive practice. In what
follows, I provide a detailed analysis of two exemplars to illustrate this observation.
In this excerpt, the student begins in lines 1 and 2 by putting the word
dilemma in a sentence to display his understanding of its meaning. In line
3, the tutor corrects the students use of come back instead of go back. After
that, the student initiates his declarative statement, which is hearable as an
alternative, referential question regarding which phrase (go back or come
back) would be suitable in the context he has provided. This discussion leads
to another declarative question (line 8), this time initiated by the tutor.
Although the tutors turn is not formally in conformity with the syntax
of any of the major question types discussed above (e.g. yesno question
or wh-question), it is still oriented to as a question by the student, partially
because it is marked with a rising intonation at the end.
H. BELHIAH 33
This excerpt is drawn from a session in which the student is the party
launching the questions, while the tutor supplies the answers. So far in the
encounter, the student has asked two pronunciations questions (i.e. water and
zero). In line 1, the student is in the middle of practicing his pronunciation of
the vowel that follows word-initial /z/. He is also initiating some prefatory talk
regarding the reason why he is or will be asking several questions regarding
the pronunciation of certain words; this he attributes to the fact that he is
tutoring some students in math. It follows that since certain words on his
list such as zero, equation, and definition are of high frequency in math,
he needs to learn how to pronounce them accurately.
What transpires between lines 6 and 7 is interactionally interesting since it is
in violation of our earlier observation that recipients refrain from initiating
new turns during the speakers prefatory talk. To be more specific, the tutor is
deviating from the turn-taking system that has been agreed upon so far, in
which the student launches courses of action and solicits responses, whereas
the tutors turns form second pair parts of sequences, in which she provides
responses. Note that the students turn in line 5 is neither syntactically nor
pragmatically complete. Rather it projects more prefatory talk or a transition to
the question regarding the pronunciation of definition. The tutors turn is
anything but in keeping with the turn-types that have been allocated to each
one of them thus far.
The tutors turn can be viewed as an example of a b-event question. This
term refers to a turn-at-talk launched by a speaker regarding events to which
the recipient has privileged or exclusive access (Labov and Fanshel 1977).
These events can be related to the recipients feelings, attitudes, or personal
life. In this excerpt, the tutor is asking the student about his feelings regarding
tutoring in math. The tutor can commensensically be assumed to be
34
QA SEQUENCES
legitimately ignorant about the students feelings since he was not present
during the tutoring sessions in question.
There are two features in the tutors talk and body movements that show
how she treats her b-event question as somehow infringing upon the students
turn. First the tutor ends her turn with what is hearable as a misplacement
marker (Schegloff and Sacks 1973). Misplacement markers such as by the
way have been demonstrated by Schegloff and Sacks to be deployed by
participants to mark their turns as being disjunctive or out order. By inserting anyway at the end of her unit, the tutor is somehow communicating to
her student that she is detouring from tutoring business to a social footing
(Goffman 1981).
Secondly, after 2.5 min of conversation regarding the students tutoring
experience and as the social footing is starting to wind down, the tutor utilizes
a single-word turn (line 18) in a display of re-entry into tutoring business.
Prior to her turn, the tutors hands were positioned in front of her lap.
However, immediately after uttering the word Okay, she uses a manual gesture to signal a return to the initial pre-allocated turn-types, in which the
studentrather than the tutoris the one who will be the chief initiator of
questions. This gesture consists of a quick left-hand jerk in the direction of the
students sheet, which is the site from which his questions are launched. By
performing such a gesture, the tutor marks the preceding talk as somehow
being outside the boundaries of the ongoing task, and the students upcoming
talk as the one that is aligned with their previously but temporarily suspended
agenda and turn-taking system.
The Second excerpt follows:
H. BELHIAH 35
This excerpt is extracted from a tutoring session, in which a tutor is quizzing

the student on the meaning of several words associated with the semantic
field of government. So far in the encounter, seven words have been defined,
namely proposal, legislature, obsessions, bill, penalty, mandatory, and
cast. At the beginning of this excerpt, the participants are still negotiating the
meaning of the word cast when it is used with vote as in to cast a vote.
Up to his point in the task of defining terms, no non-task talk has been injected into the conversation. Participants are, so to speak, sticking strictly to the
agenda of defining words.
However, the tutors turns in lines 9, 10; 1416; and 24 through 25 are
designed in such as way as to register that the upcoming question is not
naturally or properly positioned (Schegloff and Sacks 1973). To be more
specific, before soliciting the students opinion about Californians election
of Arnold Schwarzenegger as their Governor (lines 2730), the tutor first
tries to obtain the go-ahead from the student by initiating the FPP of a
preliminary to a preliminary or a pre-sequence to a pre-sequence
(Schegloff 1980). According to Schegloff, although FPPs such as can I ask
you a question and let me ask you a question have the guise of initiating
a pre-asking sequence, they are actually utilized and attended to as
launching pre-pre-asking pairs.
This, then, raises the following question: how does the initiation of a
pre-pre sequence by the tutor mark his imminent talk as being out of
place? To answer this question, it is vital to analyze the formatting of the
seven questions pertaining to the vocabulary items that have been discussed so far in the session. The tutors questions have been formulated
36
QA SEQUENCES
as follows:
In launching the seven questions, not once has the tutor prefaced his query
with what can be considered as the FPP of a pre-pre sequence. All these
questions have been initiated without any bid at securing the students consent first. The launching is carried out using the resources and practices that
have been discussed above (e.g. interrogative syntax, intonation, gaze direction, and so forth). Therefore, by opting to initiate a pre-pre sequence as a
preamble to his loaded question (lines 27, 28, and 30), the tutor marks this
question as being in a different league in comparison with its predecessors.6
Had the tutor treated this question as being in place, one would expect him to
say something along the line of next one, do you think Americans in
California are crazy to elect him to be a governor, therefore, cutting down
on the amount of prefatory talk that has been occasioned in anticipation of his
question. By seeking to obtain the go-ahead first, the tutor is communicating
that the incipient question is not in sync with the business of tutoring (i.e.
defining words in these data) and as such will not be designed in the same
fashion as its predecessors.
To summarize, tutors and students make extensive use of QA sequences to
attend to the students linguistic needs. These sequences are oriented to as
the preferred turn-taking mechanism after the participants reach a consensus
with regard to which participant will be in charge of managing the initiation
of these sequences. Once this orientation has been established and a sequence
of questions is projected, several utterances become treated as questions regardless of their syntactic conformation. Though not frequently, participants
can detour from the pre-established format by initiating questions that do not
address students linguistics concerns. These questions are designed in such a
way as to make them hearable as being somehow out of keeping with the
business of tutoring.
H. BELHIAH 37
CONCLUSION
This article has demonstrated how QA sequences are a crucial device in conducting tutoring business. The single-case analysis of a quantitatively tiny but
qualitatively rich adjacency pair demonstrates how an ESL student can manage
the sequential development of the tutoring session with aplomb, by guiding his
tutors gaze and orientation to the sheet of the paper, therefore securing his
tutors alignment with, attendance to, and responsiveness to his linguistic concerns. He manages to accomplish this successfully and artfully by communicating that a shift in gaze direction indicates the projection of a new question, and
that his tutor is expected to provide the second part of this adjacency pair by
either joining him in gazing down at the paper when he wants to initiate a
question or returning his gaze when he is expecting an answer. In this way, he
manages to connect that act of questioning with the shared artifact of the sheet,
which in turn is woven into the agenda for this tutorial activity.
By and large, students bids for assistance are treated unequivocally by tutors
as bona fide questions regardless of their composition and even in the absence
of interrogative syntax. By the same token, tutors questions are understood
unmistakably by students as queries for which they should provide an answer.
These findings are in synch with those of Jackson and Bobb (2009: 631) since
they highlight the ability of L2 speakers to make sophisticated use of the
linguistic and cognitive processes they have at their disposal to successfully
process and comprehend L2 input.
Typically, once tutors and tutees display their attendance to the business of
tutoring (e.g. QA format) by adhering to the pre-allocated turn-types and to the
agenda that has been established at the outset of the session, participants orientation to their agreed-upon format is such that it becomes a normative matter.
As a result, the first party will consistently initiate questions pertaining to the
task at hand, while the second will consistently provide answers. This can be
indicative of the participants interactional competence (He and Young 1998;
Markee 2000; Cekaite 2007). Both participants display a keen understanding of
the sequential organization surrounding their talk, and a shared orientation to
the ongoing task as being principally remedial in nature in that the students
turns will be attended to as bids for assistance with his linguistic needs.
Sometimes, tutors will initiate QA sequences that do not address students
linguistic concerns. In these cases, tutors will mark their upcoming question as
being disjunctive, and subsequently go ahead with their projected talk, but
with little or no sanction on the part of students. Unlike other institutional
encounters (e.g. doctorpatient; for review, see Maynard, 1991), where disjunctive talk is often rejected or forcefully resisted, the representative cases
analyzed in this study show that resisting or declining departure from the
pre-established tasks or agenda is not vigorously pursued by students. This,
I believe, is indicative of the flexible nature of tutoring agenda, as opposed
to the kind of discourse used in courts (Atkinson and Drew 1979) or news
interviews (Clayman and Heritage 2002), for instance. Therefore, while the
38
QA SEQUENCES
TRANSCRIPTION GLOSSARY
(Adapted from Hutchby and Wooffitt 1998)
sequential organization of ESL tutorial dialogs is such that the students linguistic concerns are first and foremost what gets attended to by deploying QA
sequences, deviation from an exclusive attendance to these concerns is treated
as an alternative agenda rather than inappropriate or parasitic talk that needs
to be sanctioned or terminated. It often generates a great amount of talk along
with some exchange of laughter.
From a methodological perspective, this study provides some insights into
the benefits that can be derived from adopting an emic approach to the study of
verbal and nonverbal behavior in second language interactions. Similar to its
predecessors (e.g. Sacks et al. 1974; Pomerantz 1984; Seedhouse 1999; Carroll
2000; Gardner and Wagner 2004; Seedhouse 2004; Markee 2008), it provides
ample evidence to suggest that the amount of information that could be gained
through CA transcription and analysis is so robust that we can no longer afford
to rely primarily on the structural aspects of language analysiseven if our
central interest lies in the cognitive aspects of language. As Markee (2005)
claims, it is perfectly possible that crucial microanalytic information about
human cognition and second language learning may be embedded in transcripts that include this type of information (367).
Future studies should explore in more detail whether different question
formats are linked with or preferred in certain interactional practices. For instance, one may examine if the sequential context surrounding a statement
about a b-event is qualitatively different from that associated with a referential
question. Future research should also consider how interaction might be impacted by participants introducing a new question format or structure, as well
as whether the QA sequences launched by tutors are distinguishable from QA
sequences initiated by tutees, and how ones L1 may impact question design
and participation structure in ESL conversations.
H. BELHIAH 39
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Portions of this article were presented at The 15th World Congress of Applied Linguistics, August
2429, 2008, Essen, Germany. I gratefully acknowledge Rod Gardner and Tim Greers input and
thoughtful comments on an earlier version of this article.
NOTES
used in ESL interactions, see Koshik
2002a, b, and Howard 2010.
4 I thank Donald Carroll for sharing with
me his tutorial on how to use
Photoshop to format the frame grabs.
The turn fragment and the triangle
inside the frame indicate the point in
the talk at which the video was
paused. In the data presented in this
article, the student is the person sitting
to the right.
5 This behavior is reminiscent of
Goodwins principle that a speaker
should obtain the gaze of his recipient
during the course of a turn (1980: 275).
6 This question may be loaded in the
sense that it could be interpreted as an
opinion couched as a question. By
selecting this structure, the tutor may
be entrapping the student into confirming the hidden assumption that
Californians are crazy.
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Proficiency and Sequential Organization

of L2 Requests
1,
*SAAD AL-GAHTANI and
2,
**CARSTEN ROEVER
King Saud University, Saudi Arabia and 2The University of Melbourne, Victoria
*E-mail: algsaad@ksu.edu.sa
**E-mail: carsten@unimelb.edu.au
L2 requests in developmental pragmatics research are commonly investigated
using non-interactive data collection techniques or sidelining the larger discourse sequence in which the request proper is embedded. This study takes a
different approach to the study of L2 requests. In a cross-sectional design, we
collected role play data from learners at four proficiency levels, and focused on
the sequential organization of the interactions and the impact of participants
proficiency level. Findings indicate that lower level learners were less likely to
project the upcoming request and lay the groundwork for it through ascertaining interlocutor availability and providing accounts. They used fewer first-pair
parts and uttered the request early relying on the interlocutor to elicit further
information. The interlocutor also adjusted to learners proficiency level in keeping complications to a minimum. Effects of the social context variable Power
were very limited but discernible at high-proficiency levels. We argue for a more
discursive approach to developmental data in interlanguage pragmatics that
allows the identification of interactional correlates of proficiency.
Developmental work has become an important area of research in interlanguage pragmatics (Kasper and Rose 2002). However, the field continues to
grapple with the challenge of describing the development of learners interactional abilities beyond the level of isolated speech acts (Kasper 2006b). In
this article, we will investigate how learners second language proficiency affects the sequential organization of interactions built around requests and to
what extent social context factors built into the role play situation are reflected
in the interaction.
BACKGROUND
The speech act of request is the most studied speech act in interlanguage pragmatics, and the acquisition of requests has been examined longitudinally and
cross-sectionally (e.g. recently by Rose 2000; Hassall 2001, 2003; Achiba 2003;
Byon 2004; Alcon Soler 2005; Taguchi 2006; Biesenbach-Lucas 2007; Cohen
and Shively 2007; Felix-Brasdefer 2007b; Schauer 2007; EconomidouKogetsidis 2008). Overall findings from developmental studies of requests
S. AL-GAHTANI AND C. ROEVER
43
indicate a move from single word expressions via unanalyzed formulae to

conventional indirectness and greater fine-tuning through more mitigation,
supportive moves and complex syntax (Ellis 1992; Rose 2000; Kasper and
Rose 2002; Felix-Brasdefer 2007b). However, learners in the foreign language
setting tend to show less sociopragmatic development than learners in the
second language environment (Bardovi-Harlig and Dornyei 1998;
Matsumura 2001, 2003; Shimizu 2009) and are often not able to adjust their
production to the relative status of the interlocutor in terms of Brown and
Levinsons (1987) variables of Power, Distance, and Degree of Imposition
(Rose 2000).
Traditionally, much of the research on requests and other speech acts has
been conducted with Discourse Completion Tests (DCTs), which ensure a high
degree of standardization, enable researchers to manipulate variables of interest, and allow for easy comparison between participant responses (for detailed
discussions of DCTs see Kasper and Rose 2002, in press). However, DCTs raise
validity concerns (Felix-Brasdefer 2010), and due to their single-shot nature,
they do not elicit sequentially organized discourse, and ignore the
co-constructed nature of interaction (Golato 2003). They are not suitable for
investigations that aim to uncover development of learners interactional abilities with regard to the sequential organization of interaction and the effect on
the interlocutor.
More interactive approaches to the study of L2 pragmatic development include natural discourse, elicited discourse and role plays.
In a case study, Achiba (2003) used natural data from play time interactions
to track the development of requests by an L1 Japanese speaking child learning
English, and found an expanding repertoire of request strategies, more
target-like use and more specific addressee design. Other studies have investigated acquisition of cultural norms and beliefs with regard to taste (DuFon
2006), folk beliefs (Cook 2006) and social roles (Iino 2006), as well as sentence
final discourse markers in conversation (Ishida 2009), suggestions and rejections in the academic advising session (Bardovi-Harlig and Harttford 1993,
1996), compliment responses (Shimizu 2009) and email exchanges
(Kakegawa 2009). A major advantage of natural discourse is that it offers
completely authentic data, which is not attenuated by researcher intervention
(at least not beyond the effect of audio- or video-recording). However, it is
difficult for researchers to vary independent variables of interest systematically, such as L2 proficiency or situational context factors.
Elicited discourse is a somewhat more structured approach to the collection
of interactive data, and provides a framework for the interaction through a
task. It has a long history in general SLA research (e.g. Long 1983; Varonis and
Gass 1985; Pica 1988), and has been employed in developmental pragmatics
research to investigate the development of learners ability to compliment
(Billmyer 1990), use sentence final particles (Sawyer 1992), and perform disagreements (Bardovi-Harlig and Salsbury 2004). For example, Bardovi-Harlig
and Salsbury (2004) stimulated conversations through emotion cards
44
PROFICIENCY AND SEQUENTIAL ORGANIZATION
(Rintell 1989) or preset topics, recorded the ensuing interaction, and then
identified and classified cases of oppositional talk. Elicited discourse allows
more researcher control than authentic data but is limited to eliciting casual
conversation. If learner production in a variety of social roles is to be elicited, a
role play approach is more suitable.
Open, multi-turn role plays offer a certain degree of standardization as the
situational setting and interactants goals can be pre-determined by the researcher but at the same time they elicit extended, interactive discourse.
This enables researchers to collect data from samples varying in a background
variable of interest (e.g. L2 proficiency) and to systematically vary the situational setting and context factors like Power, Distance, and Degree of
Imposition (Brown and Levinson 1987). Role plays have been widely used
in interlanguage pragmatics research to investigate the speech acts of request
(Trosborg 1995; Kobayashi and Rinnert 2003; Felix-Brasdefer 2007b; Taguchi
2007), apology (Trosborg 1995), refusal (Gass and Houck 1999; Felix-Brasdefer
2004; Taguchi 2007), and complaint (Trosborg 1995), expressions of gratitude
(Hassall 2001), compliment responses (Tran 2006), as well as gambits and
routine formulae (Wildner-Bassett 1986; House 1996). They have also been
employed in assessment settings (Hudson et al. 1995; Yamashita 1996;
Yoshitake 1997; Ahn 2005; Takimoto 2009; Okada 2010). In developmental
request research, Kobayashi and Rinnert (2003) found greater use of
pre-request strategies among high-proficiency learners as well as more
native-like adherence to sociopragmatic norms. Trosborg (1995) found that
learners at three proficiency levels were similar to native speakers in the use
of conventionally indirect strategies, but lower proficiency learners overused
want-based strategies and produced hints with little obvious requestive force.
Felix-Brasdefer (2007b) compared learners of Spanish at three proficiency
levels and found four stages of request development, identified by a move
toward more indirectness and more external modification. In a nondevelopmental study, Okada (2010) investigated role plays as part of Oral
Proficiency Interviews (OPI), and showed how candidates and interviewers
co-construct the role play interaction within the context of the OPI.
However, role plays are not a panacea. Felix-Brasdefer (2007a) showed that
role plays approximate natural data but that they do not include some features
that are common in natural data. Role plays are inauthentic in that participants know that no real-world consequences are attached to the outcome of
their interactions (Kasper and Rose, in press), and participants are likely to
orient to the social situation of the role play itself (Aston 1993; Okada 2010).
Also, they may be aware that the researchers interest is in their language,
which can make the role play more about linguistic self-display than about
solving a task (Al-Gahtani 2010).
On balance, role plays allow a decent degree of standardization while eliciting extended interactive data. However, elicitation is only the first step and
whether learners interactional abilities can be investigated also depends crucially on the analytical framework employed.
45
Analyzing interactive data for evidence of development

The majority of studies in interlanguage pragmatics have employed and
adapted categories developed for DCT data in the Cross-cultural Speech Act
Realization Project (CCSARP) (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989). This approach classifies components of speech acts as a set of semantically based strategies, and
researchers then count the occurrence of different types of strategies and compare frequencies between learners at different proficiency levels (e.g. Trosborg
1995; Felix-Brasdefer 2007a, 2007b, 2008). This approach highlights shifts in
learners preference for certain strategies, and these shifts are understood as
indicative of development in the learners L2 pragmatic competence. Perhaps
the greatest weakness of the speech act set approach is that it does not easily
accommodate modeling of sequential organization: what a certain utterance
accomplishes can be strongly influenced by where it occurs in an interaction
(e.g. Schegloff 1993, 2007) but frequency counts of strategies cannot capture
this information and do not allow researchers to see systematic differences in
how interactants use interactional devices, only in how often they use them.
Being originally designed for DCT data, speech act set categorization
approaches also do not take into account the role of the interlocutor and the
fundamentally co-constructed nature of conversation.1 Furthermore, the categorization approach is silent on the segmentation of longer stretches of talk
into analyzable units, forcing researchers to develop and operationalize their
own segmentation criteria, e.g. episodes (Gass and Houck 1999). There is
nothing in principle wrong with researchers developing their own segmentation criteria, but following a generally established analytical framework facilitates comparison between studies. Such a framework is offered by
Conversation Analysis (CA).
CA
CA was originally developed as a sociological approach, not a linguistic one,
and aims to understand how people organize social activities through talk
(Hutchby and Wooffitt 2008). CA traditionally examines recordings of naturally occurring ordinary, everyday conversation and proceeds under the assumption that co-participants in interaction share a range of competences
that allow them to reliably analyze an interlocutors production, and display
to the interlocutor their reaction to that production (Garfinkel 1967; Schegloff
and Sacks 1973; Heritage and Atkinson 1984). CA tries to uncover the tacit
organizational principles that co-participants follow in co-constructing their
interactions turn by turn (Jacoby and Ochs 1995), and analysts do so by
using the same competencies that interactants bring to bear on their conversation (answering the question why this now?), thereby developing an emic
perspective that is anchored in the data (Seedhouse 2004, 2007). Its emic
perspective also means that CA is traditionally disinclined to use features of
the physical context, the social relationship between the interlocutors, or
46
interlocutor characteristics as explanations for interactional conduct

(Seedhouse 2004). This approach contrasts sharply with research in second
language acquisition generally and interlanguage pragmatics specifically,
which uses elicited data, systematically manipulates task and participant variables so as to observe their effect on a pre-determined feature of interest, and
tends to impose an etic analytic framework (like CCSARP) on the data.
While CA and interlanguage pragmatics may appear fundamentally incompatible, compromise positions have started to emerge. Dissatisfaction with
the overly atomistic and etic analyses in interlanguage pragmatics has led
to calls for a stronger integration of conversation analytic methods and perspectives (Kasper 2006b, 2009a). This has become more feasible through the
emergence of applied CA (Drew and Heritage 1992; ten Have 2001, 2007;
Richards and Seedhouse 2005), which has relaxed the traditional disinclination to take the setting of the interaction and participant identities within
that setting into account, and investigates how aspects of interaction are managed differently in particular institutional contexts (Heritage and Clayman
2008: 18).
Although applied CA has mostly been used in workplace and medical settings, its perspective is useful for the analysis of second language data, which
violates CAs basic assumption of shared competences (Firth and Wagner 2007;
Taleghani-Nikazm and Huth 2010). The participant characteristic of second
language speaker thus becomes analytically relevant, and research has investigated the overall normality of second language talk (Gardner and Wagner
2004; Taleghani-Nikazm and Huth 2010), features of Oral Proficiency
Interviews (Young and He 1998; Kasper 2006a; Kasper and Ross 2007), language learning in instructed settings (recently Mori and Hayashi 2006;
Hellermann 2007, 2009, 2011; Mori and Hasegawa 2009) and the development of discourse markers in Korean (Kim 2009) and Japanese (Ishida 2009).
Brouwer and Wagner (2004) suggest a situated learning framework (Lave and
Wenger 1991) to account for changes in language users interactional practices
over time although such an approach is potentially epistemologically problematic (Kasper 2009b).
Due to its focus on the generic machinery (Sacks 1995) of interaction, CAs
analytical interest is in the sequential organization of requests. From a CA
perspective, a request sequence is built around a central adjacency pair of
requestacceptance/rejection (Schegloff 2007). Anything external to this
adjacency pair is strictly optional, can precede it (pre-expansion), be inserted
between the first and second pair part (insert expansion), or follow it
(post-expansion). Their late sequential placement in an interaction and the
modifying moves preceding them indicates that interactants consider requests
dispreferred actions, whereas offers are the corresponding preferred action
(Schegloff 1990, 2007; Sacks 1995). Empirical studies of requests in pure
and applied CA include Taleghani-Nikazms (2005, 2006) analysis of
German requests in ordinary conversation, Heinemanns (2006) investigation
of positive and negative requests in home care settings, Vinkhuyzen and
47
Szymanskis (2005) study of service requests in a copy shop, Curl and Drews
(2008) comparison of contingency in ordinary phone calls and those made to a
medical service, and Lees (2009) analysis of the organization of extended
requests in calls to an airline. Very little research exists in CA on requests by
second language speakers, with the only exception being Taleghani-Nikazm
and Huths study (2010), which showed that advanced learners of German
sequentially organize requests similarly to native speakers. No research has
investigated the sequential organization of requests by learners at different
levels of proficiency, although such a cross-sectional, vertical comparison
(Zimmermann 1999) approach would enable a description of learners developing interactional abilities for managing this social action.
In this study, we will employ conversation analytic methods for the purposes
of such vertical comparison and in the tradition of applied CA to describe how
(if at all) request sequences co-produced by learners at different levels of L2
proficiency differ systematically. Our use of role play data and a trained interlocutor constitutes the greatest deviation from CAs approach of using natural
data, and it is our major concession to the theory-driven research agenda of
interlanguage pragmatics, which requires a pre-existing research question and
the collection of a corpus of focused and comparable data. However, we do
follow CA in taking an emic perspective and attempting to uncover procedures
that interactants demonstrably use in co-constructing their request sequences.
We will also analyze how the participants deployment of interactional resources affects the interlocutors responses.
Due to the cross-sectional nature of our data, we cannot address the issue of
how learning occurs in situ, and we will be largely sidestepping the discussion
of learning in CA and CA-for-SLA (e.g. Kasper 2009b; Mori and Markee 2009).
However, we will account for differences between proficiency groups in broad
strokes from an interlanguage pragmatics perspective.
THIS STUDY
This study uses a cross-sectional design to find differences in the organization of interaction between participants at different proficiency levels, and
within the proficiency levels, for different settings of the context factor
Power. It thereby aims to highlight how participants general L2 proficiency
affects the interactional resources on which they draw. Our research
questions are:
How do participants differential general proficiency levels relate to
(1)sequences preceding the request (pre-expansions)?
(2)interlocutor insertions between the request and its acceptance (insert
expansions)?
(3)distribution of first- and second-pair parts between the interactants?2
(4)interactions in situations with different settings of the contextual variable
Power?
48
METHODS
Participants
The participants were 26 male Saudi learners of Australian English.3 Saudi
learners of English were chosen because this study was part of a larger project
investigating cross-cultural issues for Saudis communicating in an Australian
context. The sample was further divided into four groups (Table 1) based on
general proficiency. Participants in the beginner, lower- and upper intermediate groups, were studying ESL in a university language program in Melbourne
with the intention of ultimately embarking on a course of tertiary academic
study. Participants in the fourth group (advanced) were not enrolled in the
ESL program; five of them were undertaking Masters degrees in various faculties at two universities in Melbourne; one was undertaking a PhD; and two
were physicians working at Melbourne hospitals.
The students in the language program took a placement test at the beginning
of the program and were subsequently assigned to one of five levels. We took
participants level in the language program as the main indicator of proficiency, and to ensure that the upper intermediate and advanced groups
were clearly different, we administered a C-test with three texts (25 gaps
each) to both groups and collected self-reported information about their
IELTS scores. The groups did not overlap on either measure. All groups also
differed in their length of stay in Australia.
The role play interlocutor/conductor was one of the researchers. An MA
student in Applied Linguistics at the time of data collection, he is a native
speaker of Saudi Arabic and highly proficient in English.
Instruments
The role plays for the present study included three request situations, which
were designed to vary the influence of one context variable (Power) and were
set in an Australian English speaking environment. All situations were designed to be low imposition and low social distance.
Table 1: Groups
Beginners
Low
intermediate
Upper
intermediate
Advanced
N
Age (years)
Course level
5
1922
1
5
1924
3
8
2539
5
IELTS score
C-test (75 max)
Residence
n/a
n/a
12 weeks
n/a
n/a
46 weeks
45.5
1630
68 months
8
2736
Master and PhD
students
6.5 and above
4051
23 years
49
Each situation contained a complicating factor to ensure longer conversations

(Halleck 2007) and make the role play more challenging for participants. This
factor was known to the role play interlocutor but not mentioned on the participants role play cards. In Situation 1 (Bread, P=),4 the participant asks his
housemate to go to the supermarket and buy some bread but the complication is
that the housemate is watching TV and would prefer not to go immediately. In
Situation 2 (Lecture Notes, P+), the participant is a student who asks his professor to give him the lecture notes from the last lecture, which he did not attend
due to illness. Instead of acceding to the request right away, the professor first
asks him why he did not attend and whether he is feeling better. In Situation 3
(Class Canceled, P-), the participant is a tutor (teaching assistant) who asks one
of his students to inform the other classmates that there is no seminar that day.
The student confirms the information before accepting the request.
In order to find any design problems with these role play situations, they
were piloted with two Saudi learners of English. A detailed role play card for
each situation was prepared for all participants (Supplementary Appendix SB).
Procedures
The three role plays were conducted in individual sessions and audio taped.
They were all led by the same conductor in order to eliminate variability between interlocutors.
The role play conductor strove to treat all participants equally but did not
use static scripts and adapted to the participants as necessary. To obtain request
data from each participant, the role play conductor was not to accept participants requests unless they were on the record, i.e. his instructions were to not
accept hints as requests or make offers. While the role play conductor knew
the proficiency levels of the participants and was acquainted with research in
interlanguage pragmatics, it is important to note that he had no familiarity
with conversation analysis or other methodologies for the sequential analysis
of extended discourse at the time the role plays were run. In fact, the role plays
were designed to be analyzed through a traditional, head-act focused speech
act analysis following CCSARP with no attention to their sequential organization. The conductor did not consciously influence sequential organization
other than by trying to elicit an on-record request and to introduce the complicating element.
All role plays were transcribed following the conventions used by Heritage
(1984) (Supplementary Appendix SA) and subsequently analyzed for their
sequential organization.5
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Effects of proficiency were most directly apparent with regard to preexpansions, insert expansions and the suppliance of first-pair parts.
However, effects of the social variable Power were far less obvious.
50
Pre-expansion: the participants work

A pre-expansion is an optional sequence that precedes a first-pair part and in
our case followed the ubiquitous opening sequence with greetings or summons, and optional how-are-you exchanges. Pre-expansions were sometimes
opened with preliminaries to preliminaries or pre-pres (Schegloff 2007), such
as can you help me?, can you do me a favor please?, etc. Pre-expansions
occurred in the beginner group only in three role plays, whereas the other 12
did not contain a pre-expansion as exemplified in Excerpt 1:
Excerpt 1: Bread, Beginner
1. P: "Excuse me::
2. I: yes
3. P: I (.) want bread
4. I: Ok
5. P: Yea::h
6. I: So:: you want bread?
7. P: Yes:: (.) it is enough in the ()
8. I: .hhh (.) >you mean< there is nothing: in the fridge?
9. P: Yes
10. I: So:: (.) you wa::nt me to go:: to the superma::rket and get
some bread for you
11. P: Yes
12. I: Ok (.) Ill go "now and get it for you
In Excerpt 1, the participant produces a greeting/summons in line 1, and after
that is acknowledged, launches straight into the request in line 3 without any
pre-expansion or other preliminary moves.
Pre-expansions were also rare in the low-intermediate group, occurring in
four out of 15 role plays. Excerpt 2 shows a case where a pre-expansion
occurred in an excerpt from the Lecture Notes role play with an intermediate
level learner:
Excerpt 2: Lecture notes, Low intermediate
1. P: hello:
2. I: hi
3. P: how are you::?
4. I: Im goo::d
51
5. P: !I am sorry (.) because (.) I dont come (.3) after week

because (.) I am sick,
6. I: Ok (.) how do you feel n::ow?
7. P: I am fine
8. I: Thats good
9. P: I want shortno:tes
10.
I: "Do you mea::n (.) the lecture notes?
11.
P: Lecture notes (.) yeah (.) I () I ta::lk with my friend (.4) he

(.) he to:ld me (.3)
12.
you give lecture notes,
13.
I: yea::h
14.
P: but (.) I dont have lecture notes "now (.1) can you help
me?
15.
I: >Yeah<
16.
P: Give me lecture no::tes=
17.
I: =sure
In Excerpt 2, the lower intermediate participant opens the conversation with a

greeting sequence, and then in line 5 provides an account as a pre-expansion.
The interlocutor acknowledges the account in line 6 and opens a short sequence on the participants well-being, which concludes in line 8, followed
by the request for handouts.
In contrast, in the upper intermediate group, only one out of 24 role plays
did not have a pre-expansion. Excerpt 3 shows a request by an upper intermediate level learner in the Bread role play:
Excerpt 3: Bread, Upper intermediate
1. P: hi ((name))
2. I: hi ((name))
3. P: .hhh >actually< I wanna ask you something?
4. I: Su::re.
5. P: ! .hhh today I have too many (.) assignments to do=
6. I: =Yeah
7. P: ! "so I have no:: more time (.1) to do my shopp[ing
8. I:
[.hh
52
9. P: ! for today (.) a::nd Im running out (.) the bread so could
you (.3) buy
10. some bread for me?
11. I: su::re (.) yeah (.) but >you know< right now Im wa:tching
this match so (.)
12. do you wa::nt it at the moment (.) or:: I can buy it later on?
In Excerpt 3, the participant opens the conversation with a greeting, and
then in line 3 produces a prepre, which could preface a question or a request
in a real-world interaction with an innocent interlocutor. However, given
the role play situation where both interactants knew that a request was the
target of the interaction, and the initial use of actually as a disalignment
token projecting a dispreferred action, it is likely that this prepre prepares
the hearer for the accounts in lines 5, 7, and 9, preceding the request in lines
910.
The advanced group also almost invariably showed pre-expansions, except
in two role plays. Excerpt 4 illustrates a sequence produced by an advanced
learner:
Excerpt 4: Class Canceled, Advanced
1. P: Excuse me
2. I: yes (.) Mr. (first name)
3. P: ! >can I< ask you: something (.) to do it?
4. I: SU::RE
5. (.3)
6. P: ! uhm:: I have an urgen:t meeting today an::d (.1) I cant
attend the class
7. toda::y. Can you "plea::se tell your friends that Im not available today?
8. I: hh I will (.) so::: there is no:: class today?
9. P: there is no class today
10. I: all right (.) I will tell them
11. P: okay (.) Than:ks
12. I: youre welcome
13. p: bye
14. I: bye
53
Excerpt 4 starts with a summons and a response, followed by a prepre in line

3, which (though ungrammatical) projects the upcoming request. After a
go-ahead response in line 4, the next turn by P contains background by way
of an account and a problem statement, followed by the request itself. In line 8,
I accepts the request and engages in a brief repair, clarifying that Ps unavailability means that the class is not taking place, which P confirms in line 9. After
acknowledging receipt of this updated information, I confirms that he will pass
it on to his fellow students, and P closes the sequence with a sequence-closing
third (Schegloff 2007) in line 11.
It is notable that upper level participants overwhelmingly provided
pre-expansions whereas lower level participants did so rarely. The differences
in pre-expansion between the groups are in accordance with findings in traditional interlanguage pragmatics research (e.g. Rose 2000; Felix-Brasdefer
2007b) that higher proficiency learners use more supportive moves, presumably because their greater automatization and advanced control of the L2
makes it easier for them to produce more extensive utterances. While this is
true, sequential analyses show that the placement of pre-expansions differed
between higher- and lower level groups, pointing to a noticeable proficiency
effect on sequential organization. The main difference was that higher level
participants pre-expansions elicited information about interlocutor availability
and provided accounts, projecting the upcoming request. Lower level participants frequently produced the request first, and then relied on the interlocutor
to elicit reasons or simply accept their request (see Excerpt 1 for a typical
example). This is actually a very efficient strategy for speakers with limited
linguistic resources, for whom the production of extended discourse is difficult
and effortful: they make their request first, and if it is accepted, there is no
need for further explanation, because post-expansions do not usually occur
after preferred second-pair parts (Schegloff 2007). Only if the request is rejected do they need to go to extra trouble to reverse a rejection.
While the lower level learners tactic is efficient, the higher level learners
more proactive approach allows them to steer the interaction. By providing
reasons first or performing checks on the interlocutors availability, they can
gauge the likelihood of request acceptance interactively, and adjust their production accordingly if necessary, for example by impressing the importance of
their request on the interlocutor, or abandoning a request altogether if it is not
likely to be accepted.
Overall, pre-expansions showed clear differences between proficiency levels,
and their greater linguistic ability allowed higher level learners more control of
the progress of their request.
We also looked for evidence of situational variation but found very little. The
use of pre-expansions was similar across situations for each of the groups, with
one exception: four out of eight participants in the advanced group integrated
accounts in the request turn in the Class Canceled situation rather than in
pre-expansion moves as they did in the other situations. This difference might
be related to the participant playing the more powerful role in this situation,
54
which makes it less necessary to check for the likelihood of compliance before
making a request. Rather, requesters more powerful position might convey a
sense of entitlement, which allows them to go on the record without preliminary moves checking for availability or willingness. Other than in the case of the
advanced group, different degrees of Power associated with the interlocutors
social role did not seem to affect pre-expansions for any of the other groups.
Insert expansions: the interlocutors work

As interactions are co-constructed, it is to be expected that differences in production between participant groups would also influence the interlocutors
production (van Lier and Matsuo 2000). This was indeed the case in several
ways. With low-proficiency learners, the interlocutor accepted the request
earlier and often did not introduce a complicating factor via an insert expansion. In fact, with both lower level groups, there was no negotiation about the
timing of buying bread. In the Lecture Notes situation with the lower level
groups, the interlocutor did not provide an insert expansion with half the
participants, and asked the other half about why they were absent or whether
they are feeling better now, but never both as Excerpt 5 demonstrates:
Excerpt 5: Lecture Notes, Beginner
1. P: excuse me doctor
2. I: yes (.) come in
3. P: I wa::s absent (.2) since last two wee::ks (.) I want handout
4. I: !Why were you absent?
5. P: I was sick
6. I: Ok (.) this copy is for you::
7. P: Tha::nk you doctor
8. I: Youre welcome
P produces an account with a request turn in line 3, which I follows with a
question about Ps reason for his absence, thereby signaling that compliance
with Ps request is conditional on a satisfactory response to this question.
When P provides such a response in line 5, I acknowledges Ps explanation
as sufficient and grants the request in line 6.
With the higher level groups, a combination of the two questions was the
normal insert expansion as Excerpt 6 demonstrates:
Excerpt 6: Lecture Notes, Upper intermediate
1. P: .hhh yesterday (.) I was absent yesterday
2. I: yeah
55
3. P: I want the handouts plea:se.

4. I: you want the handout:ts?
5. P: yep
6. I: ! sure (.) but wh::y were you absent?
7. P: I was sick (.) yesterday
8. I: ! .hh (.) how do you fee::l >right now<?
9. P: ok (.) now good
10.
I: thats good (.) so:: you want the handouts?
11.
P: yep
12.
I: I have extra:: copies (.1) this one is for you.
13.
P: tha::nk you.
In line 6, I signals in-principle approval of Ps request but then asks for an

account of the absence, and when P provides this account in line 7, I follows
up with a question after Ps current state of health in line 8 before bringing the
interaction back to the Ps request in line 10.
In the Class Canceled situation, the interlocutor provided a confirmation
question as the pre-planned (complicating) insert expansion, and since such
questions can also function as a repair when dealing with a genuine trouble
source, it is difficult to see differential effects of participants group membership. However, one difference is noticeable. With lower level learners, the
interlocutor frequently used you mean in his rephrasing, as in line 6 of
Excerpt 7:
Excerpt 7: Class Canceled, Low intermediate
1.
P: you can sai::d to all students (.1) "today no:: lecture?
2.
I: ! ok (.) so:: you mean (.) there is no lecture toda::y?
3.
P: yea::h
4.
I: ok (.) Ill tell them
With higher level participants, the interlocutor never used this formula but
either said so there is no class today or so it means (that) there is no class
today as in line 8 of Excerpt 8:
Excerpt 8: Class Canceled, Upper intermediate
1. P: .hhh today Im busy [
2. I: [yeah
3. P: Im not (.) attending the cla::ss
56
4. I: yeah
5. P: I want you (.) to tell your students (.3) my tea::cher is not
coming today
6. I: .hh
7. P: you can?
8. I: ! so:: there is no: class today?
9. P: NO class today,
10. I: .hh (.) sure (.) Ill tell them
Participants tended to react differently to the two questions, as illustrated in
the examples above: a you mean clarification usually elicited only a confirmatory yeah as in line 3 of Excerpt 7, whereas a so (it means) there is
clarification usually elicited a repeat of the central proposition (NO class
today) as in line 9 of Excerpt 8 and line 9 of Excerpt 4 above, or an emphasis
on a limiting condition (today, just today). Whether this difference in participant reaction is due to a different function served by the confirmatory
repair first-pair parts or is simply a result of proficiency differences that
make lower level participants more inclined to shorter responses, remains an
open question.
Because the interlocutors complicating utterances were pre-planned as part
of the role plays, conclusions about different effects of Power cannot be drawn.
Leading the conversation: first-pair parts and repair

A further effect of proficiency level on the co-construction of the interaction is
apparent in the distribution of first- and second-pair parts. Due to the design of
the role plays, where the participant is always the requester, the role plays
generally have the participant produce first-pair parts while the interlocutor
produces second-pair parts, except for insert expansions, as Excerpt 9 illustrates:
Excerpt 9: Bread, Upper intermediate
1. P: hi ((name))
2. I: hi ((name))
3. P: .hhh >actually< I wanna ask you something?
4. I: ! Su::re.
5. P: .hhh today I have too many (.) assignments to do=
6. I: ! =Yeah
7. P: "so I have no:: more time (.1) to do my shopp[ing
8. I:
57
[.hh
9. P: for today (.) a::nd Im running out (.) the bread so could you
(.3) buy
10.
some bread for me?
11.
I: ! su:re yeah (.) but you know (.) right n::ow Im wa::tching
this match (.) so::
12.
do you want it at the moment or I can buy it la::ter on?
13.
P: yeah (.) thats all right (.3) you can do [this
14.
I:
15.
P: later on.
16.
I: .hh
17.
P: yep.
[later
I produces a second-pair part in response to Ps greeting in line 2, and then two

go-ahead responses in lines 4 and 6. Only in line 11, where he introduces the
complication as an insert expansion after the request has been made, does he
produce a first-pair part and more than a one-word response. However, with
participants in the lowest level group, the interlocutor provides far more
first-pair parts as in Excerpt 10:
Excerpt 10: Bread, Beginner
1. P: "Excuse me::
2. I: yes
3. P: I (.) want bread
4. I: Ok
5. P: Yea::h
6. I: ! So:: you want bread?
7. P: Yes:: (.) it is enough in the ()
8. I: ! .hhh (.) >you mean< there is nothing: in the fridge?
9. P: Yes
10.
I: ! So:: (.) you wa::nt me to go:: to the superma::rket and get

some bread for you
11.
P: Yes
58
12. I: Ok (.) Ill go "now and get it for you

13. P: Ok
14. I: No problem
Is first-pair part in line 6 may seem odd since it just reiterates Ps statement
from line 3, which I acknowledged in line 4. However, its function is that it
prompts P for more information, which P attempts to provide in line 7. Ps turn
results in a contradiction to his original request, and I initiates repair by proposing a candidate solution in line 8, which is confirmed by P in line 9. Line 10
is interesting in that I effectively makes an offer by providing the request P
could make in this sequential position, which P confirms, and I follows up with
an offer of getting the bread immediately in line 12. In fact, I breaks protocol in
this case and in another ten out of 15 role plays with the beginner group by not
leaving it to the participant to produce an on-the-record request but rather
providing an offer. Through his provision of first-pair parts, I makes it less
necessary for P to produce long utterances, and creates an opportunity for
him to reply with yes or no. Such interlocutor-guided conversations are
common in interactions with the beginner group, and some degree of repair
occurs in nearly all role plays with the beginners, for example, in line 4 of
Excerpt 11:
Excerpt 11: Lecture Notes, Beginner
1. P: hi teacher
2. I: hello:: ((name))
3. P: this me (.) I want paper (.) my cla::sses (.) OK?
4. I: ! you wa::nt to get the handouts (.) for the la::st lecture?
5. P: >yeah (.) yeah<
6. I: ok (.) here you go::
7. P: thank you (.) thank you very much
The greater occurrence of repair and interlocutor production of first-pair parts
with the beginners is not surprising and echoes the findings of van
Lier and Matsuo (2000). Beginning learners production is highly untargetlike
in many instances, so clarification and confirmation on the part of the interlocutor are common and the structure of the interaction becomes much
more interlocutor controlled than for the other groups. This was, however,
only the case with this lowest level group. There were occasional repairs in
role plays with other groups as well (see e.g. line 8 in Excerpt 4 above),
but never did the interlocutor lead the conversation to the same extent
as he did with the beginning-level learners, and they were the only group
59
for which he provided candidate formulations of the target requests and outright offers.
We did not find any systematic differences in distribution of first and second
pair parts between situations within proficiency levels.
Sequential organization, proficiency, and situational variation

This study set out to take a developmental perspective on interlanguage pragmatics data from extended discourse. In accordance with speech act studies
(Rose 2000; Kasper and Rose 2002), we found that lower level learners were
much less likely to supply supportive moves as pre-expansions, instead relying
on early production of the request itself. At the same time, the occasional
occurrence of preliminary moves in request sequences even among beginners
is evidence that these competences are available to learners regardless of proficiency, but proficiency may affect whether learners can deploy them in
real-time discourse.
The sequential organization of learners requests had a strong effect on the
interlocutor, who took a much more directive role with the beginners and
elicited information necessary for completing the role play by asking questions
and thereby producing first-pair parts, rather than responding to the learners
questions as was the case with the higher level groups. The interlocutor was
also less likely to introduce complications with lower level learners, and even
disregarded his role play instructions by providing candidate formulations of
requests. Learners development in interactional abilities seems to progress
from a more passive role of relying on the interlocutor to elicit background
information in support of their requests (and even provide offers) to a more
active one of introducing background information through preliminary moves
and thereby projecting the upcoming request and gauging the likelihood of
acceptance. It also appears that early provision of the request and lack of
pre-expansions signals to the interlocutor a lower degree of interactional ability and the need to take greater charge of the conversation and keep complications to a minimum. Incidentally, the interlocutors elicitation of specifics
and accounts models to learners what features are expected in the course of
making a request, and may well socialize them into requesting practices in the
target speech community [similar to Bardovi-Harlig and Hartfords (1993,
1996) findings].
It is interesting that only some learners from the advanced group exhibited
any noticeable effect of socio-pragmatic ability on the structure of the interaction. The reason why the lower proficiency groups did not show a similar
effect when in a position of higher power could be due to a lack of socialization
opportunities as the three lower level groups were drawn from the relatively
sheltered environment of a language school. It could also be the case that only
the advanced learners had sufficient linguistic ability to notice in the input
60
how socio-pragmatic rules regarding power were pragmalinguistically implemented (Roever 2009).
CA and interlanguage pragmatics research

We found that integrating CA was crucial to understanding proficiency effects
on sequential organization of interaction, which speech act analyses cannot
capture and which had so far not been shown for L2 requests. Using CAs emic
approach and its substantial research on pre-sequences and insert expansions
enabled us to identify these types of sequences in our data, and to describe
how the use of preliminary moves changed with proficiency. It also helped to
highlight the minute effect of social context reflected in some advanced learners greater tendency to eschew pre-expansions and only place an account in
the request turn.
CAs focus on co-construction of interaction also opened up a new way of
integrating the interlocutors contributions in the analysis, which are commonly ignored in speech act pragmatics. This broadened view showed how
learners proficiency-dependent deployment of interactive resources affected
the interlocutor and thereby the overall structure of the talk.
Overall, the use of CA methods highlighted how proficiency affects the
sequential organization of requests, and helped us identify differences across
proficiency levels that a speech act analysis would not have accommodated.
LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH

Our study had some logistical limitations. Because it was part of a larger project focusing on Saudi learners of English, we did not have speakers of
other L1s in our participant population. Also, due to cultural norms, our population was exclusively male, so there may be gender effects we were unable
to detect. Finally, the role play interlocutor in all cases was a native speaker
of Saudi Arabic, though highly fluent in Australian English, but his responses may still be somewhat different from a native speaker of Australian
English.
The use of role plays involved some trade offs between standardization and
authenticity. Data may not be equivalent to natural conversations, and it was
not always possible to distinguish in analyses whether participants were orienting to the role play or the make-believe situation in the role play. However,
we believe that participants need to use interactional resources at their disposal
to accomplish the task of an interactive role play (Okada 2010, makes a similar
argument), and we were able to see how learners at different proficiency levels
deploy their resources to do so.
For future research, we wonder what would happen if the interlocutor was a
participant as well, that is, if two learners were interacting with each other
61
who do not know each others instructions. It would also be interesting to

explore the effect of a less accommodating interlocutor (as in Gass and
Houck 1999) as well as the impact of different social variables (distance and/
or imposition). Furthermore, investigating the effect of the interaction between proficiency and length of exposure on sequential organization would
be a challenging but fascinating project. Finally, comparisons with L1 data
might point to the existence of transfer in discourse organization.
SUPPLEMENTARY DATA
Supplementary Data are available at Applied Linguistics online.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors extend their appreciation to the deanship of scientific research at King Saud
University for funding the project through research group project number RGP-VPP-094.
NOTES
1 This is not to say that the effect of proficiency on interaction has never been
looked at. Work on interactional modification conducted from a general SLA
perspective (e.g. Long 1983; Varonis
and Gass 1985; van Lier and Matsuo
2000) has found that higher proficiency
interlocutors ask clarification questions
and steer the conversation making it
asymmetrical.
2 It would seem logical to also consider
post-expansions, but since all our role
plays contained preferred second-pair
parts for the request, i.e., the request
was always eventually accepted,
non-minimal post-expansions did not
occur, as predicted by Schegloff (2007).
3 As the role plays were conducted by a
male researcher, Saudi cultural norms
made it impossible to recruit female
participants. It is highly inappropriate
in Saudi culture for a man to have extended conversations with women who
are not blood relatives. We considered
recruiting a female research associate to
role play these scenarios with women,
but decided against it as it would

even be inappropriate for a male researcher to listen to the voices of
these female research participants
during transcribing.
4 P= designates equal power for both
interactants, P+ designates higher
power for the interlocutor than the participant, and P- designates higher
power for the participant. All Power
settings refer to the situation being
role played rather than power distribution in the role play as a social event.
5 We did not categorize head acts as is
common in interlanguage pragmatics
research. As one reviewer pointed out,
it is of course in principle possible to
classify head acts according to the interlocutor response they trigger. However,
the interlocutor response to a requestive head act was to some extent
pre-determined in our role plays as an
eventual acceptance so we felt that this
lack of authenticity would make a valid
categorization based on next-turns
impossible.
62
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Sentence Reading and Writing for Second

Language Vocabulary Acquisition
1,
*FRANCOIS PICHETTE, 2LINDA DE SERRES and

3
MARC LAFONTAINE
This study compares the relative effectiveness of reading and writing sentences
for the incidental acquisition of new vocabulary in a second language. It also
examines if recall varies according to the concreteness of target words.
Participants were 203 French-speaking intermediate and advanced English as
second language (ESL) learners, tested for incidental acquisition of 16 rare concrete, or abstract L2 words. Immediate and delayed cued recall was used to assess
acquisition. Results from immediate recall show superior recall for writing tasks
over reading tasks, and for concrete words over abstract words. However,
delayed recall scores suggest that this superiority disappears over time.
Given its implications for teaching, a subject that has sparked interest is the
comparative effectiveness of reading1 and writing in the acquisition and retention of words in a second language (L2). Opinions differ regarding which individual activity is more likely to promote the retention of a new word by the
learner: Is it reading a word in context or writing that word in a sentence?
Unlike reading, which offers external input, writing is a language generating
task, thus it does not allow for encountering new words. Therefore, the question of the relative efficiency of reading versus writing must be addressed regarding new words recently encountered byor presented tothe L2 learner.
STATE OF THE QUESTION

Studies comparing the effectiveness of writing and reading tasks for the acquisition of vocabulary in L2 are scarce. In several cases, the writing of sentences
was compared with the reading/visualizing of isolated words (e.g. Coomber
et al. 1986; Barcroft 1998, 2000), or the reading/visualizing of words was
compared with the writing of isolated words (e.g. Thomas and Dieter 1987;
Barcroft 2006). However, reading or writing isolated words out of context is
not a normal learning task. Furthermore, many of these studies opposed tasks
carried out with sentences whose context offered semantic or syntactic information with tasks based on isolated words with no contextual clues.
1
Universite du Quebec, 2Universite du Quebec a` Trois-Rivie`res and 3Universite Laval,
Canada
*E-mail: pichette.francois@teluq.ca
F. PICHETTE, L. DE SERRES, AND M. LAFONTAINE
67
Skehan and Fosters Limited Capacity Model predicts better

performance on the non-complex task as learners do not have
to direct almost their entire attentional capacity towards the content
of the task, and, thus, part of their attention can be devoted
to the linguistic form. Robinsons Cognition Hypothesis, on the
contrary, expects learners to do better on the complex task as
learners are able to share their attention between content and
form. (p. 51)
HYPOTHESES
In light of the above considerations, the goal of the present study is to investigate learning that is as incidental as possible,3 since the more intentional the
Considering these limitations, other more recent studies have compared the
reading and writing of plain text. Studies conducted by Hulstijn and Laufer
(2001), Laufer (2003), Keating (2008), and Kim (2008) all compared the recall
of words or pseudo-words in English as second language (ESL) after the completion of tasks relating to the reading and writing of sentences, passages or
short texts. Contrary to the aforementioned studies relating to isolated words
(Barcroft 2006), these studies reported a significantly higher recall for writing
tasks. However, Keating (2008) notes that the superiority of writing in his
study did not hold when test scores were adjusted to reflect time on task. In
the first experiment of his two-part study, Webb (2005) had one group of
participants write sentences containing pseudo-words while another group
read the sentences with equivalents given in L1. Participants were given
12 min to learn the words. Although reading proved to be superior on 10
different recall measures, Webb points out that the readers had to wait for
the slower writers to complete the task: the readers thus had several minutes
to resort to memorization strategies after their task was complete, giving them
a likely advantage over the writers. For Webbs second experiment, each participant completed both the reading and writing tasks, each with 20
pseudo-words. This time, however, they were given only the time necessary
to complete each task. Lastly, participants were unaware that there would be a
recall test, in order to avoid the temptation to resort to individual memorization strategies. The results ran contrary to the first experiment: writing proved
to be superior on all recall measures.
The scarcity of these studies, compounded by their methodological discrepancies, makes it impossible to draw solid conclusions, so that current knowledge does not allow for definitive answers regarding the relative effectiveness
of reading and writing for L2 vocabulary acquisition. Some studies and models
suggest that reading is the more effective of the two activities, while others
seem to conclude the opposite. Furthermore, researchers do not agree as to
whether the higher level of complexity inherent to writing2 tasks enhances
acquisition. As summarized by Kuiken and Vedder (2008),
68
SENTENCE READING AND WRITING FOR VOCABULARY ACQUISITION
learning is, the more the learner is likely to resort to diverse memorization strategies. In such cases, one ends up comparing reading + strategies
to writing + strategies. Our hypotheses are that writing tasks will better
promote vocabulary acquisition and that concrete words will be better
acquired.
Hypothesis #1: superiority of writing tasks
Some researchers have posited that the type of semantic elaboration

involved in sentence writing should facilitate learning new words
(e.g. target pseudowords; Coomber et al. 1986). Other researchers
have argued that the type of output involved in sentence writing
can facilitate lexical learning (Laufer 1997). (p. 304)
Barcroft argues against a superiority of writing tasks for learning new words,
claiming that language production relies on processes other than those
involved in the acquisition of new forms, thus tapping the cognitive resources
which are necessary (but no longer available) for acquisition. However, it is
difficult to determine if the amount of semantic processing which takes place
when encountering a new word is really superior when writing it in a complete sentence rather than when reading it in context, even when accompanied by an image or an L1 equivalent as semantic support. Also, we must not
ignore an additional type of processing, which further distinguishes the writing
of a sentence from the writing of isolated words, or from any type of reading:
the syntactic elaboration,5 which occurs (in addition to the semantic elaboration) when combining words and appropriately placing them in a cohesive
sentence structure.
According to Swains (1985) Output Hypothesis, only language production

tasks truly compel the learner to undertake full grammatical processing,
which favors a more effective L2 development (Gass 1988; Joe 1998). It is,
in fact, generally accepted that word memory depends largely on both the
amount and quality of attention that has been paid to various aspects of that
word (cf. Hulstijn 2001). These considerations are reminiscent of Craik and
Lockharts (1972) Levels of Processing Theory. These researchers had originally
hypothesized that writing would be more effective, since it would necessitate
deeper processing of new words.4
In addition, researchers have paid little attention to syntax in their models
of vocabulary acquisition, which usually focus on word meanings and
forms. Syntactic representations are usually seen as lexical projections, thus
stemming from the acquisition of a word rather than leading to it (e.g.
Vanniarajan 1997). For example, an existing vocabulary acquisition model is
the TOPRA model (Barcroft 2000), which is based on the form and the meaning of new words, with syntax being absent as an influential factor. Barcroft
(2004) emphasizes that:
69
Hypothesis #2: influence of concreteness

On one hand, in many models of vocabulary acquisition (and the studies
that inspired them), the factors that seem best to predict recall are centered
on the strategies, attitudes or motivation of the reader (e.g. Tseng and
Schmitts model 2008)as well as the attention given to these factors by
the reader and the context of the target word. Few models, if any, consider
the factor of word concreteness, even though the superiority of concrete
words for recall over abstract words has been demonstrated in numerous
studies over the years (Paivio 1983; De Groot and Keijzer 2000; Hamilton
and Rajaram 2001; Peters and Daum 2008). For example, Vanniarajans
(1997) model only considers syntactic category, morphology and case
among word-related factors, and the Involvement Load Hypothesis assumes
that word complexity factors are assumed to be held constant (Hulstijn
and Laufer 2001: 554).
Consequently, our second hypothesis is that the nature of a word plays a
role in its retention. We thus suggest that concrete words have a higher
potential for retention due to the higher number of connections they
allow7 and offer additional connections through mental imagery (Paivio
1983).8
Drawing from Craik and Lockharts (1972) notion of depth of processing,
Hulstijn and Laufers Involvement Load Hypothesis mentioned earlier proposes that the effectiveness of a language learning task rests on the learners
level of cognitive involvement, which is operationalized by the combination of
three components: need, search and evaluation (Hulstijn and Laufer 2001;
Laufer and Hulstijn 2001). While the Involvement Load Hypothesis has
received considerable empirical support (for recent overviews of such support,
see Keating 2008 and Kim 2008), evidence for the impact of word concreteness
renders questionable the fact that this hypothesis holds word factors constant.
In evaluating the language learning potential of a task, it seems justified to
consider word complexity factors in addition to task-induced involvement. As
a first step toward the goal of complementing the Involvement Load
Hypothesis, this study investigated the relevance of considering word concreteness in the equation.
Lastly, one further argument may be made in favor of the efficiency of

writing over reading: the effect of task overlap. While writing necessarily involves a certain amount of reading, the contrary is not true. As we write, we
visualize and read what we have written; would it not follow, then, that some
of the advantages linked to visual contact that we attribute to reading are also
likely to play a role in the case of writing?
In light of these considerations, our study is based upon the hypothesis that
the greater cognitive demands of writing should lead to better acquisition of
new words through writing than through reading text.6
70
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
The present study attempts to answer the following research questions:
Question #1
For intermediate and advanced L2 students, does sentence writing lead to
higher vocabulary gains relative to sentence reading?
For intermediate and advanced L2 students, does recall vary according to the
concreteness of target words?
Question #3
Does the impact of task and concreteness change over time?
Based on our two hypotheses, our predictions for recall are that writing will lead
to higher recall than reading, and recall will be superior for more concrete words.
METHODS
Participants
The participants are 203 French-speaking ESL students, enrolled in a
University in Quebec, Canada. The participants mean age was 24.2 years,
with a range of 1853 years.
In order to ensure that the participants had a sufficient mastery in the L2 to
complete the writing tasks, and to preclude the possibility that insufficient L2
competence would saturate working memory and prevent vocabulary acquisition, only intermediate and advanced students were tested.
Items
Since the participants had a relatively high level of competence in L2, we chose
to use eight concrete words and eight abstract words which we considered to
be very rare. Each word contained three syllables, and had no French cognates.
For reasons of ecological validity and authenticity, real words were preferred to
pseudo-words. The use of rare words made it almost impossible for the participants to have encountered them previously. As with pseudo-words, it also
eliminates the need to quantify or qualify previous knowledge of each item by
each participant, which is haphazard (Read 2000).9 The words were assumed
to be as close as possible to the two extremities of Paivio et al.s (1968) Likert
scale for concreteness and imagery. This was verified in a related study (N = 20)
based on a 7-point scale, in which our abstract words yielded a mean of 3.0 for
concreteness and 3.3 for mental imagery, whereas means for the concrete
Question #2
71
words were 5.8 and 4.9, respectively (see Supplementary Appendix SA for all
16 items).
Tasks
Time allotted for completing the tasks

Almost all experimenters in previous studies of this nature have imposed fixed
amounts of time on the participants. As discussed by Webb (2005), however,
this methodological approach throws into doubt the nature of the processes
that actually take place during the experiment, for several reasons.
First, if more time than necessary is allocated for a task, this leaves time for
processes and learning strategies other than those anticipated by the researcher. Reading speed varies from one person to another, and once a sentence or
clause has been read, the readers eyes may remain fixed on the items; this has
been called the wrap-up effect, which results in additional comprehension processes in the form of elaborative inferences (Wiley and Rayner 2000). Upon
completion of these stages, the goal of comprehension is reached. While reading should be the only task involved, there are reasons to believe that if the
reader is exposed to the same sentence longer than necessary, additional information processing will occur: re-reading, mental rehearsals, mnemonic
techniques (in the case of intentional acquisition), etc. It is most likely that
these strategies, both in nature and number, vary from one person to another.
As signaled by Webb (2005), in a normal reading situation, nobody spends
more time than necessary for completing a reading task.
The same phenomenon occurs in writing. The creation of a mental representation followed by marking it on paper might require different amounts
For the writing task, participants were to write three sentences per item, with
each sentence containing the target L2 word. The target word, accompanied by
its definition in the L1, preceded each sequence of three sentences.10
The reading task involved three sentences containing the target word in
three different syntactic functions: as a subject, as a direct object, and as an
indirect object. When possible, the target words were used twice in the singular and once in the plural form (see Supplementary Appendix SB for task
samples). The use of relatively long sentences was seen as a compromise between isolated words and texts, which would have involved considerably more
language material than the writing tasks they were compared with.
The recall task chosen was cued recall, which requires the participants to
provide the L2 word via a clue offered by the experimenter. The measured
knowledge is thus of a productive, not receptive, nature. Cued recall is recognized as sensitive to word forms, since the person tested does not have to
recognize the L2 form, but retrieve it from memory and produce it correctly.
Since the experiment included abstract words, the clues were L1 French definitions, since the use of illustrations would be difficult, if not impossible.
72
Procedure
The experiment was presented as a study aimed at measuring skills for comprehending and using rare words in English. It was decided not to disclose the
real objective of the exercise so as to avoid the use of other idiosyncratic
strategies for the intentional memorization of content. The participants were
not made aware of the immediately following recall test; this was to promote
incidental learning by reducing the risk that they focus on the target words for
deliberate retention (Peters 2007).
The participants first signed a consent form and completed an identification
questionnaire to gather general information regarding their literacy.
Participants also received guidelines on the nature of the experiment with
an example for each task.
The test consisted of one target word per sheet, displayed on the front side.
This page was to be turned over as soon as it was completed. For the writing
tasks, participants were instructed verbally to write sentences of more than 10
words, and to use a different type of sentence each time. This last requirement
was among the instructions given orally at the time of testing, in order to limit
the amount of written instructions on the test package. In most cases, the
participants wrote the word as a subject, a direct object and a indirect object,
as was shown in class as an example prior to testing (cf. the writing sample in
of time from one person to another. In this case, too, allocating a period of
time longer than necessary will lead to cognitive processes in addition to the
writing task.
In the same line of thought, too little time allotted could also have a negative
effect on recall. In a normal reading or writing situation, nobody is subjected to
a pre-determined, pre-announced number of seconds for completing the task.
In studies with a fixed time, some participants struggle to complete the task on
time (e.g. Webb 2005, Exp #1). In other cases, it is not unreasonable to assume
that even if the time allocated was just enough (e.g. 48 s per sentence in
Barcroft 2000), the mere awareness of this limitation could create stress
which would be detrimental to performance. Therefore, controlling for time
on task was deemed inadequate in this study given the different nature of the
tasks involved, although it is advocated for tasks of a more similar nature
(cf. Folse 2006 for different types of writing tasks). In line with the aforementioned ecological validity argument, these more natural conditions akin to
most classroom tasks may give our results more applicability for teaching.
Thus, as in Webbs (2005) second experiment, each individual participant
was allowed the time necessary to complete the task; no time limit was
announced. The writing task lasted for about twice as long as the reading
task. This greater time, according to Webb (2005) and Hulstijn and Laufer
(2001), is seen not as an advantage of the writing task, but rather as an intrinsic characteristic of it.
73
Scoring and analyses

The scores were calculated by an independent corrector and the participants
were kept anonymous. One point was awarded for each correct syllable, with a
maximum possible score of three per word. Syllable scoring was chosen due to
its high correlations with scores resulting from whole word scoring (e.g. r = .96
in Farhadi and Malekpour 1997). It also allows correctors not to reject forms
such as opsimat or opsimoth for opsimath, all the while providing them with an
objective method for allowing partial points. Significant effects can be observed
based on syllable scoring that may not be visible for whole word scoring, due to
a lack of precision of the latter as a measure of word form knowledge, as
hypothesized by Barcroft (2004). A correct form associated with a wrong
word was counted solely on the basis of formal similarities with the correct
L2 word. Any word that a participant had already seen was excluded from the
analysis for that participant, as well as words for which the task was not
completed according to the directions given. The scores were put in a MS
Access data base. The analysis was conducted using SAS 9.2, with
mixed-model repeated measures.
Among the few studies cited that compared reading and writing of sentences
or text, with sufficient time allowed for performing the tasks, only one researcher (Webb 2005, 2nd experiment) used a within-subjects design, that is
where participants were exposed to all task types, which decreased the
Supplementary Appendix SB). For the reading task, they were instructed to
read each sentence once and to focus on understanding it.
This study consisted of four conditions with four items per condition: writing
concrete words, writing abstract words, reading concrete words, reading abstract words. A within-subjects design was adopted. Each participant received
all 16 target words, with eight randomly selected words to write and the other
eight to read. Each word received an equal amount of each of the two treatments. Of the eight items, the participants saw in each task (writing and reading), half of those were abstract and half were concrete. Processing each word
in both formatsreading and writingby each participant was rejected, since
for the second task the word would not be new anymore. The order of presentation of the items was randomized, and the order of the tasks was balanced:
tasks alternated between reading and writing for the duration of the exercise.
Due to the short testing time, the tests were administered during normal
class time. A financial compensation was offered in the form of a lottery.
The surprise recall task was given to each participant individually almost
immediately after he or she completed the tasks: this consisted of a sheet
with the L1 definitions for the 16 target words, which they had 2 min to
write down. At the bottom of the same sheet, participants were asked to indicate which words, if any, they had already known prior to the experiment.
The same test was administered a week later in order to measure longer term
recall.
74
RESULTS
The testing sessions proceeded as planned, with testing times ranging from
18 to 34 min, with an average of 24 min. The writing tasks seemed to take
about three times longer than the reading task, as opposed to twice as long in
Webb (2005). Of the 203 completed test packages, only one yielded a missing
task, which was the writing task for treppverter. In total, each word was processed between 100 and 105 times for each of the two tasks. Of a total of 3248
items (words participants), 66, or 2.0 per cent, were marked as having been
encountered before. About half the cases were for the word buoyancy (N = 30),
followed by acronyx (N = 6) (see Supplementary Appendix SB). The remaining
cases are shared about equally among the rest of the words, all with zero to
four claims of previous encounter.
Given the very rare nature of the words, this impression is likely to rest
solely on vague deja`-vu based on resemblance with other words, and similar
factors, instead of actual prior encounters with said words. As support for this
hypothesis, Participant #45 claimed to have previously encountered half the
words (!), and at Recall #1 marked fustilug as having been encountered, but did
not do so at Recall #2. Likewise, both P#63 and P#88 identified three words
as having been encountered before the test, which is very unlikely to be the
case.9 Scores for the rejected items, without including the word Buoyancy, were
1.17 out of 3 (SD 1.40) for Recall #1 and 1.04 out of 3 (SD 1.43) for Recall #2.
These figures are higher than the means obtained for the data we analyzed,
as will be seen in this section, while not as high as one would expect if all
these words had been known to the participants. On the contrary, Buoyancy
seems to be a less uncommon word, and had most likely been encountered,
since recall for this item is 2.80 (SD 0.55) for Recall #1 and 2.67 (SD 0.87) for
Recall #2.
The scores presented in this section underwent square root transformation
in order to reach a distribution closer to normal, using the BoxCox family of
transformations. Variance postulates were verified to ensure normality and
homogeneity on model residues, that is transformed data. Since normality
was not entirely satisfactory, the analysis was also conducted on ranks, that
possibility of individual differences influencing the results (p. 45). However, in

this case as in all the studies listed that met the above-mentioned criteria, the
variable of word concreteness was not considered; only word categories are
sometimes mentioned, but with no comparative analyses based on those categories. Therefore, given the small number of items generally tested for recall,
the relative effectiveness of the two types of tasks may depend not only on the
nature of the task, but also on the concreteness of the items whose acquisition
is assessed. One of the major contributions of the present study is to separate
out the variables related to the task performed and those related to the items
learned, among which concreteness has been shown to influence word retention, as was emphasized earlier.
75
Table 1: Scores out of 3, task versus recall

Reading task
Recall 1
Recall 2
Writing task
Raw data,
mean (SE)
Transformed
data, mean (SE)
Raw data,
mean (SE)
Transformed data,
mean (SE)
0.4718 (0.0350)
0.2371 (0.0285)
0.4887 (0.0282)
0.2590 (0.0249)
0.7645 (0.0457)
0.3150 (0.0346)
0.6937 (0.0309)
0.3173 (0.0285)
Effect
Recall
df
Recall*task
Recall*task
1
2
202
175
47.28
4.59
<.0001
.0335
is non-parametric values. The analysis was also repeated on raw, not

transformed data. In all three cases the same conclusions are reached, although
p-values differ slightly.
Question #1
For intermediate and advanced L2 students, does sentence writing lead to higher vocabulary gains relative to sentence reading?
Table 1 shows the scores out of 3 for both tasks (reading and writing) and for
both recall tests (immediate and delayed).
The F-tests show a significant difference in the average scores for both recall
tests. More specifically, the average score is lower for words read compared
with words written for both immediate and delayed recall tests.
Furthermore, additional F-tests have shown that the average scores for
both recall tests are significantly lower for the second (delayed) recall, both
for words read (F = 116,13, p < .0001) and words written (F = 190, 90,
p < .0001).
Table 2 shows a recall/task interaction near the a-level for Recall 2. A closer
look through differences of Least Square Means (LSMs) shows that significance
is reached due to the difference between recall for concrete words in reading
and writing (t = 2.41, df = 173, p = .0172). There would be no difference between reading and writing had we tested abstract words only (t = 0.71,
df = 171, p = .4760).
Table 2: Tests of effect slices, task versus recall
76
Table 3: Scores out of 3, concreteness versus recall

Abstract words
Recall 1
Recall 2
Concrete words
Raw data,
mean (SE)
Transformed data,
mean (SE)
Raw data,
mean (SE)
Transformed
data, mean (SE)
0.5619 (0.0279)
0.3010 (0.0257)
0.5697 (0.0365)
0.2810 (0.0298)
0.6205 (0.0304)
0.2753 (0.0265)
0.6666 (0.0427)
0.2711 (0.0328)
Effect
Recall
df
Recall*task
Recall*task
1
2
201
156
4.37
1.08
.0379
.3002
Question #2
Does recall vary according to the concreteness of target words?
Table 3 shows the scores for both word types (abstract and concrete) and for
both recall tests (immediate and delayed).
As shown in Table 4, F-tests show a significant difference between both
word types (abstract and concrete) for immediate recall only (p = .0379).
More precisely, the average score is lower for abstract words than for concrete
words on immediate recall tests. There was no significant difference between
the average scores of abstract or concrete words on the delayed recall tests
(p = .3002).
Also, F-tests show that the average scores for both types of recall were significantly lower for the second recall test, whether it be concrete words
(F = 173.27, p < .0001) or abstract words (F = 136.29, p < .0001).
Still in Table 4, the only significant recall/task interaction, that for Recall 1,
warrants further analyses. Differences of LSMs show that significance is
reached due to the writing task (t = 2.07, df = 201, p = .0394), the reading
task showing no difference between concrete and abstract words (t = 0. 80,
df = 201, p = .4246).
Question #3
Does the impact of task and concreteness change over time?
In order to address Question 3, the variables of task and concreteness were
combined, and the two recall tasks were separated. As Figure 1 shows, a comparison between scores for each combination shows an interesting leveling
Table 4: Tests of effect slices, concreteness versus recall
77
0,8
0,74
0,65
0,6
0,5
0,47
Recall 1
Recall 2
0,5
0,4
0,32
0,3
0,32
0,28
C
on
.W
r.
C
on
.R
d
Ab
s.
R
d
Note: Abs = abstract; Con = concrete; Rd = reading; Wr = writing.
Figure 1: Adjusted mean scores for all four combinationstask versus

concreteness
trend occurring between Recall 1 and Recall 2. For Recall 1, differences in

LSMs are significant for all combinations except between the reading of abstract and the reading of concrete words (p = .4246). For Recall 2, the significant differences stem only from the reading of concrete words, whose adjusted
mean score is significantly lower than for the writing of concrete words
(p = .0172) and of abstract words (p = .0178).
DISCUSSION
The data profile obtained matched our predictions and expectations based on
Webb (2005) and on the Involvement Load Hypothesis, namely that, generally, writing a text may lead to significantly higher recall than reading if
enough time is allocated for each task, writing being intrinsically longer
than reading for the same amount of language.
Furthermore, observed recall was superior for more concrete words. This is
yet further empirical support for this robust phenomenon which has been
observed and studied for several decades.
Concerning the length of the observed recall, it is pertinent to compare the
results of the second recall with that of the first. As for the apparent superiority
of writing tasks, this difference seems to hold steady, at least for 1 week, since it
persists in the second recall. However, our analyses showed that by the second
recall, it had become borderline significant, having disappeared for abstract
words. As for the superiority of concrete over abstract words, this difference
quickly waned in the present study, as it did not appear in the delayed recall
test. The high amount of empirical support for the concreteness superiority
effect from previous research is probably related in part to the high number of
0,23
0,2
Ab
s.
W
r.
Adj. Mean / 3
0,7
78
Pedagogical implications
Writing short passages for proficient L2 students can be an effective activity for
retaining words that have recently been encountered. However, it has to be
kept in mind that the effectiveness of teaching methods varies according to
learner types, and teaching outcomes depend mostly on the motivating aspects
that stem from using a variety of activities. Nevertheless, our results suggest
that language teachers may resort to writing tasks that incorporate newly
taught words in order to enhance students retention.
Limitations
Among the three aspects of a word knowledge according to Nation (2001)
(form, meaning, and use), only the first two aspects were involved in the
use of our reading and writing tasks. A separate measure for the grammatical
functions of target words would perhaps shed more light on the relative impact
that the two types of tasks would have on word retention. Examining a variety
of writing tasks would be another interesting avenue to explore (Joe 1998;
Waring and Tataki 2003; Folse 2006). It is also hoped that future studies will
find a way to measure the amount of syntactic and semantic processing in
reading and writing, to see if that variable plays a role in determining their
relative efficiency for acquiring language.
Moreover, this study aimed at measuring recall which was to be as incidental
as possible. It remains to be seen whether the incidental nature of the experiment and our data could have been influenced by two factors. First, target
words were displayed on the top of the test pages as well as during the task,
thus creating some overemphasis on those items. Second, many students had
probably guessed that some sort of recall test would be given as a follow-up
task, given the fact that they are frequently solicited for participating in studies
studies that tested recall a short period of time after the experiment. With a
more longitudinal version of this study, it would be interesting to see if this
leveling pattern would continue over a longer period, and if this apparent
superiority for writing would continue to degrade up to the point of disappearing completely; and, if so, after what length of time.
If we assume that delayed recall is a better indicator of learning than immediate recall, the prediction that writing will lead to higher vocabulary retention
than reading seems to be supported only for concrete words and not for
abstract words when recall is assessed after 1 week. From a theoretical standpoint, this intriguing observation has important implications for the
Involvement Load Hypothesis. In addition to suggesting that word factors
should be taken into consideration when assessing the learning potential of
a language task, it underscores the need for investigations into why learners
show little or no benefits of writing activities over reading activities when it
comes to language items of lower concreteness.
79
during their degree program. And there remains the ever-present question of
the extent to which recall measures actually reflect acquisition.
CONCLUSION
SUPPLEMENTARY DATA
Supplementary Data are available at Applied Linguistics online.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The authors would like to express our gratitude to the four anonymous reviewers for their
insightful suggestions that led to improvements in this article.
NOTES
1 In the present study, writing is seen as
the production in the written form
of plain text, coming from the writer
and significant to him/her. It is not a
question of isolated words, copied
words, or words unfamiliar to the
writer. Reading, on the other hand, is
seen as a quest for meaning through
the visual perusal of plain text. This
form of reading is the most commonly
found and the generally accepted definition of reading in research (reading
for meaning; Swaffar et al. 1991). It is
thus not a question of visualizing isolated words, of scanning text, which
consists of rapid glancing at a page in
search of particular graphical symbols,
or skimming text, which consists of
locating only certain elements of the

text in order to draw a general
impression.
2 We acknowledge the fact that complexity depends not only on whether
reading or writing is involved but on
what is required of the learner: some
writing tasks can be simple, and some
reading tasks complex. The assumption
here is that cognitively speaking, writing tasks will be generally more demanding than reading tasks.
3 For a discussion on the difference between intentional and incidental
learning, see Hulstijn (2003).
4 Syntactic processing has always been
regarded as a complex task that is
only accomplished by humans, and
In light of these considerations, and taking into account the above-mentioned

studies, many researchers argue that incidental vocabulary acquisition through
reading is limited (e.g. Pichette 2005; Pigada and Schmitt 2006; Esquiliche
Mesa et al. 2007; Pulido 2007; Brown et al. 2008). We have reason to believe
that a purely incidental learning situation would have led to even lower recall
scores. This study nonetheless suggests that some limited incidental acquisition
can take place during normal reading and writing activities, and that both
exposure to and production of language can lead to some (albeit very limited)
incidental retention. We hope that our studyand others like itmay benefit
teachers and pedagogues seeking to maximize their class time and their students language learning potential.
80
activation of left parietal and frontal

associative areas (Jessen et al. 2000).
8 Paivios (1983) Additivity Hypothesis,
with considerable empirical support,
argues that the additional presentation
of an illustration, in addition to the
word form itself, yields recall superior
to that of the form alone, even though
in theory more cognitive resources are
necessary for a double treatment than
for a single one.
9 We verified with five native speakers of
English who had completed their doctoral studies; none of them was familiar with more than three words.
10 An earlier version of the test consisted
of writing sentences on blank lines on
which two words were already provided: the target words as well as a
verb that would force the participant
to adopt the same three syntactic structures for the reading task. Tested with
122 participants, the absence of impact
of the type of activity as well as of the
item type (Pichette et al. 2008) coupled
with participants remarks underscored
the importance for people to write the
target words in the written task, with
the risk of not seeing all three syntactic
structures being produced. The present
article reports on the use of this newer
version of the writing tasks.
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(Pinker 1994), and on the condition
that humans start before a critical age
(Curtiss 1977). As for semantic processing, it is less complex, demands
less effort and is manifested in some
animal species though comprehension
or even word production.
5 Semantic
elaboration
refers
to
increased evaluation of an item with
regard to its meaning (Barcroft 2002:
323). Syntactic elaboration refers to
increased evaluation of an item with
regard to its syntactic properties. In
this article, elaboration and processing
are considered synonyms.
6 According to the Generation Effect
described among others by McNamara
and Healy (1995), it should be noted
that the benefits of language production derive from the production of the
sentence and not from the output
stage. This means that it is not the writing of a sentence on paper that promotes acquisition, but the semantic
and syntactic processes that precede it.
7 This hypothesis is closely linked to
the Context Availability Theory, which
assumes that concrete words activate
a broader contextual verbal support,
which is reflected by a greater
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Laufer, B. 2003. Vocabulary acquisition in a
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Applied Linguistics 22: 126.
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doi:10.1093/applin/amr044 Advance Access published on 20 December 2011
FORUM
Adaptation and Validation of

Self-regulating Capacity in Vocabulary
Learning Scale
Kansai University, Japan
*E-mail: mizumoto@kansai-u.ac.jp
This article reports on an adaptation and validation study of SRCvoc
(self-regulating capacity in vocabulary learning scale; Tseng et al. 2006) in
a Japanese EFL setting. The piloting phase revealed that factor structures were
different from those in the original study. The main study, including
a self-reported measure of procrastination to explore the convergent evidence
of the construct validity, suggests that the scale can be a valid measure of
self-regulation capacity in vocabulary learning in a Japanese EFL environment.
These findings provide implications for future studies that utilize the same
type of research paradigm.
INTRODUCTION
Self-regulating Capacity in Vocabulary Learning Scale (Tseng et al. 2006;
hereafter SRCvoc) is a psychometric instrument (self-report questionnaire)
which is intended to measure learners self-regulating capacity in second
language (L2) vocabulary learning. It was developed to (i) introduce the
concept of self-regulation developed in educational psychology to the field of
second language acquisition and (ii) to operationalize learning strategies as
self-regulatory capacity, while creating a psychometrically sound measure of
strategic learning as a new alternative to the measurement instruments
commonly used for this purpose. Earlier instruments are problematic in
terms of their psychometric properties (see also Dornyei 2005).
Although the concept of self-regulation has been criticized (e.g. Gao 2007),
Tseng et al.s (2006) study has made a successful conceptual advance by introducing it to the field of L2 acquisition. Among several theories of self-regulated
learning (see Zimmerman and Schunk 2001 for a review), that of Tseng et al.
(2006) is based on action and volitional control strategies, as proposed in Kuhl
(1987) and Corno and Kanfer (1993). Action and volitional control strategies
include strategies for protecting against distractions and for facilitating task
completion towards goals; they are aimed at regulating emotions, motivation,
and cognition in the process of goal striving (Corno and Kanfer 1993).
*ATSUSHI MIZUMOTO and OSAMU TAKEUCHI
84
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METHOD
Translation of the original questionnaire
The first author of this article translated the SRCvoc items into Japanese.
An EnglishJapanese bilingual speaker back translated them to check for
any ambiguities. Two other researchers with PhDs in Applied Linguistics
confirmed the appropriateness of wording.
Testing the questionnaire

The Japanese version of the SRCvoc was field-tested with 443 EFL learners
who were humanities or engineering majors at four different universities in
western Japan (208 males and 235 females, aged 1822). They gave responses
on a six-point Likert scale, the same used in Tseng et al.s (2006) questionnaire.
Following the questionnaire pilot test, an item analysis with the criterion of
a Corrected Item-Total Correlation higher than .40 revealed two of 20 items
did not meet the criterion for acceptable items.1 Hence, 18 items were selected
to replicate Tseng et al.s (2006) model. Table 1 shows the descriptive statistics,
including Cronbachs alpha reliability coefficients of the five subscales, following the original models categorization. The reliability coefficients were rather
low compared with those in Tseng et al. (2006).
Table 1: Descriptive statistics of the subscales in the pilot study

Subscale
No. of items
M (SD)
Commitment control
Metacognitive control
Satiation control
Emotion control
Environment control
4
4
3
3
4
3.03
2.99
2.93
3.15
3.94
0.63
0.74
0.71
0.66
0.67
(0.79)
(0.88)
(0.87)
(0.92)
(0.89)
Moreover, self-regulating capacity acts as an important mediator between

motivation and learning strategies (Tseng and Schmitt 2008: 362).
Tseng and Schmitt have demonstrated that (s)elf-motivated vocabulary
learning experts need to develop sufficient self-regulating capacity to support
themselves in controlling and managing their vocabulary learning behaviors
(2008: 388). That is, self-regulating capacity manifested in action and volitional control is crucial to learning L2 vocabulary. Tseng et al.s (2006) scale
provides a useful instrument for measuring this integral part of learning, but
it has not yet been utilized and validated in other studies. Therefore, we have
adapted and validated the scale in a Japanese EFL environment.
FORUM 85
Figure 1 displays the replicated model of SRCvoc proposed in Tseng et al.s

(2006) study. The goodness of fit indices in confirmatory factor analysis (CFA)
were all acceptable. However, we noticed that the use of a summated or average score was problematic. This technique, known as item parceling
(Bandalos 2002, 2008; Little et al. 2002; Matsunaga 2008), creates an indicator
instead of treating each item. It can be recommended if a construct has a large
number of measured variable indicators and all the items for a construct
are unidimensional with reliability of .90 or higher (Hair et al. 2006: 826).
Item parceling can considerably improve model fit. However, without the
unidimensionality of the items to be combined, the improvement in fit can
be achieved by masking rather than correcting the source of model misfit
(Bandalos 2008: 212).2 Given that the reliability coefficients in Table 1 were
lower than recommended, it is highly likely that item parceling only hid the
lack of unidimensionality.3
Thus, we tested the higher order model (Figure 2), which should represent
the same concept as that intended by Tseng et al. (2006). We also checked the
goodness of fit at each factor level (i.e. commitment control with four items
only). Results showed the model did not produce an adequate fit to the data;
besides, it generated an improper solution. (One of the standardized factor
loadings had a value greater than 1.0.) We concluded that approximate replication of Tseng et al.s model in our study would be unjustifiable. Therefore,
an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) using maximum likelihood with promax
Figure 1: Replicated model of self-regulating capacity suggested in Tseng

et al.s (2006) study
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rotation was conducted to re-examine the factor structures of SRCvoc. Table 2

shows the results of EFA.
Main study
In total, 12 items remained because of EFA. These were administered again
in a questionnaire, this time to 914 EFL learners who were humanities or
engineering majors at different five universities in Japan (425 males and 489
females, aged 1822). Because the decisions about factor models were made
a priori, the construct validity of the questionnaires was investigated with CFA.
Figure 2: Higher order model (improper solution)
FORUM 87
Table 2: Results of exploratory factor analysis

Original
subscale
Original item
number
Factor 1
Factor 2
Factor 3
M (SD)
6
8
5
2
9
.88
.69
.64
.60
.51
.10
.11
.01
.04
.10
.07
.05
.12
.09
.02
.81
3.02 (0.90)
Metacognitive
Metacognitive
Commitment
Commitment
11
16
13
10
.06
.19
.09
.05
.72
.62
.57
.48
.04
.08
.05
.16
.71
3.14 (0.85)
Environment
Environment
Environment
20
17
3
.03
.06
.11
.01
.05
.03
.85
.62
.49
.71
4.14 (0.98)
Previous studies have suggested that procrastination has a negative effect

on self-regulation: the quintessential self-regulatory failure (Steel 2007).
The two constructs should be related to each other, as expected, if convergent
evidence of the construct validity is found (i.e. external aspect of validity in
Messick 1995). Four items measuring procrastinating behaviours were given to
the participants. These were taken from the questionnaire developed by Aitken
(1982) and translated into Japanese by Fujita (2005). Cronbachs a coefficient
of the procrastination measure was relatively high ( = .84). Furthermore, the
model showed a good fit to the data in CFA (2/df = 6.82, GFI = .99, AGFI = .97,
CFI = .99, RMSEA = .08).
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Table 3 summarizes the descriptive statistics and Cronbachs a coefficients of
the two scales in the main study. Reliability for each subscale was relatively
high. As Figure 3 shows, fit indices revealed that the hypothesized three-factor
model of SRCvoc provided an adequate fit to the data.
Figure 4 illustrates the hypothesized model of the relationship between
SRCvoc as a whole (higher order factor) and procrastination. The goodness
of fit indices show that the model fit the data satisfactorily. The standardized
path coefficient from self-regulating capacity to procrastination is .29
(p < .001); thus, self-regulating capacity negatively affects procrastination.
As stated in the literature (Steel 2007), the greater the self-regulating capacity
of a learner, the less likely he or she is to procrastinate learning. Figure 5 shows
Emotion
Satiation
Metacognitive
Emotion
Metacognitive
88
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Table 3: Descriptive statistics of the subscales in the two questionnaires

(n = 914)
Subscales
No. of items
SD
SRCvoc
Emotion control
Metacognitive control
Environment control
5
4
3
3.32
3.23
4.12
0.93
0.89
0.91
.83
.77
.68
4.12
0.97
.84
Procrastination
Figure 3: CFA of SRCvoc in the main study

a similar model in which the paths from each subscale are directed to procrastination. Metacognitive control indicates the highest standardized path
coefficient because its items directly ask the degree of ones procrastinating
behaviour (e.g. When it comes to learning vocabulary, I have my special
techniques to prevent procrastination).
These results suggest SRCvoc as a whole (the higher order model) measures
not only procrastination but also other aspects of volitional control in vocabulary learning, such as emotion and environment control. This may explain
why the higher order model exhibited a lower standardized path coefficient
Scale
FORUM 89
Figure 5: Effect of SRCvoc subscales on procrastination. Items for each

subscale are not shown for simplicity. All paths are significant (p < .001)
than the model with each subscale. Overall, although factor structures were
different from those suggested in Tseng et al. (2006), our study demonstrated
that SRCvoc could be a valid and reliable measure of the volitional aspect
of self-regulating capacity in vocabulary learning.
Figure 4: Effect of self-regulatory capacity on procrastination. Items for

each subscale are not shown for simplicity. All paths are significant (p < .001)
90
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CONCLUSION
NOTES
1 Both of them are reversed items.
2 Similarly, adding the paths among error
covariances within a construct can also
improve the model fit, but Hair et al.
(2006) argue that researchers should
not do this. This is because the existence of such cross-loadings is evidence
of a lack of unidimensionality, thereby

violating the assumptions of good
measurement.
3 CFA at each factor level also indicated
that the goodness of fit measures were
inadequate.
REFERENCES
Aitken, M. E. 1982. A personality profile of
the college student procrastinator (Doctoral
dissertation,
University
of
Pittsburgh),
Dissertation Abstracts International 43: 7223.
Bandalos, D. L. 2002. The effects of item
parceling on goodness-of-fit and parameter
estimate bias in structural equation modeling,

Structural Equation Modeling 9: 78102.
Bandalos, D. L. 2008. Is parceling really
necessary? A comparison of results from item
parceling and categorical variable methodology, Structural Equation Modeling 15: 21140.
Undertaken as an approximate replication of Tseng et al.s (2006), this study

investigated the validity of SRCvoc in a Japanese EFL setting and found it to be
a reliable and valid measure of self-regulation capacity in vocabulary learning.
However, the factor structures were not the same as those proposed in
Tseng et al.s original study, presumably because of cultural differences or
item parceling.
Based on our findings, we can suggest directions for future research to
gain further insight into the role of self-regulation in vocabulary learning.
First, future studies could investigate the teachability of self-regulation (volitional control). Some studies in educational psychology (e.g. Randi and
Corno 1999; McCann and Turner 2004) have reported that it is feasible
and useful to teach volitional control. Tseng and Schmitt (2008) have
proposed a model of motivated vocabulary learning in which self-regulating
capacity plays an integral role in bridging initial motivation state and strategy use. This supports the idea that teaching students self-regulation may be
worth pursuing. Secondly, the concept of self-regulated learning should be severely scrutinized. Self-regulating capacity, with its focus on volition, is only
part of a complex picture of self-regulated learning (Zimmerman and Schunk
2001). Thus, researchers should carefully consider which theory of
self-regulated learning is appropriate for L2 vocabulary acquisition. Because
self-regulated learning links motivation and strategy in the vocabulary learning
process, future studies utilizing the same research paradigm may enable us
to synthesize existing research in both motivation and strategy in language
learning.
FORUM 91
McCann, E. J. and J. E. Turner. 2004.

Increasing student learning through volitional
control, Teachers College Record 106: 1695714.
Messic, S. 1995. Validity of psychological assessment: validation of inferences from persons
responses and performances as scientific
inquiry into score meaning, American
Psychologist 50: 7419.
Randi, J. and L. Corno. 1999. Teacher
innovations
in
self-regulated
learning
in M. Boekaerts, P. Pintrich, and M. Zeidner
(eds): Handbook of Self-regulation. Academic
Press, pp. 65185.
Steel, P. 2007. The nature of procrastination: a
meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure, Psychological
Bulletin 133: 6594.
Tseng, W.T. and N. Schmitt. 2008. Toward a
model of motivated vocabulary learning: a
structural equation modeling approach,
Language Learning 58: 357400.
Tseng, W.T., Z. Dornyei, and N. Schmitt.
2006. A new approach to assessing strategic
learning: the case of self-regulation in vocabulary acquisition, Applied Linguistics 27: 78102.
Zimmerman B. J. and D. H. Schunk (eds).
2001. Self-regulated Learning and Academic
Achievement: Theoretical Perspectives, 2nd edn.
Lawrence Erlbaum.
Corno, L. and R. Kanfer. 1993. The role of volition in learning and performance, Review of
Research in Education 19: 30141.
Dornyei, Z. 2005. The Psychology of the Language
Learner: Individual Differences in Second Language
Acquisition. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Fujita, T. 2005. A study of the relation of
procrastination behavior and error behavior,
Bulletin of Center for Educational Research and
Development 14: 4346.
Gao, X. 2007. Has language learning strategy
research come to an end? A response to
Tseng et al. (2006), Applied Linguistics 28:
61520.
Hair, J. F., W. C. Black, B. J. Babin, R.
E. Anderson, and R. L. Tatham. 2006.
Multivariate Data Analysis, 6th edn. Pearson
Prentice Hall.
Kuhl, J. 1987. Action control: The maintenance
of motivational states in F. Halish and J. Kuhl
(eds): Motivation, Intention, and Volition.
Springer, pp. 27991.
Little, T. D., W. A. Cunningham, G. Shahar,
and K. F. Widaman. 2002. To parcel or not to
parcel: exploring the question, weighing the
merits, Structural Equation Modeling 9: 15173.
Matsunaga, M. 2008. Item parceling in
structural equation modeling: a primer,
Communication Methods and Measures 2: 26093.

FORUM
HEATH ROSE
Trinity College, The University of Dublin.
E-mail: heath.rose@tcd.ie
This forum article examines the conceptualization of strategic learning over
the past 30 years, focusing on recent conceptualizations that shift towards the
notion of self-regulation. In recent years, scholars have argued that language
learning strategies are too general, undefined, and incoherent and the questionnaires designed to measure language learning strategies are inaccurate and unreliable (see, for example, Dornyei 2005; Woodrow 2005; Tseng et al. 2006).
Instead Dornyei proposes a new theory to replace language learning strategies
based on the psychological concept of self-regulation encased within his own
model of motivation control. This article will argue that this reconceptualization
might be a matter of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, in that it throws
out a problematic taxonomy and replaces it with another one, which is also
problematicincluding the same definitional fuzziness for which previous
taxonomies have been criticized.
INITIAL DEVELOPMENT OF STRATEGIC LEARNING

TAXONOMIES
In seminal research in the field of strategic language learning Rubin (1975) set
out to study the good language learner and observed:
The differential success of second/foreign language learners suggests
a need to examine in detail what strategies successful language
learners employ. In addition to the need of research on this topic,
it is suggested that teachers can already begin to help their less
successful students to improve their performance by paying
more attention to learner strategies already seen as productive.
(Rubin 1975: 41)
Learning strategies, therefore, are seen as tools that language learners can use
to accelerate or aid their second language learning. Rubin (1981: 42) defines
language learning strategies as the techniques or devices that a learner may
Reconceptualizing Strategic Learning in

the Face of Self-Regulation: Throwing
Language Learning Strategies out with
the Bathwater
FORUM 93
CHALLENGES TO THE VALIDITY OF LANGUAGE LEARNING

STRATEGY TAXONOMIES
Challenges to the categorizations of strategic learning have spanned the past
22 years, although support for criticism has grown in strength in more recent
years. Back in 1989, almost immediately after the OMalley and Chamot
and Oxford theorizations were gaining steam, Skehan (1989) noted there
were few hard findings in the field of language learning strategies due to conflicting methodologies and results, calling for re-theorization within the field.
However, Skehans calls were instead met with an explosion of language
use to acquire language. A further definition is the special thoughts or behaviours that individuals use to help them comprehend, learn, or retain new
information (OMalley and Chamot 1990: 1). Later research argued that
learning strategies promote learning by aiding the acquisition, storage, and
retrieval of information and also make learning easier, faster, more enjoyable,
more self-directed, more effective and more transferable to new situations
(Oxford 2001: 166). Researchers in this field, therefore, widely agreed on
the theoretical benefits that learning strategy research provided for foreign
language education. Methods to classify and record these strategies, however,
have been more varied and contested.
After Rubins (1975) examination of learning strategies, research began to
investigate a wide range of different strategies for different aspects of language
learning, such as overall strategies, vocabulary learning strategies, cognitive
strategies, and social strategies (see, for example, Naiman et al. 1975; Hosenfeld
1976; Selinger 1977; Bialystok 1979). The need for a classification system of
newly identified strategies emerging from this research soon became apparent
leading to the development of the first taxonomy of language learning strategies by Rubin (1981). Research continued into the 1980s, with particular emphasis on cognitive strategies for English language learning (see for example
OMalley et al. 1985a, 1985b; Chamot and OMalley 1987; Chamot and Kupper
1989), leading to the OMalley and Chamot classification of language learning
strategies (OMalley and Chamot 1990).
Despite these moves to integrate cognitive theory with language learning
strategies, OMalley and Chamots classification system was overshadowed by
Oxfords taxonomy. According to the Oxford model of strategy classification,
language learning strategies can be classified into six strategy types. Oxford
noted that distinctions could be made between these six categories, however,
the boundaries are fuzzy, particularly since learners sometimes employ more
than one strategy at a time (Oxford 2001: 167). Even though there have been
notable attempts at introducing new taxonomies of strategic learning, because
of the sheer magnitude of research conducted under the Oxford umbrella, it
remains the most widely applied classification system of strategic learning researchand the most scrutinized.
94
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learning strategies studies in the 1990s, which helped perpetuate the current
theories of the time.
In more recent years, Dornyei (2005) has challenged the definitional fuzziness of the classification of language learning strategies and the instruments
researchers use. In regard to the OMalley and Chamot classification system,
Dornyei (2005: 168) claims:
In a further example, Oxfords inclusion of a category for compensatory strategies in her taxonomy has prompted criticism from Dornyei (2005) that these
strategies are related to language use rather than learning. Thus, the two
processes are so different both in terms of their function and their psycholinguistic representation that they are best kept separate (Dornyei 2005: 168).
A further criticism of definitional fuzziness is in the separation of cognitive
strategies with mnemonic strategies, when it has been argued mnemonic strategies constitute a subclass of cognitive strategies (Dornyei 2005: 168). Thus it
is clear, definitional fuzziness of the major learning strategy classification systems is a point of ongoing criticism, and is a point that will be returned to later
in this article.
In summary, language learning strategy classification systems have been
subject to growing criticism regarding definitional fuzziness and invalid research instruments. Based on these criticisms, Dornyei (2005), like Skehan
in 1989, called for re-theorization of language learning strategies, and
Woodrow (2005) called for moves to more qualitative methods. It is important
to note, however, that there have been a number of refutes to Dornyeis
criticisms on the basis that he generalizes across all language learning strategy research on the basis of critiques to certain out-dated models and instruments. For example, it is Grenfell and Macaros conviction that Dornyei may
be setting up a straw man in order to knock him down (2007: 26).
Nevertheless, the criticisms made by Dornyei still resonate in language learning strategy research today as the concept of self-regulation continues to make
inroads into strategy research.
RETHEORIZATION TOWARDS SELF-REGULATION

In 2005, in the wake of criticism of language learning strategy paradigms,
Dornyei offered a new model of strategic learning based on the concept of
self-regulationa term used in educational psychology (see Dornyei 2005;
Tseng et al. 2006). This taxonomy of strategic learning is based in the framework of motivational control strategies (Dornyei 2001) and consists of five
The odd one out in OMalley and Chamots taxonomy is clearly the
last group, social/affective strategies, which includes such diverse
behaviours as cooperation, questioning and clarification, and
self-talk. These strategies are not related to the cognitive theoretical basis outlined by the authors, and they admittedly represent a
broad grouping.
FORUM 95
categories. Dornyei (2005) notes that his system was based on Kuhls (1987)
and Corno and Kanfers (1993) taxonomy of action control strategies. The
categories are defined below:
(Dornyei 2005: 113)

In a later publication, Tseng et al. (2006) apply the conceptualization to the
task of vocabulary learning in the form of a questionnaire designed to measure
the self-regulatory capacity of vocabulary learning (SRCVoc). In the study,
items on the questionnaire were developed from focus groups with students,
and fit into the above framework, because of the theoretical problems surrounding the existing learning strategy taxonomies (Dornyei 2005: 186).
However, use of this instrument alone would only provide an understanding
of the underlying self-regulatory capacity of a learner, rather than strategy use
itself. Dornyei (2005: 184) explains the SRCVoc does not measure strategy use
but rather the learners underlying self-regulatory capacity that will result in
strategy use. In fact, Gao (2006) suggests that models of strategy use and
Dornyeis model of self-regulation are not incompatible as they are measuring
the beginning and end product of the same event. That is, self-regulation is
about looking at the initial driving forces, while strategy research examines the
outcome of these forces.
DISCUSSION OF MOVEMENTS TOWARDS SELF-REGULATION

However, as the motivation control taxonomy has been applied to other language learning tasks, such as in my doctoral research into Japanese language
learning, the taxonomy seemed to suffer from the same definitional fuzziness
for which the Oxford model is criticized. In the study, it was reported:
Not one instance of environmental control was reported in the
study where it was not being used to regulate another form of motivation control. Such results indicate environmental control may
not be a separate category of control in itself, but a self-regulatory
mechanism or strategy to control other forms of motivation.
1 Commitment control strategies for helping preserve or increase learners goal

commitment.
2 Metacognitive control strategies for monitoring and controlling concentration
and for curtailing unnecessary procrastination.
3 Satiation control strategies for eliminating boredom and adding extra attraction or interest to the task.
4 Emotion control strategies for managing disruptive emotional states or
moods and for generating emotions that are conducive to implementing
ones intentions.
5 Environmental control strategies for the elimination of negative environmental influences by making an environment an ally in the pursuit of a difficult goal.
96
FORUM
Participants, for example, reported regulating their study environment in order to alleviate boredom (by changing the study environment regularly) or stress (by working out while studying), or
factors that may lead to procrastination (by creating an environment free of distractions). (Rose 2011: 218)
Therefore, participants in this study reported using environmental control
strategies for the sole purposes of regulating satiation, metacognitive, and emotion control.
In addition to this, the study also found there to be a complex relationship
between the other four categories. That is, a breakdown in any category of
motivation control had a clear impact on other categories, as illustrated in
Figure 1.
Such intricate relationships, therefore, suggest the proposed model of motivation control, may indeed suffer from the same definitional fuzziness for
which previous models of strategic learning have been criticized. It also warns
of the dangers of replacing an old system too hastily with a new one that is still
in its infancy in terms of research conducted within its paradigms.
CONCLUSION
The purpose of this article is not to criticize movements towards paradigms of
strategic learning that include models of self-regulation. Indeed, many of the
Figure 1: Relationships between categories of self-regulation (Rose 2011)
FORUM 97
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Bialystok, E. 1979. The role of conscious
strategies in second language proficiency,
Canadian Modern Language Review 35: 37294.
Corno, L. and R. Kanfer. 1993. The role
of volition in learning and performance
in L. Darling-Hammond (ed.): Review of
Research in Education. Peacock Publishers.
Chamot, A. U. and L. Kupper. 1989. Learning
strategies in foreign language instruction,
Foreign Language Annals 22: 1324.
Chamot, A. U. and J. M. OMalley. 1987. The
cognitive approach: A bridge to the mainstream, TESOL Quarterly 21: 22749.
Dornyei, Z. 2001. Teaching and Researching
Motivation. Longman.
Dornyei, Z. 2005. The Psychology of the Language

Learner: Individual Differences in Second Language
Acquisition. Lawrence Erlbaum.
Gao, X. 2006. Has language learning strategy
research come to an end? A response to
Tseng et. al., Applied Linguistics 28: 615620.
Grenfell, M. and E. Macaro. 2007. Claims and
critiques in D. C. Cohen and E. M. Macaro
(eds): Language Learner Strategies. Oxford
University Press.
Hosenfeld, C. 1976. Learning about learning:
Discovering our students strategies, Foreign
Language Annals 9: 11729.
Kuhl, J. 1987. Action control: The maintenance
of motivational states in F. Halisch and
criticisms of language learning strategy models are justified. Also, movements

towards clearer definitions of strategic learning, and towards more justifiable
and qualitative instruments to measure them are welcomed. This article
argues, as Gao did in 2006, that these movements towards self-regulation
are not incompatible with language learning strategies. That is, it is possible
to examine strategic learning both in terms of a learners self-regulation of the
learning task, but also in terms of the cognitive and behavioural strategies they
employ. Thus, in order to understand the bigger picture, research frameworks
that incorporate both self-regulation and strategy use need to be explored and
theory needs to remain malleable to new findings in order for a new model
of strategic learning to emerge.
Indeed, this is the direction many researchers in the field of strategic learning are moving in. In addition to my own model (Rose 2011), which merges
elements of cognitive and memory strategies from SLA and language cognition
theory with motivation control and self-regulation theory, there have been
movements in a similar direction. Lin and Oxford (2009) developed and
applied a model of strategic learning that incorporated self-regulation into
a framework that examined strategic learning from psychological and sociocultural theories from micro and macro perspectives. In addition to this,
Oxford (2011) published her Strategic Self-Regulation (S2R) model earlier
this year. Another model, developed by Weinstein (2009) examines strategic
learning from the perspectives of learner skills, learner will or motivation and
self-regulation. The use of the term self-regulation in all four of these models
makes Dornyeis impact on the shift of research into strategic learning clear.
However, it is important to realize that models that incorporate theory from
both areas in order to research a language learning task are still in their infancy, and thus research that applies these models to various language learning
tasks are needed to develop them to their full potential.
98
FORUM
Oxford, R. L. 2011. Teaching and Researching

Language Learning Strategies. Pearson Education.
Rose, H. 2011. Kanji learning: strategies, motivation control and self-regulation. Doctoral
dissertation, The University of Sydney.
Rubin, J. 1975. What the good language learner
can teach us, TESOL Quarterly 9: 4151.
Rubin, J. 1981. Study of cognitive processes in
second language learning, Applied Linguistics
11: 11731.
Selinger, H. W. 1977. Does practice make perfect? A study of interactional patterns and L2
competence, Language Learning 27: 26378.
Skehan, P. 1989. Individual Differences in Second
Language Acquisition. Hodder Education.
Tseng, W. T., Z. Dornyei, and N. Schmitt.
2006. A new approach to assessing strategic
learning: The case of self-regulation in vocabulary acquisition, Applied Linguistics 27: 78102.
Weinstein, C. E. 2009. Strategic and
self-regulated learning for the 21st century:
The merging of skill, will and self-regulation.
Paper presented at the Independent Learning
Association Conference, June 4.
Woodrow, L. 2005. The challenge of measuring
language learning strategies, Foreign Language
Annals 38: 90100.
J. Kuhl (eds): Motivation, Intention and Volition.

Springer.
Lin, C. Y. and R. L. Oxford. 2009. Developing
autonomous learners in the digital realm:
Exploring digital language learning strategies
from macro and micro perspectives. Paper presented
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the
Independent
Learning
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Naiman, N., M. Frohlich, H. H. Stern, and
A. Todesco. 1975. The Good Language Learner.
Ontario Institute of Studies for Education.
OMalley, J. M. and A. U. Chamot. 1990.
Learning
Strategies
in
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Language
Acquisition. Cambridge University Press.
OMalley, J. M., A. U. Chamot, G. StewnerManzanares, L. Kupper, and R. P. Russo.
1985a. Learning strategies used by beginning
and intermediate ESL students, Language
Learning 35: 2146.
OMalley, J. M., A. U. Chamot, G. StewnerManzanares, L. Kupper, and R. P. Russo.
1985b. Learning strategy applications with
students of English as a foreign language,
TESOL Quarterly 19: 55784.
Oxford, R. 2001. Language learning strategies
in Nunan and Carter (eds): The Cambridge
Guide to Teaching English to Speakers of Other
Languages. Cambridge University Press.
REVIEWS
Tara W. Fortune and Diane J. Tedick (eds): PATHWAYS TO
MULTILINGUALISM: EVOLVING PERSPECTIVES ON IMMERSION
EDUCATION. Multilingual Matters, 2008.
It is hard to believe that there are still some voices which question the social,
psychological, psycholinguistic, cognitive and educational benefits of additive
bilingualism. This biased viewpoint is mainly based on spurious reasons and
has little to do with what we know through research. Donna Christian points
out in the Foreword of this edited volume that there are currently about 600
immersion schools in the USA that represent well over 100,000 students, significant figures on their own, but far below other contexts such as Spain,
whose population (44 million) is much smaller than that of the USA (ca.
310 million), but where there are more students involved in immersion programs than in the USA as a whole. This indicates the importance and very
timely contribution of this excellent volume to furthering professional understanding of immersion education, especially at a time when in those parts of
the world where English is the mother tongue of the majority of the population (represented by the so-called inner circle countries), there is very little
interest in learning other languages.
The book is divided into 13 chapters: the editors introduction is followed by
11 chapters written by leading researchers in the field, and a concluding synthesis. The introductory chapter is very much welcomed, as it deals with the
current terminological mess concerning bilingual education and immersion
programs that undoubtedly needs to be clarified. This lack of accurate labeling
of programs may remind us of the Orwellian doublespeak which disguises and
distorts the real naturein this caseof immersion programs, as terminological ambiguity hampers coherent design and implementation. The editors begin
the volume by offering a reader-friendly description of immersion education
and, more precisely, of the three types of immersion programs discussed in the
volume: one-way foreign language immersion, two-way immersion and indigenous immersion. This clarification of terminology is in fact critical, since this
is a problematic issue in many different (European) contexts where one-way
immersion variants are remarkable (see Lasagabaster and Sierra 2010). Instead
of the more traditional summary of the contents of the volume, I will attempt
in my review to whet the reading appetite by focusing on some of the questions habitually raised by education stakeholders when dealing with immersion education. The answers to these questions can be found in the different
contributions, while the authors also succeed in debunking several myths
about immersion programs. The different chapters are nicely intertwined
and the internal cross-referencing is outstanding, a reflection of the careful
and painstaking editing carried out by Fortune and Tedick.
100 REVIEWS
The opening chapter is written by Genesee and the reader can find
research-based answers to key issues such as whether immersion students
achieve high levels of L2 proficiency while acquiring grade-appropriate competence in academic subject matter. The conclusion to be drawn is that dual
language education works and students can learn both language and content.
And this is so even in the case of students with learning difficulties, whose
progress is similar to that of comparable students in native language programs.
Yet, additional research involving students with cognitive and socio-affective
problems is still needed.
The following 10 chapters are divided into three sections: evolving perspectives (i) on immersion pedagogy, (ii) on language development in immersion
contexts, and (iii) on social contexts and their impact on immersion programs.
In the initial chapter of Part 1, Met reflects on literacy, language and academic
achievement, while providing answers to how academic language differs from
day-to-day informal language. Met underscores that every content teacher is
also a language teacher and, thus, language growth has to be planned carefully. Next, Fortune, Tedick and Walker provide insights from the immersion
classroom concerning the integration of language and content teaching. These
authors examine how practicing immersion teachers understand the complex
phenomenon of integrated language and content teaching and conclude that
there is a need for ongoing teacher development if new understandings of the
immersion curriculum are to be developed. In Chapter 5 Palmer explores the
ways students academic identities emerge in class and how the teacher can
manage the classroom discourse. The reader will find a fuller-length treatment
of intriguing issues, but the role that immersion projects can play when it
comes to fostering more equitable discourse patterns among linguistically
and culturally diverse classrooms stands out. Through ethnographic discourse
analysis, Palmer shows the reader how challenging it is to manage conversation in a diverse classroom while taking the English-speaking students out of
center stage.
The second section of the book centers on language development. Swain and
Lapkin analyze the role of repetition in lexical learning, as research has identified lexical development as an area needing attention. They delve into how
immersion learners can be led to notice aspects of their spoken L2. Lyster and
Mori highlight the importance of integrating form-focused instruction into
subject-matter instruction to make students notice infrequent or non-salient
features of the L2. Their chapter sheds light on how immersion teachers intervene to effect change in immersion students use of interlanguage forms.
Sodergard focuses on Swedish immersion in kindergarten in Finland and describes the strategies that the teacher uses to elicit students L2 production. This
section is a clear example of how different results may be obtained depending
on the setting, as immersion programs implemented in diverse contexts display
distinctive features and bear out the multifaceted and multidimensional character of immersion. These chapters also confirm that giving feedback is a complex process which is not carried out systematically in immersion classrooms.
REVIEWS 101
The first chapter of the third section is that by Lindholm-Leary and Howard
who examine two-way immersion programs in the USA in an attempt to find
answers to what the academic achievement of students in these programs is.
The studies under scrutiny consistently demonstrate that students from different backgrounds make significant progress in the two languages, but native
learners generally outscore their L2 counterparts. Dagenais stresses the need
for a critical awareness about language diversity in immersion, which is why
she analyzes whether students from diverse backgrounds can succeed in immersion programs. She notes the effectiveness of language awareness activities
at a time when globalization and migration have resulted in changing demographics. In this new context, diversity in students first languages has to
become visible and audible in the classroom. In their chapter, Richards and
Burnaby present attempts to restore aboriginal languages in Canada. The
reader will find many intriguing questions, but the reasons why many aboriginal families continue to choose the regular English-language program
happen to be of great interest. The reader may find it striking that adult immersion programs are among the most successful ones, however, the authors
end on a positive note: there may be yet a future for these endangered languages (p. 240). Concluding the third section, Hoare and Kong review the
development of late immersion in Hong Kong since 1997 to address the question of why immersion in English has a substantial negative effect on subject
achievement. Research in this context does not tally with the previous contributions which confirm that gains in L2 proficiency through immersion do not
hamper subject achievement. This chapter is a very good case in point of the
need to undertake research in each context due to the influence exerted by
local distinctive features. Despite the frustrating results obtained in Hong
Kong, Tucker and Dubiner conclude in the final chapter that there is ample
evidence that immersion can provide a pathway to multilingualism for many
students.
This volume should be of interest to different education stakeholders for
different reasons: (i) to researchers for accessing detailed research findings
and for unveiling many interesting topics for further research; (ii) to teachers
because it will help them cope with immersion-related challenges from different perspectives; (iii) to administrators because the book exemplifies a range of
good practices and offers a sound review of the literature about the results that
have been obtained in immersion settings. The spread of immersion programs
appears to be unstoppable and there is an urgent need for volumes such as the
one reviewed here to provide answers to the many issues raised by educationalists. The findings and practices brought together by the editors will indubitably help to improve the implementation of immersion education in many
diverse contexts. Despite the excellence of the contributions, a wider range
of contexts would have enriched the final product further still. With the exception of the references to Hong Kong and Finland, the volume is mainly
limited to the North American context (Canada and the USA), although the
results and experiences described are applicable to many programs. Finally, a
102 REVIEWS
chapter devoted to the introduction of a third language in immersion contexts

would have fleshed out further the pathways to multilingualismpart of the volumes title. Although the editors acknowledge that immersion students may
be uniquely primed for acquiring additional languages (p. 18), this issue is not
examined further. All in all, this is an excellent volume that all those interested
in immersion education cannot afford to miss.
REFERENCE
Lasagabaster, D. and J. M. Sierra. 2010.
Immersion and CLIL in English: more
differences than similarities, ELT Journal 64:

36775.

and John H. Schumann: THE INTERACTIONAL INSTINCT: THE
EVOLUTION AND ACQUISITION OF LANGUAGE. Oxford University
Press, 2009.
The book starts with a position that is being entertained by a growing number
of scholars today since Hopper (1987, 1998), viz. languages are emergent phenomena and complex adaptive systems (CASs). That is, their systems arise
out of the self-organization of the smaller elements they are made of, are in
constant search for equilibrium, and undergo non-linear evolution. The authors, henceforth identified LMJMS, attribute the phylogenetic emergence of
language and childrens ability to learn language to their interactional
instinct. This is defined as an innate tendency that motivates the organism
to take action to achieve attachment and social affiliation with conspecifics
(p. 6, 24). Grammars are consequences of the increasing size of the lexicon and
have evolved through the conversational interaction among the hominids as
they attempt to express meanings with consistent form over time (p. 4).
Grammatical structure [evolved] to fit the brain, contrary to claims by
some other scholars that human brains evolved specifically for the kinds of
languages we speak or sign (p. 4).
An important question that arises by the end of Chapter 1 (Introduction:
Overview) is what the agents of languages as CASs are. As in Beckner et al.
(2009), the agents are hastily identified as speakers. However, complexity
theory suggests that the agents be identified in language itself, where
self-organization applies. In principle, the agents must be the various linguistic
Reviewed by David Lasagabaster

University of the Basque Country, Spain
E-mail: david.lasagabaster@ehu.es
102 REVIEWS
chapter devoted to the introduction of a third language in immersion contexts

would have fleshed out further the pathways to multilingualismpart of the volumes title. Although the editors acknowledge that immersion students may
be uniquely primed for acquiring additional languages (p. 18), this issue is not
examined further. All in all, this is an excellent volume that all those interested
in immersion education cannot afford to miss.
REFERENCE
Lasagabaster, D. and J. M. Sierra. 2010.
Immersion and CLIL in English: more
differences than similarities, ELT Journal 64:

36775.

and John H. Schumann: THE INTERACTIONAL INSTINCT: THE
EVOLUTION AND ACQUISITION OF LANGUAGE. Oxford University
Press, 2009.
The book starts with a position that is being entertained by a growing number
of scholars today since Hopper (1987, 1998), viz. languages are emergent phenomena and complex adaptive systems (CASs). That is, their systems arise
out of the self-organization of the smaller elements they are made of, are in
constant search for equilibrium, and undergo non-linear evolution. The authors, henceforth identified LMJMS, attribute the phylogenetic emergence of
language and childrens ability to learn language to their interactional
instinct. This is defined as an innate tendency that motivates the organism
to take action to achieve attachment and social affiliation with conspecifics
(p. 6, 24). Grammars are consequences of the increasing size of the lexicon and
have evolved through the conversational interaction among the hominids as
they attempt to express meanings with consistent form over time (p. 4).
Grammatical structure [evolved] to fit the brain, contrary to claims by
some other scholars that human brains evolved specifically for the kinds of
languages we speak or sign (p. 4).
An important question that arises by the end of Chapter 1 (Introduction:
Overview) is what the agents of languages as CASs are. As in Beckner et al.
(2009), the agents are hastily identified as speakers. However, complexity
theory suggests that the agents be identified in language itself, where
self-organization applies. In principle, the agents must be the various linguistic
Reviewed by David Lasagabaster

University of the Basque Country, Spain
E-mail: david.lasagabaster@ehu.es
REVIEWS 103
units that interact with each other and constantly reposition themselves.
Speakers are only the hosts and local manipulators (Mufwene 2001) that
give life to the units. This appears to me to be the ultimate conclusion of the
position which LMJMS advocate against the traditional conception of languages as institutions developed, apparently by design, by their speakers.
The agency of speakers/signers would still be significant. After all, the interactants and producers of utterances enable patterns to emerge out the
self-organization of units. It also seems inaccurate to me to identify the resources of linguistic systems with linguistic information (p. 25) rather than
with the devices available in particular languages to convey the information.
In any case, LMJMS present the Evidence for Language Emergence in
Chapter 2. The first kind is from modeling, according to which machines interacting with each other without a pre-established grammar can produce patterns. Thus, Steels (2000) underscores the role of feedback loop in minimizing
cognitive effort and maximizing communicative success through an individuals language memory. The second kind of evidence is adduced from creoles
and pidgins, which show how grammatical complexity is correlated with the
intensity/frequency of interactions and, may I add, with the range of topics on
which the interactants exchange information. The authors underscore the significance of vernacularization, rather than just any kind of language practice,
in the emergence of complex grammar. The Nicaraguan Sign Language is
adduced to support this position.
What LMJMS do not discuss but is equally significant is the distinction between, on the one hand, the emergence of idiolects, where there is pressure to
be systematic for efficient encoding of information and, on the other, the
emergence of communal norms, which make the idiolects similar to each
other (Mufwene 2001, 2008). The distinction sheds light on the fact that
self-organization operates within both idiolects and communal languages,
but not in identical ways. Interactions help generate category-based regularities in idiolects but produce convergent systems between the idiolects of regular interactants. The distinction between innovating and copying also makes
more sense at the communal level than at the idiolectal level.
The evidence that LMJMS adduce from historical linguistics only shows that
languages are always in the state of flux. Moreover, the question of the motivation for language change at the communal level (p. 45) is not really answered. Changes are actuated by the ways current devices and strategies are
extended to new situations, by the accommodations that speakers/signers
make to each other, and by deviations from current forms and patterns that
occur during language learning, which proceeds by inference.
LMJMS also reject the idea of a language organ that putatively facilitates
language acquisition. For them, domain-general learning strategies enable
children to acquire language. This general-purpose capacity includes a
pattern-recognition module and a statistical module, which keeps track of patterns of variation. Accordingly, the superior ability of children to acquire
104 REVIEWS
languages exists in the relative immaturity of neural structure and in the different physiology and psychology of children (p. 47).
I suspect that the following facts that are related to maturation are ecological
factors that also bear significantly on the subject matter: childrens communicative needs are not as extensive as those of adults, and the scope of their early
cognitive and interactional interests restrict the complexity of structures that
the caretakers produce in their utterances. Numerous words and structures are
omitted, because they are irrelevant to the child-and-caregiver kinds of interactions, leading to a gradual emergence of complex structures in the childs
linguistic competence. Incremental learning under conditions of interactions
and structures that grow progressively more complex must foster closer approximations of target linguistic behaviors. The relative faithfulness of the
outcomes suggests also that we not overlook the plasticity of the younger
mind and the relative absence of interfering factors associated with age and
experience. None of these factors appears to militate against the authors emergentist approach to language ontogenesis.
I find LMJMSs double articulation of aggregation as a factor in the emergence of complexity (p. 52) quite compelling, though they should clearly distinguish between the agents that are units in the emergent system and the
human agents whose interactions produce the units without the foresight of
integrating them into a system. Communication is always in the present, with
the interactants remembering which strategies have worked and which
ones have failed, but without anticipation of what the full communicative
system will wind up like. I also find plausible the authors position that increase in both the size of the lexicon and the frequency of interactions produces more complex linguistic patterns, although much of this remains to be
elaborated.
Chapter 3, The Implications of Interaction for the Nature of Language,
articulates the role of conversation as the primordial form of language and
as the form that first evolved in the environment of evolutionary adaptation
(p. 56). LMJMS state that speech and/or conversation are the most natural
habitats for language (p. 57, see also Kretzschmar 2009), arguing that writing
is to speech what gymnastics is to walking (p. 97). They espouse Levinsons
(2006) position that interactive language is the key phenomenon to be explained (p. 57); after all, patterns emerge out of the interactions among
participating agents (p. 68). The authors thus promote oral communication,
with its pauses, repeats, restarts, and repairs (traditionally associated with performance in generative linguistics) as primary and more natural language and
a more adequate subject matter of linguistics than written language (p. 63).
More specifically, children cannot acquire language without interaction, and
the use and manipulation of language reveals [sic] its dynamic and flexible
nature, which interacting participants can exploit in order to accomplish social
REVIEWS 105
goals (p. 65). Language is social; it is a cultural artifact (p. 68). Context too is
highly promoted, because much of what gives grammar its shape is the context in which it occurs, both linguistic and situational (p. 66).
LMJMSs correct emphasis on language as a cultural artifact can help explain why there is so much typological variation among the worlds languages.
On the other hand, it also calls for more justification for why they think it
unnecessary to posit a language organ in order to account for why languages
operate in fundamentally similar ways. To be sure, they do not address the
question of why grammar is necessary in the first place. The answer appears to
lie in the fact that the modalities used to embody language, viz., phonetic and
manual signs, call for some conventional strategies of encoding non-linear
meaning into a linear (less strict for sign language) composition.
Under particular cultural constraints, linearity entails that the sounds be
combined in specific ways to form words and words in turn be combined in
specific ways to form larger utterances, consistent with Martinets (1960)
notion of double articulation. Grammar, conceived of in evolutionary or
neurobiological terms, is thus a consequence of the physical embodiment of
language but not of the abstract, mental part of the technology, though it is
constrained by universal principles that can be characterized as cognitive, and
physiological in the case of sound combinations. The above considerations are
consistent with the authors position that grammar . . . did not develop as an
autonomous system among its users but was used along with a multitude of
semiotic resources, all of which were employed in concert for meaning to be
made and for actions to be successfully carried out (p. 100).
In Chapter 4, Interactional Readiness, LMJMS adduce various facts about
interactive infants to prove the innateness of the interactional instinct. They
suggest that the need/desire to communicate and socialize with conspecifics
preceded the ontogenetic development of language and probably also its
phylogenetic emergence. The evidence is adduced from infants ability to participate in joint attention, to focus more on humans than on objects, to express
emotions and read those of their caregivers, to participate in protoconversations with them, and to imitate or initiate interactions. The authors
argue that interaction alone does not guarantee [language] acquisition; language is transmitted through other developmental precursors: pattern finding
and statistical learning (p. 131). Even pattern finding alone is not sufficient
for language acquisition (p. 133); the behavior of the caregivers, especially
infant-directed speech, facilitates child language development. The interactional instinct itself is aided by the mirror-neuron system.
Chapter 5 is a very short one, on the Neurobiology of the Interactional
Instinct. It appears to have to do with interactional experience, negative
and positive, and with memory and its role in the feedback loop within the
language learning process. LMJMS remark, As a nonlinear course of
106 REVIEWS
development begins in the infant, memory systems build on experience built

on encounters, with appetitive goal-seeking, dopamine-mediated reward (p.
166). This is what they continue to discuss in Chapter 6: The Interactional
Instinct in Primary- and Second-Language Acquisition. The role of interactional instinct is acknowledged as critical in both processes, assuming that
language facilitates social affiliation (p. 167). The role of population structure
is likewise acknowledged as defining types of enclosure (p. 171). Individuals
face different experiences, which play a role in the shaping of internal neurobiological substrate (p. 179). Notwithstanding the fact that different speakers/
signers have different learning skills, the authors express a position similar to
Mufwenes (2008) observation that idiolects are different largely because individual speakers have had different interactional histories, thus they have had
access to different primary linguistic data, which influenced variably the inferences that shaped their emergent idiolectal systems.
The distinction that LMJMS adopt between experience-expectant and
experience-dependant processes (p. 179) seems worth exploring further
about language emergence. Success-wise, an important difference between
first- and second-language acquisition seems to lie in the readiness of the
learner to interact with another person in the language they are learning,
with the adult often being more inhibited than the child, though there are
several other factors. A controversial one is perhaps the authors claim that
children are better equipped with neural resources for interaction and, therefore, for language learning than adults (p. 186). I think a noteworthy problem
for adults is that they face more communicative and social pressures.
Knowledge of another language can as much facilitate the learning as it can
cause interference. It certainly makes the learner impatient to express ideas in
ways they have not learned yet.
In Conclusion: Broader Implications of the Interactional Instinct, LMJMS
underscore their central points in the book, especially: (i) language acquisition
would seem to be governed not by UG but by general cognitive development;
and (ii) those who facilitate child language development need not be the parents, they can be anybody who interacts with the children, including the older
children. This should remind us that language and cultural transmission is
more horizontal than vertical. The learners tend to affiliate with those they
interact with, making experience a more significant factor than age (Mufwene
2001).
This thought-provoking book is generally written very accessibly and
focused on demonstrating the important role of the interactional instinct
both in language acquisition and in the emergence of language in mankind.
Perhaps it would have been easier to absorb if the authors had discussed the
topics in reverse order, beginning with language acquisition and ending with
the phylogenetic emergence of language. Some readers may wonder why they
brought in emergentism and complexity theory earlier in the book but hardly
invoke them to explain language acquisition or prove the role of the interactional instinct. Chapters 4 and 5 are perhaps the most technical, while
REVIEWS 107
Chapter 5 is perhaps the least informative. Overall, The Interactional Instinct is a

book worth reading, as it is very informative in both the facts that are discussed
and the literature covered, and it defends a position that in the very least
deserves more attention. I have found it stimulating.
REFERENCES
Beckner,
C.,
R.
Blythe,
J.
Bybee,
M. H. Christiansen, W. Croft, N. Ellis,
J. Holland, J. Ke, D. Larsen-Freeman, and
Tom Schoenemann. 2009. Language is a
complex adaptive system: a position paper,
Language Learning 59 (Suppl.), 126.
Hopper, P. J. 1987. Emergent grammar. Papers
from the 13th meeting of the Berkeley
Linguistics Society, pp. 13957.
Hopper, P. J. 1998. Emergent grammar
in M. Tomasello (ed.): The New Psychology of
Language: Cognitive and Functional Approaches
to Language Structure. Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, Inc., pp. 15565.
Kretzschmar, W. A. 2009. The Linguistics of

Speech. Cambridge University Press.
Levinson, S. 2006. Cognition at the heart of
human interaction Discourse Studies: 8593
Martinet, A. 1960. Elements de linguistique
generale. Armand Colin.
Mufwene, S. S. 2001. The Ecology of Language
Evolution. Cambridge University Press.
Mufwene, S. S. 2008. Language Evolution: Contact,
Competition and Change. Continuum Press.
Steels, L. 2000. Language as a complex adaptive
system in M. Schoenauer et al. (eds): Parallel
Problem Solving from Nature (PPSSN 6). Springer,
pp. 1726.
Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow (eds): SEMIOTIC LANDSCAPES:

LANGUAGE, IMAGE, SPACE. Continuum Publishing, 2010.
Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow, two academics with joint appointments
in linguistics and communication studies, have collected excellent case studies
integrating analyses of material culture with sociolinguistics. As they state,
if not succinctly, they wish to foreground the interplay between language,
visual discourse, and the spatial practices and dimensions of culture, especially
the textual mediation or discursive construction of place and the use of space
as a semiotic resource in its own right (p. 1). Every worthwhile anthology
deserves a valuable introductory chapter. Unfortunately, it is precisely in this
regard that this collection breaks down and the excessively packed sentence
above is symptomatic of the editors failure. Recommending a readers
strategy, I suggest commencing with the articles.
I do not know when professors in fields other than semiotics decided to use
semiotic as an adjective and synonym for symbol, rather than master the
technicalities of semiotic analysis. As a semiotician, I find Jaworski and
Reviewed by Salikoko S. Mufwene

The University of Chicago, USA
E-mail: s-mufwene@uchicago.edu
REVIEWS 107
Chapter 5 is perhaps the least informative. Overall, The Interactional Instinct is a

book worth reading, as it is very informative in both the facts that are discussed
and the literature covered, and it defends a position that in the very least
deserves more attention. I have found it stimulating.
REFERENCES
Beckner,
C.,
R.
Blythe,
J.
Bybee,
M. H. Christiansen, W. Croft, N. Ellis,
J. Holland, J. Ke, D. Larsen-Freeman, and
Tom Schoenemann. 2009. Language is a
complex adaptive system: a position paper,
Language Learning 59 (Suppl.), 126.
Hopper, P. J. 1987. Emergent grammar. Papers
from the 13th meeting of the Berkeley
Linguistics Society, pp. 13957.
Hopper, P. J. 1998. Emergent grammar
in M. Tomasello (ed.): The New Psychology of
Language: Cognitive and Functional Approaches
to Language Structure. Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, Inc., pp. 15565.
Kretzschmar, W. A. 2009. The Linguistics of

Speech. Cambridge University Press.
Levinson, S. 2006. Cognition at the heart of
human interaction Discourse Studies: 8593
Martinet, A. 1960. Elements de linguistique
generale. Armand Colin.
Mufwene, S. S. 2001. The Ecology of Language
Evolution. Cambridge University Press.
Mufwene, S. S. 2008. Language Evolution: Contact,
Competition and Change. Continuum Press.
Steels, L. 2000. Language as a complex adaptive
system in M. Schoenauer et al. (eds): Parallel
Problem Solving from Nature (PPSSN 6). Springer,
pp. 1726.
Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow (eds): SEMIOTIC LANDSCAPES:

LANGUAGE, IMAGE, SPACE. Continuum Publishing, 2010.
Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow, two academics with joint appointments
in linguistics and communication studies, have collected excellent case studies
integrating analyses of material culture with sociolinguistics. As they state,
if not succinctly, they wish to foreground the interplay between language,
visual discourse, and the spatial practices and dimensions of culture, especially
the textual mediation or discursive construction of place and the use of space
as a semiotic resource in its own right (p. 1). Every worthwhile anthology
deserves a valuable introductory chapter. Unfortunately, it is precisely in this
regard that this collection breaks down and the excessively packed sentence
above is symptomatic of the editors failure. Recommending a readers
strategy, I suggest commencing with the articles.
I do not know when professors in fields other than semiotics decided to use
semiotic as an adjective and synonym for symbol, rather than master the
technicalities of semiotic analysis. As a semiotician, I find Jaworski and
Reviewed by Salikoko S. Mufwene

The University of Chicago, USA
E-mail: s-mufwene@uchicago.edu
108 REVIEWS
Thurlows pedestrian and rather unscholarly attempt to tie the articulation

between meaning-based actions and socio-spatial processes involving material
culture troubling. Semiotics is the study of the life of signs in society, a
concise way of saying the same thing as above and according to the classic
definition of de Saussure (even though the term is Peirces; de Saussure used
semiology). Any conceived and constructed environment, according to semiotics is, technically, a signifying landscape. Jaworski and Thurlows burden,
which they ignore, is to apply semiotics to an object of analysis that they
consider semiotic. In keeping with the breezy way they jaunt through the
landscape of contemporary cultural studies, picking and choosing the bright
objects that catch their attention, there is little or no semiotics in this volume,
nor, any deep level analysis of signifying processes. The case studies presented
here succeed only because they add to the usual mix of sociolinguistic analysis
a pertinent attention to contemporary sign vehicles that are as important as
more traditional manifestations of environmental signification, such as how
our current landscape is a composite of images, words, modern media,
discourses, communication technologies, and subcultures meshed together in
urban space.
Secondly, the pedestrian way the editors weave aspects of contemporary
cultural studies into their introduction detracts from the quality of the other
contributions. Space is an important concept today. Jaworski and Thurlow
have read David Harvey. They mention Lefebvre (who is the source of
Harveys approach to Space), but they have not read him well. Discussing
Lefebvre, they once again regurgitate what has come to be a kind of signature
dilettantish reference of his threefold approach to socio-spatial meaning
perceived, conceived, livedas if this is all there is to the 400-plus pages of his
book, The Production of Space. They seem, too, not to have understood Harvey
well. The editors talk about modernism and relate it to socio-spatial aspects,
using quotes from one book, but surely, Harveys important contribution was
the way he analysed, not modernism, but postmodernism in that very
volume. It is not possible to understand contemporary culture, as Jaworski
and Thurlow try to do, without grasping the broad material and ongoing
issues associated with the study of postmodernism. So limited is their reading
and understanding of contemporary cultural studies that they ignore Jameson,
who literally created this field with one article that is universally known and
Baudrillard, who truly did integrate semiotics with cultural studies by using his
absolutely indispensable concept of sign value. When Thurlow and Jaworski
discuss our signifying landscape and the societal processes that are articulated
with it, they verbosely strain to say things that using sign value would help
them say quite directly and clearly (see Gottdiener 1995). Finally, there is no
more visible sign of their limited reading and understanding of contemporary
cultural studies than how they fall back on citing the ancient Kevin Lynch,
regurgitating him for a full paragraph into a discussion of space, instead
of referencing more recent work in the Lefebvrian tradition.
REVIEWS 109
The articles in this collection are a different matter. Of interest to sociolinguists and to scholars in communication studies concerned with societal processes alike, the chapters expand our ways of thinking about signifying
practices tied to media and environmental culture. Several authors focus on
the way globalization in general or the transformation of societies to a
neo-Liberal capitalist economy, alters the signifying environment. Jeffrey L.
Kallens case study of Dublin identifies it as a multi-linguistic landscape.
He notes how globalization has changed the parameters of street-level signage
from the historical imperative of writing signs that make the most sense to a
given language community within the territory it inhabits, to those of more
universalistic signs. This includes the mixing of several language communities
as referents pertinent to the cultural diversity of globalized places. Missing
from this approach, which is essentially an extension of sociolinguistics and
Erving Goffmans frame analysis, is any recognition of another issue and one
that is most relevant to semiotics, namely, the phenomenon of polysemy. Signs
invariably mean different things to different people even within the same
language community. In this and other instances the articles collected here
ignore semiotics, despite the editors use of that term.
Mark Sebba, Nik Coupland and Susan Dray write on similar themes. They
observe how once uniform language communities have been transformed to
multiple symbolic domains by marginalized or non-hierarchically active signifying practices produced by population diversity. Sebba compares apartheid
South Africa and the Isle of Man in regard to ordinary and transitory consumer
goods, such as newspapers or bus tickets. His analysis foregrounds the way
minority modes of expression are marginalized, yet cannot be suppressed.
Couplands case study of Wales shows how, despite active government regulation of language to preserve the purity of Welsh in the face of increasing
English use, everyday speech undermines this effort. Coupland, of course,
echoes the classic distinction made by de Saussure between langue and
parole. Susan Dray does something similar in her comparison between the
use of English and Jamaican Patois in everyday signage demonstrating how
the latter is just as significant a means of communication as the former for
community discourse. Squarely placed within the tradition of sociolinguistics,
these studies connect the quotidian with specific places and illustrate the
difference between structure and agency, even if they fail to demonstrate knowledge of sign analysis tying ideology to discourse or forms and substances of
expression to content in the semiotic sense.
Ingrid Piller reports on the transformation of Basel, Switzerlands
tourist-oriented sex industry according to new environmental signs that
appeal to global consumers. Analysis of ads, shop fronts and websites, supplement other media forms neutralizing the image of sex by promoting clean fun
for tourists. Reversing her emphasis, Alastair Pennycock shows how graffiti is
an alternative expression of artistic and subcultural difference compared with
the normalized, commercial middle class images promoted in place by tourist
industry advertising. Thomas Mitchell presents another version of subcultural
110 REVIEWS
versus dominant cultural imaging. His Pittsburgh case study of how Spanish
language intrusion accompanies Mexican immigration into the city critiques
the view of the majority in the conception of scale and, therefore, as spreading
a false view inducing crisis. Rodney Jones adds to the mix of these studies a
reminder that, in addition to the real built environment, there is also a virtual
space where people interact. Thus, computer-mediated communication
remains important as a behavioural domain otherwise hidden from view,
which is, in Jones study, anchored, to specific places and milieus.
Gil Aboussnouga and David Machin examine British memorials from WWI
to the present relating the designs (landscapes, poses) and formal features to
ideologies of nationalism, heroism, warfare and social relations. Exploring the
changing moral and political dimensions of society through the differences in
signifiers over time, they show how social change has affected the way people
view war and its effects on memory and memorialization. In a related study,
Elana Shohamy and Shoshi Waksman examine Tel Avivs public monuments
in regard to competing narratives of migration connected to the Zionist project
and its limitations. Returning to the globalization motif, Irina Gendelman
and Giorgia Aiello study the transformation from Communism to Capitalism
in several East European cities via building facades that link post-communist
commodification to an emergent tourist industry. Similarly, Ella Chmielewska,
surveys several cities, reading the city according to dichotomies, in the
manner of Lotmans Moscow-Tartu school, an approach over half a century
old that contemporary urban semiotics has surpassed. However, her analysis
acknowledges the presence of other readings that subjectively deconstruct
her dichotomies. But, are they subjective, a semiotician would ask? Her reliance on dichotomies ignores the general question of polysemy which is already
a well-established failing of this formalistic approach and to which she, like the
others, appears to be oblivious.
The editors, Thurlow and Jaworski, also include a study of their own that,
along with the chapter by Jones, is among the weakest in the collection. In
sharp contrast to their overblown claims of theoretical sophistication and
jargon-stuffed discussion, they present a subjective reading of advertisements
selling luxury, up-scale experiences. Ignoring similar and more semiotic
studies, such as Goldman and Papson (1999), they relate signs of elitism in
ads to tourism in little more than a simple content analysis. Markers of superelite lifestylehaute cuisine, butlers, spa treatments, luxury brandsare
identified. But what about the possibility of Baudrillard-like simulation of
the same? Just as in the case of studying local native cultures, where is their
proof of authenticity for the production of a real elite experience contained
in the commodification practices of the advertising producers? In other words,
they, themselves, take these ads for the real because they only present a
reading, rather than also interrogating their construction, costs, access and
political economy. As an exploration of elitism, limited analytical imagination
is demonstrated because of the failure to note how wealth is signified through
invidious comparison by a second process, that of excess. Thorstein Veblen
REVIEWS 111
observed this over 100 years ago; it is also exemplified by Dubai (for a semiotic
approach to this phenomenon, see Gottdiener 2011). In short, the authors
best effort does not measure up either to semiotic or to cultural studies analysis
against scholarship in these fields.
REFERENCES
Goldman, R. and S. Papson. 1999. Sign Wars:
The Cultural Landscape of Capital. Guilford Press.
Gottdiener, M. 1995. Postmodern Semiotics.
Blackwell Press.
Gottdiener, M. 2011. Socio- Semiotics and the

new mega spaces of tourism: Some comments
on Las Vegas and Dubai, Semiotica 183/14,
1218.
Reviewed by Mark Gottdiener

University at Buffalo, SUNY, USA
E-mail: mgott@buffalo.edu
1/28/12
3:23 PM
Page 2
EDITORS
NOTES TO CONTRIBUTORS
Ken Hyland, Director, Centre for Applied English Studies, KK Leung Building,
The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong
Jane Zuengler, Nancy C. Hoefs Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison,
6103 Helen C. White 600 North Park Street Madison, WI, 53706 USA
Assistant to Jane Zuengler: Heather Carroll, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Articles submitted to Applied Linguistics should represent outstanding scholarship and

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REVIEWS AND FORUM EDITOR

Stef Slembrouck, Professor of English Linguistics and Discourse Analysis, Universiteit
Gent, Vakgroep Engels, Rozier 44, B-9000 Gent, Belgium. <stef.slembrouck@ugent.be>
Assistant to Stef Slembrouck: Tine Defour, Universiteit Gent
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Page 1

FIONA COPLAND
You Know Arnold Schwarzenegger? On Doing Questioning in Second Language Dyadic
Tutorials
HASSAN BELHIAH
SAAD AL-GAHTANI, CARSTEN ROEVER
Sentence Reading and Writing for Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition
FRANCOIS PICHETTE, LINDA DE SERRES AND MARC LAFONTAINE
FORUMS
Reconceptualizing Strategic Learning in the Face of Self-Regulation: Throwing Language
Learning Strategies out with the Bathwater
HEATH ROSE
REVIEWS
Tara W. Fortune and Diane J. Tedick (eds): Pathways to Multilingualism: Evolving
Perspectives on Immersion Education
DAVID LASAGABASTER
Namhee Lee, Lisa Mikesell, Anna Dina L. Joacquin, Andrea W. Mates, and John H.
Schumann: The Interactional Instinct: The Evolution and Acquisition of Language
SALIKOKO S. MUFWENE
Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow (eds): Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image,
Space
MARK GOTTDIENER
Notes on Contributors
Adaptation and Validation of Self-regulating Capacity in Vocabulary Learning Scale

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Legitimate Talk in Feedback Conferences

Volume 33 Number 1 February 2012

Adaptation and Validation of Self-regulating Capacity in Vocabulary Learning Scale

ISSN 0142-6001 (PRINT)

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Proficiency and Sequential Organization of L2 Requests

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Namhee Lee, Lisa Mikesell, Anna Dina L. Joacquin, Andrea W. Mates,

Applied Linguistics 2012: 33/1: 120

Legitimate Talk in Feedback Conferences

Feedback on performance is a feature of much professional training. Trainee

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Feedback on performance is a feature of professional training. Much feedback is

2 LEGITIMATE TALK IN FEEDBACK CONFERENCES

DATA AND APPROACH

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practices of the post-observation feedback conference. Qualitative research by

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10-week semi-intensive programme (twice a week), the other a four-week

4 LEGITIMATE TALK IN FEEDBACK CONFERENCES

The post-observation feedback conference can follow a number of models,

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THE FEEDBACK CONFERENCE: AN OVERVIEW

DATA ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION

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6 LEGITIMATE TALK IN FEEDBACK CONFERENCES

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8 LEGITIMATE TALK IN FEEDBACK CONFERENCES

Extract 2the nicest thing to do would be . . .

Yeah yeah I agree totally I think I think its that issue of ()

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LEGITIMATE TALK IN FEEDBACK CONFERENCES

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Extract 3is that not feedback?

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LEGITIMATE TALK IN FEEDBACK CONFERENCES

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The main advantage would be the fact that hopefully people . . .

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LEGITIMATE TALK IN FEEDBACK CONFERENCES

Extract 4can I just ask a quick question?

((turning to trainee 2)) Do you want to go on to trainee 1?

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LEGITIMATE TALK IN FEEDBACK CONFERENCES

LEGITIMATE TALK AND DEVELOPMENT

The purpose of feedback is to erm to get the trainees to evaluate the

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Would you, would you do it differently in that situation? How

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LEGITIMATE TALK IN FEEDBACK CONFERENCES