“The volume by Brian Paltridge and Matthew T.

Prior offers to the field contemporary perspectives

on the theoretical and methodological power of discourse analytic approaches in furthering under-
standings of second language learning, teaching, and use in a wide range of contexts. Novice and
seasoned researchers alike will find the chapters eminently useful.”
Joan Kelly Hall, Professor Emerita of Applied Linguistics,
The Pennsylvania State University, USA
 THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF
SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND
DISCOURSE

This state-of-the-art volume offers a comprehensive and accessible examination of perspectives

within the field of discourse analysis on the processes and conditions of second language learning,
teaching, and use.
Led by Brian Paltridge and Matthew T. Prior, this collection brings together leading global
researchers in the field to guide readers through background theories, theoretical paradigms,
methodological issues, and pedagogical implications by synthesizing current and past work, and
setting a future agenda for discourse-oriented second language research.
The book is a critical resource which will be indispensable for scholars and advanced students of
applied linguistics, second language acquisition, education, and related fields.

Brian Paltridge is Professor of TESOL at the University of Sydney, Australia. He has served as edi-
tor for the journals English for Specific Purposes and TESOL Quarterly.

Matthew T. Prior is Associate Professor of English (Applied Linguistics, Linguistics, and TESOL)
at Arizona State University, USA. He has edited several volumes and journal special issues. Most
recently, he served as associate editor of Research Methods in Applied Linguistics, which he helped
launch.
 ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOKS IN SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
Susan M. Gass and Alison Mackey, Series Editors
Kimberly L. Geeslin, Associate Editor

The Routledge Handbooks in Second Language Acquisition are a comprehensive, must-have survey
of this core sub-discipline of applied linguistics. With a truly global reach and featuring diverse
contributing voices, each handbook provides an overview of both the fundamentals and new
directions for each topic.

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Edited by Brian Paltridge and Matthew T. Prior

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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK
OF SECOND LANGUAGE
ACQUISITION AND DISCOURSE

Edited by Brian Paltridge and Matthew T. Prior

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Title: The Routledge handbook of second language acquisition and discourse /
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handbooks in second language acquisition | Includes bibliographical
references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2023041205 (print) | LCCN
2023041206 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032011851 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032011882
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ISBN: 978-1-032-01185-1 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-01188-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-17757-9 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003177579

Typeset in Times New Roman

by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.
 CONTENTS

List of figures x
List of tables xi
List of contributors xii

1 Introduction 1
Brian Paltridge and Matthew T. Prior

PART I
Approaches and perspectives 9

2 Conversation analysis and second language research 11

Atsushi Hasegawa

3 Multimodal discourse analysis and second language research 24

Christoph Hafner

4 Narrative inquiry and second language research 38

Doris Warriner and Anne Pomerantz

5 Disciplinary discourses and second language literacies: A systemic

functional linguistic perspective 51
Nicole Siffrinn and Meg Gebhard

6 Genre, discourse, and second language research 64

Christine M. Tardy and Jeroen Gevers

7 Grammatical complexity, discourse, and second language research 76

Ge Lan

vii
 Contents

8 Critical perspectives on discourse and second language research 88

Qinghua Chen, Yanmei Zheng, and Angel M. Y. Lin

9 A discursive psychological approach for second language

acquisition research 102
Matthew T. Prior

10 Sociocultural theory and L2 discourse: From descriptive to interventionist

research in second language acquisition 116
Amy Snyder Ohta

11 Sociocognitive perspectives on second language acquisition,

teaching, and use 132
Dwight Atkinson, Anamaría Sagre Barboza, and Elif Burhan-Horasanlı

12 Complex dynamic systems theory, interactional discourse, and second

language research 146
Aki Siegel and Paul Seedhouse

13 Corpus approaches to discourse and second language research 162

Sheena Gardner

14 Ethnographic perspectives on discourse and second language research 173

Hanako Okada

15 Sociolinguistic perspectives on discourse and second language research 187

Corinne A. Seals and Honiara Salanoa

16 Language socialization, discourse, and second language research 200

Patricia A. Duff and Masaru Yamamoto

PART II
Types of discourse 213

17 Spoken discourse and second language research 215

Midori Ishida

18 Written discourse and second language research 229

Elena Cotos and Kimberly Becker

19 Disciplinary discourses and second language research 242

Bethany Gray and Chris Nuttall

viii
 Contents

20 Metadiscourse and second language research 255

Victor Ho

21 Classroom discourse and second language acquisition 270

Christopher Jenks and Olcay Sert

22 Multilingual discourse and second language research 283

Tarja Nikula and Anne Pitkänen-Huhta

PART III
Areas of use 295

23 Technology-mediated discourse and second language research 297

Vincenza Tudini and Anthony J. Liddicoat

24 Intercultural pragmatics, discourse, and second language research 311

Istvan Kecskes

25 Identity, discourse, and second language research 327

Elizabeth Miller

26 Gender, sexuality, discourse, and second language acquisition research 339

Susan Ehrlich and Tommaso Milani

27 Discourse, competence, and second language acquisition research 353

Daisuke Kimura

Index 367

ix
 FIGURES

5.1 SFL’s text/context dynamics in classroom SLA 53

10.1 Steps of concept-based language instruction 122
10.2 Kim’s (2013) conceptual depiction of American sarcasm 124
10.3 Kim’s (2013) flowchart on detecting American sarcasm 125
10.4 Masuda & Ohta’s (2021) SCOBA 1.2 to teach subjective construal 126
10.5 Masuda & Ohta’s (2021) SCOBA 2.1, displaying discourse impacts of subjective
construal 126
10.6 Teaching the passive, as empathy toward and focus on the subject 127
12.1 Normalized frequency of word-search sequences 151
12.2 Normalized frequency of word-search sequences by participant 151
20.1 Hyland’s (2005, p. 49) interpersonal model of metadiscourse 257
21.1 Four axes of classroom discourse approaches 273
23.1 Typical video-conference interaction between L2 teacher and students (adapted
from Tudini, 2021) 305

x
 TABLES

10.1 Some examples of dialectical transformation of SLA terminological thought 128

18.1 Methods and foci in L2 writing research (based on Polio & Friedman, 2016) 233
18.2 Theoretical perspectives, approaches, and methods in sample studies 234
19.1 Types of comparisons 247
19.2 Overview of sample studies 248

xi
 CONTRIBUTORS

Dwight Atkinson is an applied linguist and second language educator at the University of
Arizona, USA.

Anamaría Sagre Barboza is an associate professor in English at the Universidad de Córdoba in

Colombia.

Kimberly Becker is an academic communication consultant at Iowa State University, USA.

Elif Burhan-Horasanlı is an assistant professor in the English Language Education Program at TED
University, Turkey.

Qinghua Chen is a doctoral student at Simon Fraser University, Canada.

Elena Cotos is Director of the Communication Program Director in the Graduate College and As-
sociate Professor of Applied Linguistics at Iowa State University, USA.

Patricia A. Duff is Professor of Applied Linguistics and Distinguished University Scholar in the
Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia, Canada.

Susan Ehrlich is Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguis-
tics at York University, Canada.

Sheena Gardner is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Coventry University, UK.

Meg Gebhard is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA.

Jeroen Gevers is a lecturer in writing programs at the University of California Los Angeles, USA.

Bethany Gray is an associate professor and Director of Graduate Education in the Department of
English at Iowa State University, USA.

xii
 Contributors

Christoph Hafner is an associate professor in the English Department at City University of Hong
Kong, Hong Kong SAR.

Atsushi Hasegawa is Assistant Professor in Japanese Language and Linguistics at the University of
Hawai’i, USA.

Victor Ho is an associate professor in the Department of English and Communication at Hong Kong
Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR.

Midori Ishida is Lecturer in Japanese Language at San Jose State University, USA.

Christopher Jenks is Professor of Intercultural Communication at Utrecht University, the

Netherlands.

Istvan Kecskes is Distinguished Professor in the School of Education, University at Albany, State
University of New York, USA.

Daisuke Kimura is an associate professor in the School of Education at Waseda University, Japan.

Ge Lan is an assistant professor in the English Department at City University of Hong Kong, Hong
Kong SAR.

Anthony J. Liddicoat is Professor of Applied Linguistics in the Centre for Applied Linguistics at the
University of Warwick, UK.

Angel M. Y. Lin is a Professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University, Canada.

Tommaso Milani is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Pennsylvania State University, USA.

Elizabeth Miller is Professor of English at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, USA.

Tarja Nikula is a professor in the Centre for Applied Language Studies at the University of
Jyväskylä, Finland.

Chris Nuttall is a PhD student in the Applied Linguistics and Technology program at Iowa State
University, USA.

Amy Snyder Ohta is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Literature at
the University of Washington, USA.

Hanako Okada is an associate professor in the Faculty of Liberal Arts at Sophia University, Japan.

Brian Paltridge is Professor of TESOL in Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of
Sydney, Australia.

Anne Pitkänen-Huhta is a professor in the Department of Language and Communication Studies at

the University of Jyväskylä, Finland.

xiii
 Contributors

Anne Pomerantz is a professor of practice in the Graduate School of Education at the University of
Pennsylvania, USA.

Matthew T. Prior is an associate professor of applied linguistics at Arizona State University, USA.

Honiara Salanoa is Head of the Department of Media and Communication at the National Univer-
sity of Samoa, Samoa.

Corinne A. Seals is a senior lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies
at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

Paul Seedhouse is Professor of Educational and Applied Linguistics at the University of

Newcastle, UK.

Olcay Sert is Professor of English Language Education at Mälardalen University, Sweden.

Aki Siegel is an assistant professor in the English department at Uppsala University, Sweden.

Nicole Siffrinn is an assistant professor of literacy, language, and culture at the University of South-
ern Maine, USA.

Christine M. Tardy is Professor of English Applied Linguistics in the Department of English at the
University of Arizona, USA.

Vincenza Tudini is a senior lecturer in Italian and applied linguistics at the University of South
Australia, Australia.

Doris Warriner is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University, USA.

Masaru Yamamoto is a PhD student in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the
University of British Columbia, Canada.

Yanmei Zheng is a teacher of Chinese Literature at Pearson College UWC, Canada.

xiv
 1
INTRODUCTION
Brian Paltridge and Matthew T. Prior

The Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Discourse aims to provide an informative guide
for language researchers seeking to explore discourse perspectives on second (L2) or additional (Lx)
language acquisition and associated concerns. This comprehensive resource offers an array of theo-
ries and empirical approaches, reflecting diverse epistemological and methodological perspectives.
By showing the many affordances of discourse analysis for second language research, the Handbook
supports language researchers in investigating a broad range of topics. Moreover, second language
research affords a rich terrain for advancing the insights and techniques of discourse analysis, as
evinced by the diverse contributions in this volume.
This is not to suggest that researchers have thus far failed to recognize the productive links be-
tween discourse analysis and the study of second language acquisition (SLA). Early contributions by
language researchers such as Hatch (1978), Hatch and Long (1980), Kramsch (1981), and Larsen-
Freeman (1980) showed the theoretical and analytic power of the tools and findings of discourse
analysis to illuminate the varied processes and conditions of SLA. More recent advances have ex-
panded our understandings of the socio-interactional dynamics of language learning in and beyond
the classroom: language as an ‘in-situ process and as a product’ (Eskildsen et al., 2019, p. 2).
Even as this Handbook recognizes past and present work linking the domains and interests of SLA
and discourse analysis, it seeks to inspire new connections by taking an intentionally encompassing
view of SLA, which Ortega (2009) describes as:

the scholarly field of inquiry that investigates the human capacity to learn human languages
other than the first, during late childhood, adolescence or adulthood, and once the first language
or languages have been acquired. It studies a wide range of complex issues and phenomena that
contribute to the puzzling range of possible outcomes when learning an additional language in
a variety of contexts.
(pp. 1–2)

The increasingly diverse field of SLA encompasses not just universal, individual, cognitive, lin-
guistic and developmental matters but also social, affective, interactional, sociopolitical, technologi-
cal, ideological, epistemological, ethical and, increasingly, methodological concerns. Contemporary
SLA is therefore characterized by an interest in understanding the complex, multidimensional nature
of acquiring additional languages and the macro, meso, and micro levels of second language learning,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003177579-1 1
 Brian Paltridge and Matthew T. Prior

teaching, and use (Douglas Fir Group, 2016). This includes attention to the belief systems and values
that both shape and are shaped by language acquisition, the institutions and communities in which
individuals learn and acquire languages, the conditions and experiences of being and becoming a
second language user, and the actions and interactions that language learning and teaching involve
(Hall, 2019). This broad view of SLA also encompasses discussions of transdisciplinary (Hall, 2019),
sociocultural (Lantolf, 2011), complex-dynamic-systems (Hiver et al., 2023; Larsen-Freeman, 2011),
language-socialization (Duff & Talmy, 2011), conversation-analytic (Kasper & Wagner, 2011), so-
ciocognitive (Atkinson, 2011), and translanguaging (Li, 2018) approaches to SLA and its diverse
conditions, processes, and outcomes.
Similarly, the Handbook takes a broad, interdisciplinary perspective on discourse and discourse anal-
ysis, from what Fairclough (2003) terms ‘textually oriented discourse analysis’ through to approaches
which draw on social (Block, 2003), interactional (Kasper, 2006), or post-structural orientations to
discourse (McNamara, 2019). These views are neither mutually exclusive nor incompatible with each
other, in that discourse that is studied from a textually oriented view is still socially situated and needs to
be interpreted in terms of its social meaning and function (Cameron & Kulick, 2003). Equally, discourse
that is considered from various social perspectives still needs to include a focus on language in its dis-
cussion; that is, how social meanings and relations are produced, and re-produced, through discourse
(Eckert, 2008)—and through language users’ diverse semiotic and multimodal repertoires.
There are, of course, many handbooks which focus on discourse analysis. There are also books
on discourse analysis which include varying degrees of attention to language learning and teaching.
The Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Discourse, however, aims to go beyond these
texts by bringing contemporary research in the areas of discourse and language learning, teaching,
and use together to illustrate how discourse-oriented research—its diverse topics, findings, theories,
perspectives, and methodologies—contributes to the diverse field of SLA research as we have defined
it earlier in this chapter.
The aim of the Handbook, thus, is to provide a collection of reader-friendly yet authoritative chap-
ters on research approaches and areas in discourse analysis and SLA. The book discusses prevailing
views in each of the topics covered, especially as they relate to second language learning, teaching,
and use. The Handbook, in sum, aims to be an accessible yet authoritative introduction to discourse
analysis and SLA, with chapters written by leading researchers in the field which cover key theoreti-
cal, methodological, and practical issues of relevance to both novice and seasoned researchers.

Discourse and discourse analysis

It is important to describe how we (and the chapter authors) define discourse and discourse analysis
for the purposes of this Handbook. We do this by discussing the history of the term discourse analy-
sis, starting with the work of Zellig Harris (1952), who first introduced the term, and then outlining
different ways in which different discourses have been researched. We also discuss the role of dis-
course in the history of applied linguistics research, which from its beginnings has been intertwined
with the field and interests of SLA.
Zellig Harris (1952), an early researcher in the area of transformational grammar and mentor to
Noam Chomsky, was especially interested in language use beyond the level of the sentence, examin-
ing the distribution of language features within texts and how they are combined in particular kinds of
discourse. Mitchell (1957) examined the discourse structure of texts, in his case buying-and-selling
interactions, and the steps people go through when engaging in these. Mitchell also discusses how the
meaning of language lies in the situational context in which it is used and in the context of the text as
a whole, something that is taken up by van Dijk (2008), Halliday (2009) and others working with the
systemic functional view of language (see e.g., Hasan, 2009; Martin, 1999).

2
 Introduction

Discourse analysis, then, is interested, among other things, in the organizational structures of
texts. One way in which this has been examined is through identifying the schematic structures of
texts; that is, the discourse structure of texts such as arguments, reports, descriptions, and explana-
tions (see Siffrinn & Gebhard, Chapter 5 in this volume) which come together in the writing of larger
texts such as academic essays or assignments. Another way of looking at discourse structures is
through an analysis of the stages, or rhetorical moves, of a text in terms of their communicative func-
tion within the text (see Tardy & Gevers, Chapter 6; Tardy et al., 2023).
Conversation analysis (Hasegawa, Chapter 2) is an approach to the analysis of discourse and in-
teraction across a range of contexts. It examines how such discourse is organized and unfolds in real
time as speakers go about their everyday activities. Conversation analysis works with recordings of
spoken data and carries out careful and fine-grained analyses of the data (Wong & Zhang Waring,
2010; Zhang Waring, 2018).
Multimodal discourse analysis (Hafner, Chapter 3) considers how texts draw on modes of commu-
nication such as pictures, film, video images, and sound in combination with words to make meaning.
It has examined print genres as well as genres such as web pages, films, and television programmes.
It considers how multimodal texts are designed and how the colour, focus, and positioning of multi-
modal elements contribute to the making of meaning in texts (Bezemer & Jewitt, 2018).
Critical discourse analysis (Chen, Zheng, & Lin, Chapter 8) explores connections between the use
of language and the social and political contexts in which it occurs. It explores issues such as gender,
ethnicity, cultural difference, ideology, and identity and how these are both constructed and reflected
in texts. Discourse analysts have also examined the notion of identity (Miller, Chapter 25), mostly
taking a post-structural perspective, seeing identity as something that is both socially constructed
and in constant process. One way in which this might be examined is through the ways in which
people, through the language choices that they make, index a particular identity through their use of
discourse. A further way in which identity has been explored is through narrative inquiry (Warriner
& Pomerantz, Chapter 4); that is, the collection of stories in the form of journals, letters, autobiogra-
phies, memoirs, interviews, and orally told narratives that enable us to gain insights into the identities
that people display through their use of discourse. Gender and sexuality (Ehrlich & Milani, Chapter
26) are also now important areas of discourse-analytic research. The work of Judith Butler (1990) is
important here, as are the notions of ‘doing’ or ‘performing’ gender; that is, we bring states of affairs
into being as a result of what we say and what we do. It is, thus, in ‘doing’—which is often through
discourse—that an identity is both produced and reproduced (Butler, 2018).
Other approaches to discourse analysis include discursive psychology (Prior, Chapter 9) and socio-
cognitive perspectives on discourse (Atkinson, Barboza & Burhan-Horasanlı, Chapter 11). Sociocultural
theory (Ohta, Chapter 10) and complex-dynamic-systems theory (Siegel & Seedhouse, Chapter 12) have
also been drawn on in the study of discourse. Corpus approaches (Gardner, Chapter 13), ethnographic
(Okada, Chapter 14), sociolinguistic (Seals & Salanoa, Chapter 15), and intercultural (Kecskes,
Chapter 24) perspectives are further ways in which discourse has been examined.
There is also the notion of discourses (Gee, 1990), such as discourses of monolingualism, lan-
guage purity, or linguistic hierarchies (see Duff & Yamamoto, Chapter 16) and colonial, deficit,
and neoliberal discourses (Chen, Zheng & Lin, Chapter 8); that is, ways of being that entail certain
values, beliefs, attitudes, assumptions, and identities which, through their use of language, people
display membership of particular groups (Gee, 2015).
Beyond all this, however, there are different views on what discourse analysis actually is. Mills
(1997) shows how, through its relatively short history, the term discourse analysis has shifted from
highlighting one aspect of language usage to another, as well as being used in different ways by dif-
ferent researchers. People working in the area of Foucauldian discourse analysis (see Cheek, 2012),
for example, pay particular attention to matters of power, arguing that power is always present in

3
 Brian Paltridge and Matthew T. Prior

the use of discourse. Foucault’s view that discourse produces ways of thinking, views of reality and
shapes people’s identities and practices underlies post-structural and social constructivist views of
discourse. Foucauldian discourse analysis, however, pays less attention to language than most of the
approaches covered in this book so, in this way, it is different from some of them (see McNamara,
2019, for a discussion of Foucault’s use of the term discourse and how it is more generally used in
linguistics).
The view of discourse as the social construction of reality recognizes the relationship between
language and thought, and the power of language to construct different perspectives on things as well
as ‘to establish ideas about which perspective is the “normal” one’ (Goddard & Carey, 2017, p. 29).
The focus here is on the role of language in ‘constructing ideas about the nature of things’ (Goddard
& Carey, 2017, p. 26); that is, how, through the use of language, certain realities and views of the
world are constructed.
Discourse analysis, then, is a view of language at the level of text. It is also a view of language in
use; that is, of how people achieve certain communicative goals through the use of language, perform
certain communicative acts, participate in certain communicative events, and present themselves to
others. Discourse analysis considers how people both construct and manage interactions with each
other and how people communicate within particular groups and societies, as well as how they com-
municate with other groups and with other cultures. It also focuses on how people do things beyond
language, and the ideas, beliefs, and values they convey as they use that language.
Huan and Guan (2020) describe the role of discourse in the history of applied linguistics research.
They looked at publications over a 40-year period, from 1978 to 2018, finding that discourse research
has ‘emerged as a major, and increasingly distinctively sociological, contribution to the analysis of
language in social life’ (p. 607). The top 10 authors cited have changed over time but in the most
recent period, 2014–2018, they were Ruth Wodak, Teun van Dijk, Norman Fairclough, Emmanuel
Schegloff, John Heritage, Teun van Leeuwen, Harvey Sacks, Gail Jefferson, Gunther Kress, and
Erving Goffman, showing a strong focus on publications in the areas of critical discourse analysis
(Wodak, van Dijk and Fairclough), conversation analysis (Schegloff, Heritage, Sacks, and Jefferson),
and multimodal discourse analysis (van Leeuwen and Kress) during that time.
Discourse has also received increasing attention in the area of language teaching and learning.
Canale (1983), for example, adds discursive competence to Canale and Swain’s (1980) model of
communicative competence; the expanded model of which has been widely drawn on in discussions
of language teaching and learning (see Kimura, Chapter 27; also Kanwit & Solon, 2022). Celce-
Murcia and Olshtain (2000) discuss discourse and context as they are relevant to language teachers
from numerous points of view. McCarthy (1991), Burns, Joyce, and Gollin, 1996), Thornbury (2015)
and Flowerdew (2013) are examples of books that discuss discourse analysis in relation to language
teaching.

Description of the Handbook

The Handbook commences with this Introduction, which is then followed by three main sections
containing the substantive content of the book. Part I reviews methodologies, perspectives, and ap-
proaches to discourse analysis that have been employed in researching the teaching, learning, and
use of second languages. Parts II and III show how discourse-analytic research has been taken up in
a range of areas related to the areas of second language learning, teaching, and use. Each chapter ad-
dresses the fundamentals, background, and history of its topic, how it has been researched and how
this research contributes to both understandings and practices of SLA and discourse analysis. Future
directions are also highlighted and suggestions made for further reading on each of the topics covered
in the book.

4
 Introduction

The first of the remaining chapters, by Atsushi Hasegawa (Chapter 2), discusses conversation
analysis (CA) in relation to second language research. Hasegawa’s chapter commences by laying
out CA’s main theoretical and analytical premises, then continues to describe how this approach to
the analysis of discourse and interaction has been fruitful for second language researchers. Christoph
Hafner’s chapter on multimodal discourse analysis (Chapter 3) examines the contribution this view
of discourse can make in second language research by examining texts and interactions that second
language learners encounter and produce that have a multimodal character. The chapter on narra-
tive inquiry by Doris Warriner and Anne Pomerantz (Chapter 4) considers how the narratives or
stories individuals tell about their experiences contribute to research on second language learning,
development, teaching, and use. Nicole Siffrinn and Meg Gebhard’s chapter on systemic functional
linguistics (Chapter 5) lays out the theoretical background to this view of language as well as provid-
ing examples of ways in which second language acquisition researchers have designed investigations
into the development of multilingual learners’ literacy practices, drawing on a systemic functional
perspective. The chapter by Christine Tardy and Jeroen Gevers on genre (Chapter 6) discusses the
value of this notion in understanding the acquisition of language discourse from a genre perspective.
Ge Lan’s chapter on grammatical complexity (Chapter 7) shows how research in this area has been
brought into second language acquisition and performance research. Critical perspectives are the
focus of Qinghua Chen, Yanmei Zheng and Angel Lin’s chapter (Chapter 8). They examine how the
notion of ‘big D’ Discourse (Gee, 2015) has been useful for examining power and discourse, as well
as other related matters. Matthew Prior’s chapter on discursive psychology (Chapter 9) highlights
the aims, analytic features, and contributions that this approach offers for respecifying the objects
of second language acquisition research. Sociocultural theory and second language discourse is the
focus of Amy Snyder Ohta’s chapter (Chapter 10). She discusses terms and concepts in sociocultural
theory that are relevant to those interested in second language teaching and research and gives exam-
ples of research in this area. Dwight Atkinson, Anamaría Sagre Barboza, and Elif Burhan-Horasanlı
discuss sociocognitive perspectives on discourse and how they can be profitably taken up in second
language studies (Chapter 11). The chapter on complex dynamic systems theory by Aki Siegel and
Paul Seedhouse (Chapter 12) outlines how this theory can be applied to the study of second language
development research. Sheena Gardner’s chapter (13) shows how corpus-based research has gener-
ated important insights into second language learning, development, and use. The chapters on eth-
nographic perspectives by Hanako Okada (Chapter 14) and sociolinguistic perspectives by Corinne
Seals and Honiara Salanoa (Chapter 15) provide examples of how these two areas, while both already
having strong research traditions, have now been taken up in the study of second language discourse-
oriented research. The final chapter in Part I, by Patricia Duff and Masaru Yamamoto (Chapter 16),
focusses on language-socialization research and its connection to second language learning and use.
Part II of the book discusses types of discourse and how they have been focussed on in second
language studies. Midori Ishida’s chapter discusses spoken discourse (17) while Elena Cotos and
Kimberly Becker’s (18) looks at written discourse. Ishida’s chapter examines research into develop-
mental trajectories and conditions of learning in second language speakers’ language development.
Cotos and Becker outline research which utilizes the analysis of written discourse in order to under-
stand textual, linguistic, cognitive, and sociocultural aspects of second language writing, acquisition,
and development. Disciplinary discourses are the subject matter of Bethany Gray and Chris Nuttall’s
chapter (Chapter 19). They focus on the variation in discourse across disciplines that second language
learners need to be aware of and master in order to succeed in their academic work. Metadiscourse is
the topic of Victor Ho’s chapter (Chapter 20); that is, the linguistic resources that writers use to inter-
act with their readers as well as to present their intentions and purposes. Christopher Jenks and Olcay
Sert’s chapter on the analysis of classroom discourse (Chapter 21) enables us to see how teachers
and students interact, exchange ideas, inform each other, and manage learning activities through their

5
 Brian Paltridge and Matthew T. Prior

use of discourse. The final chapter in this section (Chapter 22), by Tarja Nikula and Anne Pitkänen-
Huhta, discusses how connections between multilingualism, multilingual discourse, and language
use have been addressed in second language research.
Part III covers areas of use in discourse-oriented second language acquisition research. Vincenza
Tudini and Anthony Liddicoat’s chapter on technology-mediated discourse (Chapter 23) discusses
affordances and constraints in second language digital research as well as showing how learners
adapt linguistically to technology-mediated modes of interaction. Istvan Kecskes’ chapter on inter-
cultural discourse (Chapter 24) shows how two fields—intercultural pragmatics and second language
acquisition—come together in the understanding and production of discourse in second language
contexts. Elizabeth Miller’s chapter (25) on identity and discourse shows how far research has come
in this area, as does Susan Ehrlich and Tommaso Milani’s chapter on gender, sexuality, and discourse
(Chapter 26). The final chapter of the book, by Daisuke Kimura (Chapter 27), discusses the central
yet contentious concept of competence in second language research. Kimura discusses the intellec-
tual roots of the notion of competence, then outlines how this notion has evolved through its use in
second language acquisition research.

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Routledge.

7
 PART I

Approaches and perspectives

 2
CONVERSATION ANALYSIS AND
SECOND LANGUAGE RESEARCH
Atsushi Hasegawa

Introduction
The field of second language acquisition (SLA), while still young in its history, has undergone several
important “turns” over the past decades. One of the most prominent—what Block (2003) called the
“social turn”—may be attributable to the stimulating debate initiated by Firth and Wagner (1997) in
the Modern Language Journal. Firth and Wagner problematized the narrow conception of SLA es-
poused by the cognitive/psycholinguistic-oriented approaches, which were more or less dominating
the field at the time. The authors argued, instead, for a broader understanding of language, learners,
and their engagement in social interaction. Although Firth and Wagner were not explicit in their writ-
ing, their (re)analysis of the published SLA research in their article was clearly influenced by conver-
sation analysis (CA). This debate later inspired the surge of interest in CA, and an exciting research
program—now known as “CA-SLA”—has continued to grow in its scope and influence.
This chapter presents an overview of CA-SLA research and its development over the past three
decades. The chapter first lays out the basic theoretical and methodological premises of CA as a
sociological framework. Then, it traces the development of CA-SLA by discussing representative re-
search and the contributions it has made to the field of SLA at large. As a growing research program,
CA-SLA has continued to revise its analytic goals and methods. Therefore, my goal in this chapter is
also to illuminate such changes and the challenges that come with them. The chapter then discusses
future directions and presents further readings.

Theoretical and methodological premises of conversation analysis

Ethnomethodological foundations
CA is often described as an offshoot of ethnomethodology—a sociological research program estab-
lished by Harold Garfinkel (e.g., Garfinkel, 1967). At its core, ethnomethodology seeks to unveil
mundane human sociality; that is, people’s practical actions for achieving an orderly social life. It
does not expand its investigation beyond what is observable, nor does it abstract its findings to in-
tangible theoretical notions detached from the observables. In this sense, ethnomethodological epis-
temology differs sharply from that of mainstream sociological thinking, as the former is rigorously
data-driven, descriptive, and agnostic (vom Lehn, 2014). Among many features that characterize

DOI: 10.4324/9781003177579-3 11
 Atsushi Hasegawa

ethnomethodology, the following three concepts capture its essence: reflexivity, indexicality, and in-
tersubjectivity. Reflexivity, in its ethnomethodological sense, refers to the fundamentally inseparable
relationship between social settings and human actions that constantly (re)construct social reality.
Unlike the causal view of social structures and norms affecting human agency, or vice versa, reflex-
ivity captures practical actions as a window into the contexts that surround them without assuming
the directionality or intentionality of causation. This circularity of reasoning is reinforced further by
the notion of indexicality, which refers to the context dependency of semiotic resources that people
employ in their everyday interactions. All forms of indexical expressions, including language and
actions, are inherently contingent and can only be understood with reference to the contexts in which
they are occasioned. As a practical matter, people constantly refer to local contexts in order to make
sense of the meanings indexed through their actions. Indexicality is thus presupposed on the assump-
tion that people are rational beings who are working toward the maintenance of intersubjectivity;
that is, the reciprocity of perspectives shared among participants in a given interactional context.
Intersubjectivity serves both as the condition for interpreting practical actions and the outcome ac-
complished through those actions.

CA and the interaction order

CA is one of the branches of the ethnomethodological tradition. The foundational work was carried
out by Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, Gail Jefferson, and their colleagues in the late 1960s to the
1970s (Maynard, 2013). As Sacks (1984) wrote, in interaction there is “order at all points” (p. 22).
Therefore, one of the goals of CA is to unveil the ever-present orderliness in talk-in-interaction. So-
called “basic CA” research (Kasper & Wagner, 2014) was interested in discovering the fundamental
mechanisms that people make use of in accomplishing mundane social activities, which can be cap-
tured with four interlocking facets of interaction: namely, turn-taking organization, sequence organiza-
tion, preference organization, and repair organization. People employ these structural orders—believed
to be context-free and shared universally across different languages and cultures—in context-sensitive
manners to align them with particular settings and activities at particular moments. The local, in situ
adaptation of these generic methods by participants points to their unfolding (and reflexive) under-
standings of these contexts, which also help (re)shape the contexts accordingly.
Turn-taking is a basic interactional procedure whereby the transfer of speakership is accom-
plished. According to Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1974), turn-taking occurs predominantly at the
recognizable end of a turn-constructional unit (TCU). TCUs are not predetermined units, but rather
are shaped variously by syntax, semantics, pragmatics, prosody, and other elements vis-à-vis ongo-
ing actions (Ford et al., 1996). The recognizable end of a TCU is called a transition-relevance place
(TRP), where turn-taking may—but is not required to—occur. At a TRP, the current speaker has the
option of selecting the next speaker, or the current non-speaker may self-select to speak. When the se-
lected party does not take the turn or no one self-selects to speak, then the current speaker may opt to
continue with their turn. This process may repeat indefinitely until the closure of the exchange. While
overlaps and silences do occur at TRPs, participants normally orient to the norm of one speaker at a
time, and the transfer of speakership is done seamlessly.
While turn-taking, including turn design and allocation, largely concerns the horizontal or lateral
development of interaction (i.e., as represented by the numbered lines on a transcript), sequence
organization can be regarded as the vertical order, encompassing how sets of actions by different
participants are structured in relation to one another. The most basic sequence type, known as the
adjacency pair, consists of two actions that are produced by different speakers and placed adjacent to
each other. The first pair part (FPP) makes a particular set of actions a conditionally relevant second
pair part (SPP). For example, a question makes an answer the relevant response while an invitation

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 Conversation analysis and second language research

projects an acceptance or a rejection as a relevant response. Other adjacency pairs may include greet-
ing–greeting, request–acceptance/rejection, complaint–excuse/remedy, and so forth. According to
Schegloff (2007), the fundamental characteristic of an adjacency pair is the “nextness” of two ac-
tions. An FPP creates a context in which an SPP is interpreted accordingly. This means that even if
an expected SPP is missing in the second turn, the absence of the SPP becomes accountable (e.g.,
signaling some sort of trouble is underway).
Action sequencing may be further examined in terms of preference organization. Although the
term “preference” may allude to some psychological state, preference organization is concerned with
the structural efficiency of action sequences rather than the psychology of individuals per se. That is,
certain actions are normatively oriented to by participants as being afforded with structural prefer-
ence, which does not require extensive treatment, as opposed to other alternatives that may necessi-
tate more interactional work. For example, when an invitation is issued, a preferred (i.e., normatively
expected) response is acceptance, which receives structurally economical handling (e.g., no delays,
straightforward design), while a dispreferred response, rejection, is often accompanied by recogniz-
able procedures that require more interactional work (e.g., delays, hesitations, accounts). Such an
asymmetrical structure of alternative actions can also be seen in sequence-initiating positions (FPPs),
such as offering and requesting. Offering is preferred over requesting, with the latter normally being
delivered in a dispreferred turn shape with prefacing (i.e., pre-request). Participants in an interaction
therefore design their utterances in ways that show their differential treatment of actions that are
expected socially and interactionally. Preference organization can parallel the process of alignment
and disalignment, which is concerned with the “structural level of cooperation” (Stivers et al., 2011,
p. 20) in the activity at hand. It is also closely related to the notions of face and facework (Brown &
Levinson, 1987).
The final element of CA’s fundamental objects of analysis includes repair organization. Peo-
ple may encounter trouble at any given moment in an interaction, and they normatively treat such
troubles in an orderly manner. Triggers of trouble may be non-hearing or non-understanding by the
recipient or the problem of (mis)speaking by the speaker. Essentially, repair is undertaken in order
to restore intersubjectivity or mutual understanding, which in turn restores the progressivity of the
interaction. Schegloff, Jefferson, and Sacks (1977) explained four patterns of repair work according
to who initiates (i.e., self-initiation, other-initiation) and who completes it (i.e., self-repair, other-
repair). According to the authors, self-initiated self-repair, in which a trouble source is corrected by
the speaker (e.g., “I mean …”) without being prompted by the recipient, is the most frequent type
of repair. Other-initiated self-repair, in which the presence of trouble is indicated by the recipient
(e.g., “Huh?”), but the correction is provided by the speaker, follows next. Self-initiated other-repair
and other-initiated other-repair are less frequent. In this sense, as Schegloff et al. (1977) explained,
self-repair is preferred over other-repair because the former requires less digression from the original
activity being underway than the latter. Self-repair is, again, afforded with structurally economical
handling in that respect. Word search—in which the speaker halts a turn-at-talk and engages in a
search for an item (e.g., “well, uh, tha- what was the guy’s name?”)—is also considered a forward-
oriented type of repair, because the specific trouble source has not yet been produced by the speaker.
CA’s analytical objects should not be regarded as discrete and a priori interactional categories that
are available for coding and counting (vom Lehn, 2014). These basic components of the interactional
order are locally accomplished and made procedurally relevant by participants. This is where the
notion of emic perspective, which can be roughly glossed as a participant-relevant or insider’s view,
becomes crucial (Goodwin, 1984). This understanding of emic—more accurately, a radically emic
perspective (Kasper, 2009)—is strikingly different from that of mainstream SLA research and is seen
as the hallmark of the CA-SLA framework. An emic perspective is obtained through participants’ ob-
servable conduct through which they publicly display their orientations toward the local interactional

13
 Atsushi Hasegawa

contexts and activities as they unfold. CA analysis is built on such indigenous (i.e., local) and em-
pirically analyzable micro-moments demonstrated by participants themselves. In this regard, the no-
tion of emic perspective acutely epitomizes the ethnomethodological epistemology described in this
chapter, such as reflexivity, indexicality, and intersubjectivity.
In order to capture moment-by-moment procedures of interaction, CA researchers collect audio-/
video-recordings of interaction as a primary data source and rely on detailed transcription of data that
allows for a detailed representation of talk-in-interaction in an analyzable format. The most well-
known and widely accepted transcription system was established and disseminated by Gail Jefferson
(2004). The Jeffersonian transcription system has been regarded as the standard in CA, but with the
technological advancements and the increase of interest in multimodality of interaction, such as gaze,
gestures, postures, and the use of physical artifacts, other transcription systems have been devised to
systematically incorporate such nonverbal conduct (Hepburn & Bolden, 2013).
While transcribed audio/video data constitute the main—or perhaps “exclusive” in many cases—
source of data, there are also ongoing discussions among researchers concerning how much talk-
extrinsic information obtained through interviews, ethnographic observations, and so forth may be
utilized, if at all, in CA research (e.g., Ford, 2012; Maynard, 2003). Such methodological discussions
are particularly relevant to “applied CA” (Antaki, 2011; Richards & Seedhouse, 2005), where the
goals of investigation are not to unveil generic conversational orders per se, but are to understand
the particularities of specific interactional contexts and procedures. Some note that applied CA is no
longer truly ethnomethodological in that researchers frequently draw on previous research findings
removed from the original interactional context and apply them in the analyses of their own data (ten
Have, 2012).

Strands of CA-SLA research

Applications of the CA framework to the investigation of second language (L2) use and learning
started in the mid-1990s (e.g., Firth, 1996; Markee, 1994; Wagner, 1996), a time when the aforemen-
tioned “social turn” was becoming an emergent topic of discussion in the field. Over the subsequent
decades, CA-SLA research has grown considerably both in size and quality and has made diverse
contributions to the field of SLA. CA-SLA research has maintained close connections with L2 prag-
matics research and continues to study aspects of L2 use in social interaction (Mori & Nguyen,
2020). According to Antaki (2011), six types of applied CA research have been identified, including
foundational, social-problem, communicational, diagnostic, institutional, and interventionist. Among
these six, CA-SLA has contributed most notably to the following four areas: foundational, communi-
cational, institutional, and interventionist.

Foundational CA
Foundational CA research seeks to transform a given intellectual field by respecifying the field’s
fundamental assumptions and issues (see also Prior, Chapter 9 in this volume). This line of research,
therefore, attempts to present new perspectives on the existing notions of SLA, including the nature
of language, communication, competence, and cognition, as well as the roles and identities of learn-
ers (e.g., Firth & Wagner, 1997; Markee, 1994; Seedhouse, 1998). As a radically emic framework,
CA-SLA research avoids the preconceived notions that are frequently discussed and accepted in
mainstream SLA research. For example, Firth (1996) examined segments of phone conversations
between Danish speakers of English and their international clients and discussed how participants’
anomalous utterances were treated as “normal” and “ordinary” through the production of upshots and
formulations of such utterances. The author also discussed the interpretive procedure of let it pass,

14
 Conversation analysis and second language research

whereby a hearer passes up the opportunity for repair initiation of an uncertain/unknown utterance
with the assumption that it will eventually get clarified through a further exchange of utterances.
By presenting these examples, the author criticized a priori categories, such as “nonnative speaker”
or “learner language,” which are loaded with ideological values (e.g., deficient speakers) and often
used uncritically in SLA. A similar sentiment has been expressed by Wagner (1996) and Firth and
Wagner (1997). Many of these earlier CA-SLA works attempted, although not necessarily explicitly,
to broaden the epistemological breadth of SLA.

Communicational CA
The second area of CA-SLA research—communicational—investigates how social interactions in-
volving L2/multilingual speakers are organized differently from (and similarly to) “native speaker
only” interactions. An analytic emphasis is placed on participants’ deployment of various resources,
their orientations to particular elements of interaction, and how their identities are made relevant dur-
ing the interaction—all of which serve as a window into L2 use and learning. Repair, in particular,
has been of much interest to CA-SLA researchers (e.g., Brouwer, 2004; Carroll, 2005; Greer, 2013;
Kurhila, 2006; Wong, 2000). Repair is a ubiquitous practice found in all talk-in-interaction, but it
has special significance for SLA as it makes relevant the differential knowledge and expertise of par-
ticipants and how such dynamics evident in social interaction influence language learning and shape
how we conceptualize interactional competence. Kurhila (2001), for instance, examined institutional
and everyday talk between native and nonnative speakers of Finnish and discussed how repairs/cor-
rections of grammatical deviations by nonnative speakers were treated in these environments. The
author found numerous instances of outright other-repair by native speakers of their interlocutor’s
grammar errors. Although other-repair is normally considered as a dispreferred action, the explicit
grammar corrections found in this study were occasioned predominantly in a “repetition slot” or
when repair initiation was more or less signaled by the marking of uncertainty by nonnative speakers.
Corrections were therefore shown to be carried out in ways that avoided disrupting the ongoing inter-
action. Whether L2 speakers learn from these corrections or not depends on participants’ orientations
to their differential language expertise. For instance, Hosoda’s (2006) CA study, which looked at na-
tive and nonnative speakers of Japanese, found participants rarely oriented to differences in language
expertise during interaction. Differential language expertise was made relevant only when the co-
participant was invited to other-repair and when mutual understanding was at stake. Similarly, Brou-
wer (2003) examined conversations between Danes and Dutch speakers of Danish and observed that
learning opportunities were afforded when the other participant was invited to take part in a search
activity and when participants displayed an orientation to their differential language knowledge.
Besides repair, CA researchers have examined various other interactional practices such as turn-
taking (Carroll, 2004; Gardner, 2007) and topic management (Mori & Matsunaga, 2017). These studies
collectively demonstrate how analyzing L2/multilingual speakers’ interactional practices reveals the
diverse learning opportunities they generate. In recent years, however, there has been a growing interest
in research that looks into the direct evidence of learning. This new advancement, along with the no-
tion of interactional competence, has been one of the major drives in CA-SLA research. For example,
Pekarek Doehler (2019) advocated for the examination of generic conversational features, such as turn-
taking, sequence, repair, and preference organization, in order to track the longitudinal development of
L2 interactional competence. The author discussed how these features can exhibit context-sensitive and
recipient-designed handling of interactional practices by interlocutors. However, it remains contentious
among researchers whether CA can be faithfully and aptly used to identify direct evidence of learning
(e.g., Mori & Markee, 2009). This, and other methodological and conceptual challenges in CA-SLA,
will be discussed later in this chapter (see also chapters 11, 17, 21 in this volume).

15
 Atsushi Hasegawa

Institutional CA
The third strand of CA-SLA research is concerned with the elucidation of interactional procedures
used to accomplish specific institutional goals, including vocational training (Markaki & Filliettaz,
2017), job interviews (Bangerter & Gosteli-Corvalan, 2017), medical interactions (Noble & Billett,
2017), and, most notably, language classrooms and other instructional contexts, including tutoring
and writing conferences (e.g., Hasegawa, 2017, 2018; Hellermann, 2008; Kunitz et al., 2021; Markee
& Kasper, 2004; Mori, 2002; Sert, 2015). As Drew and Heritage (1992) noted, institutional business
is conducted through routines that are “comprised of a set of interactional practices differentiating
(it) both from other institutional forms and from the baseline of mundane conversational interac-
tion itself” (p. 26). Therefore, an analytic strategy is directed toward the identification of patterned
practices in particular institutional contexts. The institutionality of a setting (“e.g., language-learning
classroom”) is viewed as an ongoing accomplishment by participants. CA researchers, then, seek
to examine how the context is brought into being, reflexively, through participants’ micro-conduct.
Seedhouse’s (2004) study, for example, revealed how L2 classroom interactions are organized and
how particular features of turn-taking, sequence, and repair organizations reflexively constructed
micro-contexts of the classroom, such as form-and-accuracy and meaning-and-fluency contexts. At
the core of his argument is the reflexive relationship between pedagogy and interaction (context-
creating and context-renewing), that is, how participants display their constant analysis of pedagogi-
cal goals, classroom norms, and instructional procedures, which reflexively create different levels of
classroom contexts.
In addition to teacher-led interaction, recent research has also examined dyadic interactions be-
tween learners (e.g., pair work), which shed light on learners’ agentive participation in the classroom
and in the activity of learning. Hellermann (2008), for example, examined the organization of dyadic
interaction in an ESL classroom. By closely examining different phases of peer interaction, including
opening, storytelling, and disengagement, Hellermann discussed how various moves and practices that
make up each phase of peer interaction reflexively construct the pedagogical context of pair work. Sim-
ilarly, Hasegawa (2017, 2018) also investigated the organization of peer interaction in beginner-level
Japanese language classrooms. Unlike Hellermann’s data, the activities assigned in these classrooms
were highly controlled, with a strong emphasis on discrete linguistic items, which may correspond
to the form-and-accuracy context discussed by Seedhouse (2004). While participants displayed their
orientations to pedagogical norms, such as “individualistic production of accurate utterances” and
“priority of task completion over an exchange of information,” some students also constructed peer in-
teraction as a place for “doing being friends” through unscripted and creative exchanges of utterances.
Because interaction is both the vehicle and the object of instruction, this research has generated impor-
tant insights for language learning and teaching. Classroom-based research has therefore remained a
thriving subarea of CA-SLA and continues to inform pedagogical decision-making.

Interventionist CA
A more direct approach to solving practical problems—interventionist CA-SLA—has also appeared
and gained momentum in recent scholarship. The interventionist CA-SLA has a goal of solving pre-
existing problems (identified before analysts look at data) with CA-informed analyses. The “solving”
part presumes some sort of intervention, and direct involvement with the stakeholders in question.
For example, one line of interventionist CA-SLA is aimed at the training of pre-service or in-service
teachers by making use of CA analyses of classroom interaction or other instructional contexts as
training resources (e.g., Sert, 2021; Walters, 2021). Sert (2021), for example, outlined the procedures
for creating a collection of comparative cases of classroom interactional phenomena for the purposes

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of language-teacher education. He emphasized the importance of using real classroom interaction

as training material and encouraged practitioners/researchers to start with their own classroom data.
Similarly, Zhang Waring (2021) explored the use of video-based classroom interaction for teacher
training and proposed a five-step framework, called SWEAR: “Situating a problem”; “Working with a
recording (and/or transcript)”; “Expanding the discussion”; “Articulating the strategies”; and “Record-
ing and reflecting.” This type of heuristic procedure shows great potential and can be applied to other
teacher education programs, but, as Zhang Waring admits, its impact on the teacher training program is
still minimal due to practical challenges (e.g., the logistics of video-recording, the technicalities of CA
transcriptions, and access to CA research findings). Beyond teacher education, there are also attempts
to develop L2 curricula/assessment tools directly based on CA findings (Kley, 2019; Kunitz & Yeh,
2019). Interventionist CA-SLA is a rapidly growing area, and new developments are awaited.
In its short history, CA-SLA research has grown considerably and continues to make significant
contributions to SLA. In earlier research, foundational research problematized SLA’s fundamental
assumptions. The studies of L2 interactional practices and classroom and other institutional settings
have thrived as well. In recent years, we have also seen the broadening of research contexts to include
naturalistic “learning in the wild” environments (Hellermann et al., 2019). It is probably safe to say
that CA-SLA has reached the point of maturity. Nonetheless, there are also challenges and difficulties
that require extensive consideration, which will be introduced in the next section.

Methodological and conceptual challenges in CA-SLA research

As described in the previous section, several strands of CA-SLA research have emerged over the
past few decades. On the one hand, these studies have presented concrete and specific examples of
authentic or real-world language use and social interaction in diverse L2/multilingual settings. On the
other hand, much CA-SLA research is concerned, in one way or another, with aspects of L2 learn-
ing or development. However, as Gass’s (2004) critique pointed out, CA-SLA research is “generally
careful in not ascribing or documenting learning and [tends to] refer, rather, to potential or conducive
learning environments or to facilitating SLA” (p. 599). This is true in many cases, yet, over the past
ten years, we have also observed a growing body of research that attempts to document and elucidate
the process of learning. In many senses, this development in CA-SLA has been a game changer, as it
directly speaks to mainstream SLA by addressing the core issues of learning, the processes as well as
the conditions. Nonetheless, the documentation of learning processes is by no means straightforward.
Because of its ethnomethodological lineage, CA excels at examining orders and structures, but it is
not intended to handle chronological changes. It also poses challenges when researchers attempt to
carry out a comparative analysis of individuals’ behavior across different occasions. As such, there
have been numerous discussions concerning the use of CA to document learning and development,
which are, by definition, variable and unstable (Pekarek Doehler & Pochon-Berger, 2011, 2015). And
the question of how and what aspects of learning can be examined with CA remains unsolved. It is
about the methodological feasibility of CA-SLA, but it is also about the conceptualization of learn-
ing—namely, how learning should be viewed and what counts as the evidence of learning.
The discussion about the methodological feasibility of CA-SLA has largely centered on two
points. The first of these concerns the use of exogenous learning theories—sociocultural perspectives
in particular—in order to explain and interpret the observable conduct as the evidence of L2 learning
and development (e.g., Brouwer & Wagner, 2004; Hellermann, 2008; Mondada & Pekarek Doehler,
2004; Young & Miller, 2004). Owing to its phenomenological influence, ethnomethodology is agnos-
tic about abstract concepts that are detached from the “lived” experiences of participants. As such, the
idea of drawing on exogenous learning theories in CA-SLA has invited mixed responses. For some,
micro-analysis of social interaction, supplemented by exogenous learning theories to strengthen their

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interpretation, is a viable solution. Brouwer and Wagner (2004), for instance, proposed methodologi-
cal procedures to study L2 development by combining CA with Lave and Wenger’s (1991) situated
learning theory. In particular, their concept of legitimate peripheral participation appealed to CA-
SLA scholars who were inspired to examine longitudinal changes in learner behavior as the evidence
of changing participation in communities of practice (e.g., Hellermann, 2008; Hellermann & Cole,
2009; Young & Miller, 2004). However, for those who want to maintain ethnomethodological purity,
CA’s analytical power alone outweighs the benefits of resorting to theoretical baggage. For example,
Hauser (2011) stated,

The danger of importing an exogenous theory of learning into CA-for-SLA is that the concepts
and/or categories of the theory will be treated as given, with the analysis being to some degree
driven by the theory rather than the data, regardless of how well the theory actually fits the data,
and even when the theory does not fit at all.
(p. 351)

Markee (2019) was also adamant about the risk of bringing learning theories into CA-SLA research.
Markee instead endorsed his language-behavior-tracking strategy (Markee, 2008) as a feasible way
to document language learning.
In fact, Markee’s (2008) learning-behavior-tracking procedure advanced the debate on the second
point of methodological feasibility: namely, whether and how CA can be used to examine changes.
His procedure consists of two steps: learning-object tracking (LOT) and learning-process tracking
(LPT). LOT is concerned with the identification of learning objects in an episode of interaction,
whereas LPT involves the examination of participants’ orientations to and incorporation of the iden-
tified objects across events. Given the ethnomethodological indifference to the a priori established
categories, it makes sense that the first step should be the identification of learning objects in data-
sets. Markee’s example was drawn from the classroom instruction, where the teacher and the stu-
dent jointly attended to the lexical item, prerequisite. What remains tricky, however, is the second
step, which entails comparisons of events from different occasions. The main problem lies in the
compatibility of multiple contexts when one is simultaneously comparing changes in individuals’
deployment of resources. This problem applies even if the observation is done with the same partici-
pants in the same classroom. CA is known for investigating regularities—what is shared and used
as resources—in talk-in-interaction, but learning entails change. According to Koschmann (2013),
“To ascribe learning, two activities must be sufficiently similar to be recognized as belonging to a
common category, but must at the same time be perceived as different in some way” (p. 2). He aptly
summarized that this line of research needs “same-but-different” analysis. We must therefore ask:
How is that possible? What would “sufficiently similar” look like?
Schegloff (2009) indeed acknowledges the challenge of comparative analysis, but he also pre-
sented his preliminary ideas for how to feasibly conduct comparative CA research (although largely
in the context of cross-cultural/linguistic comparisons). The key element of his proposal appears to
be a close description of the new environment to which to compare the old environment. Similarly, for
Wagner, Pekarek Doehler, and González-Martínez (2018), with careful consideration of data selec-
tion and ordering, it is possible to conduct longitudinal CA-SLA research.

Instead of collections of instances of specific social practice or resource independently of

whether these occur on prior or later occasions or by whom they are produced, longitudinal
studies need to order their data chronologically, contrasting instances, typically produced by
the same participants occurring at different moments in time.
(p. 5)

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As indicated in this quote, the feasibility of this approach depends considerably on the availability
of datasets that can be chronologically ordered and that show observable changes in the ways in
which certain interactional practices are accomplished while also maintaining the compatibility of
contexts within the datasets. Although such conditions may be difficult to meet, especially when one
hopes to conform to the principle of “unmotivated looking” (Psathas, 1995), this kind of development
may open up a new path for longitudinal CA-SLA research.
Alongside the methodological developments, various proposals have been made to (re)conceptu-
alize interactional competence, or IC, for CA-SLA’s fundamental research objects (e.g., Greer et al.,
2017; Salaberry & Kunitz, 2019). IC was originally discussed by Kramsch (1986) as an alternative
goal of language education in place of language proficiency. As she wrote, the concept of proficiency
is misleading as it implicitly promotes the linear view of learning, with the development of grammati-
cal accuracy at its center. Since then, applied linguists have written about their understandings of IC
from diverse viewpoints (e.g., Hall, 1995; Young, 1999), but it was only in the past decade or so that
CA-SLA researchers began actively drawing on and exploring this concept to document the develop-
ment of L2 interactional practice. According to Nguyen (2019), these various conceptualizations of
IC have the following three characterizations in common: (a) IC is practice-specific, (b) IC involves
a number of interactional resources, and (c) IC is co-constructed by interactional participants. These
points make CA a suitable analytical framework with which to investigate IC. In this light, the tra-
ditional sense of competence, including Chomskyan and Hymesian notions, has been respecified in
empirical terms as “interactional methods” (Pekarek Doehler & Pochon-Berger, 2011) or “interac-
tional repertoires” (Hall, 2018), involving various interactional practices, such as turn-taking, sto-
rytelling, and topic management. In this view, language is viewed as only one—albeit an important
one—of many resources that interactionists draw on to accomplish social activity. Gaining a fuller
understanding of intricate relations between interactional practice and interactional resource, includ-
ing language and other semiotic tools, will become an important research agenda for future CA-SLA.
CA-SLA research with a focus on IC development has attempted to capture the evidence of learning
as a diversification process of interactional methods (Pekarek Doehler & Pochon-Berger, 2011). As
Wagner et al. (2018) described, such a process may be also viewed as the increased “local efficacy of
social practices” (p. 15) or “ability for context-sensitive conduct” (p. 17). This conceptualization of
IC development, combined with longitudinal data collection and comparative analysis, appears to be
a promising subarea of CA-SLA research.

Future directions
Over the past three decades, CA-SLA has proven itself to be an effective research framework within
which to study L2/multilingual language use and learning. It has made much progress in overcoming
some of the methodological and conceptual challenges it faces, but there appears to be a long way
to go. The following three topics are particularly worth exploring in future research: (a) multimodal-
ity of interaction, (b) social mechanism of IC development, and (c) interventionist CA. Although
research on multimodal interaction has been around for some time (Deppermann, 2013), the increas-
ing availability of new recording equipment, such as smartphones, action cameras, and 360-degree
cameras, has enabled us to study even more diverse types of interactional settings. With technological
advancements, our communication tools and methods are continuously evolving. Future research
should elucidate how people accomplish various social activities in digitally mediated environments,
for instance. The second area of future directions includes further conceptualization and empirical
investigation of IC development vis-à-vis social processes. Past research emphasized how to docu-
ment the evidence of learning, which largely concerned the objects of learning (i.e., IC). A question
we should also be tackling is that of the social mechanism of such changes, which has been critically

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missing in past discussions (Deppermann & Pekarek Doehler, 2021). For example, future research
may address the question of how IC development takes place along with changes in interpersonal re-
lationships or other social dynamics (cf. Hasegawa, 2019). The last area for future research concerns
the further growth of interventionist CA. CA-SLA for teacher training and materials development is
still in its infancy and there is an urgent need for greater progress, especially in applying CA’s power-
ful analytic tools to the investigation and advancement of language learning, language teaching, and
language use in more diverse digital, multimodal, and multilingual environments. As we can see from
this brief review, the CA-SLA program has proven its ability to bridge the gap between theory and
practice, and it is poised to advance SLA research for decades to come.

Further reading
Kunitz, S., Markee, N., & Sert, O. (Eds.). (2021). Classroom-based conversation analytic research: Theoretical
and applied perspectives on pedagogy. Springer.
This large edited volume on classroom-based CA-SLA research offers a diverse, analytically rich collection of
empirical and theoretical papers on CA-SLA. As the title says, it aims to fill the gap between theory and practice.
ten Have, P. (2007). Doing conversation analysis. (2nd ed.). Sage Publications.
This introductory text offers a practical guide to conversation analysis as an approach to language research.
It is clearly written and organized for those who are new to the field.
Wong, J., & Zhang Waring, H. (2021). Conversation analysis and second language pedagogy: A guide for ESL/
EFL teachers (2nd ed.). Routledge.
This pedagogically focused textbook provides an accessible introduction to CA and sound pedagogical guid-
ance for new and in-service language teachers and language professionals. Although it is aimed at ESL/EFL
teachers, many of its ideas can be applied to other languages and educational settings.

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 3
MULTIMODAL DISCOURSE
ANALYSIS AND SECOND
LANGUAGE RESEARCH
Christoph Hafner

Introduction
This chapter examines the contributions of multimodal approaches to discourse analysis in second
language research. According to such approaches, communication and learning cannot be understood
by reference to language alone: language is just one of many different sign systems that we use in
communication. When we use spoken and written language in texts and interactions, we are also
simultaneously drawing on a range of other possible modes that can include (moving) image, layout,
graphics, sound, facial expression, proxemics, and gesture, to name but a few. That is to say that com-
munication is ‘multimodal’. Awareness of and engagement with multimodal communication forms
as part of second language research into communication and learning has grown significantly over
the past 25 years or more, in part as a response to changing communication landscapes ushered in by
digital technologies. The approach plays a role in second language research by allowing researchers
to better understand (1) the multimodal features of expert target texts and interactions that second
language learners may encounter and produce; (2) the multimodal features of novice texts created by
second language learners; and (3) the multimodal features of texts and interactions that play a role in
the learning and text-construction process. In this chapter, I will highlight some of the key concepts
that are used in multimodal discourse analysis and show how these are applied in second language
research.
Initially, it will be useful to define the overarching terms used in this chapter. Both ‘discourse’
and ‘second language acquisition’ can be understood in different ways. A simple definition of ‘dis-
course’ is ‘language in use’ (Gee, 2014, p. 19); that is, the way that people actually use language in
order to get things done in real life. For the purposes of this chapter, we need to go beyond language
conceived of as words on the page or in a spoken utterance, to focus on the full range of multimodal
resources that are used when making meaning, as suggested in the previous paragraph. ‘Second lan-
guage acquisition’ can be defined as the processes that language learners go through when learning
an additional language. Some people like to focus on the psychological aspects of these processes,
while others prefer to focus on the sociocultural aspects. At the same time, second language acqui-
sition can also refer to broader language education processes: what is going on in and outside of
language classrooms, as language learners go about developing communicative competence. Much
of the second language research that draws on multimodal discourse analysis focusses on situated

24 DOI: 10.4324/9781003177579-4
 Multimodal discourse analysis and second language research

discourse processes in teaching and learning contexts. Consequently, for the purposes of this chapter,
when I refer to second language acquisition, I will be using the term in this broad sense to encompass
language teaching, learning, and use.

Overview of multimodal discourse analysis and second language research

A multimodal discourse analysis relies on principles of ‘multimodality’, an approach to communica-
tion that takes into account the way that multiple semiotic resources are combined in any act of com-
munication (Kress, 2010). The idea of multimodality is important to language and literacy educators
if they are to provide their students with the full set of skills and competences that they need in order
to read, write, and communicate effectively. As Kress (2000, p. 337) points out, ‘it is now no longer
possible to understand language and its uses without understanding the effect of all modes of com-
munication that are copresent in any text’. The notion of multimodality is particularly important at
the present time because digital media have made it so easy for people to create texts that combine
words, images, moving images, soundtracks, and many other resources for making meaning. As a
result, there have been numerous calls for language and literacy educators to incorporate modes other
than language into their teaching, and these calls stretch back over the past 25 years and longer (see,
e.g., New London Group, 1996; Royce, 2002). Research shows that the texts that students are likely
to encounter at school and university are becoming increasingly multimodal in nature: for example,
textbooks make greater use of visuals (Bezemer & Kress, 2008) and multimodal university assign-
ments are also more and more common (Lim & Polio, 2020). Early, Kendrick, and Potts (2015) point
out that the ‘plurilingual resources’ of second language learners are also implicated in multimodal
approaches to language and literacy education (see also the work on translanguaging, e.g., Li, 2018).
In second language research, multimodal discourse analysis can provide a useful analytical tool
in projects that address issues of language teaching, learning, and use. Second language researchers
tend to ask three main kinds of questions. First, they are interested in understanding the multimodal
features of target texts, that is, those that second language learners may encounter (e.g., textbooks,
websites) and produce (e.g., academic and professional genres). This means investigating questions
like: how do expert language users design the kind of multimodal ensembles that students need
to learn to interpret and produce? What do those multimodal ensembles look like, viewed as spo-
ken and written texts and genres? This approach—using multimodal discourse analysis in order to
understand target texts and interactions created by experts—is one that is common in research on
English for specific and for academic purposes. Such research can be used to inform language teach-
ing at the tertiary level in particular, while certain less specialized genres (e.g., TED talks) remain
relevant to school contexts as well. For example, researchers have examined expert multimodal texts
and interactions like graphical abstracts (Sancho Guinda, 2015), conference presentations (Dubois,
1980; Rowley-Jolivet, 2002, 2004), practice-based theses in the visual and performing arts (Star-
field et al., 2012), video methods articles (Hafner, 2018), scientific sketchnotes (Fernández-Fontecha
et al., 2019), courtroom interactions (Matoesian & Gilbert, 2018), TED talks (Harrison, 2021; Xia &
Hafner, 2021), three-minute theses, author videos and podcasts (Rowley-Jolivet & Carter-Thomas,
2019), websites (O’Halloran et al., 2019), and tweets (Luzón & Albero-Posac, 2020; Orpin, 2019;
Smart & Falconer, 2019).
Second, researchers are also interested in the actual multimodal products of second language
learners. As teachers have begun to respond to calls for a greater focus on multimodal forms of rep-
resentation, researchers have examined the texts that students have produced as well as the processes
that they go through in producing them. This means investigating questions like: how do second

25
 Christoph Hafner

language learners go about designing multimodal texts and interactions? What do those texts and in-
teractions look like? For example, researchers have examined the multimodal texts produced by sec-
ond language learners as they go about ‘digital multimodal composing’, a pedagogical approach that
has been applied across a wide range of primary, secondary, and tertiary education contexts. This in-
cludes the construction of texts like digital stories (Kendrick et al., 2022; Nelson, 2006; Yang, 2012),
multimodal stories (Vasudevan et al., 2010), video documentaries (Hafner, 2014, 2015; Hafner &
Miller, 2019), digital videos (Cimasko & Shin, 2017), PowerPoint slides (Shin et al., 2020; Tardy,
2005, 2009), argumentative web pages (Shin & Cimasko, 2008), and ‘identity texts’ (Cummins et al.,
2015). There is also interest in second language learners’ multimodal performances, such as legal
presentations in oral advocacy (Hafner & Sun, 2023).
Finally, researchers are interested in the role that multimodal texts and interactions can play in the
learning and text-construction process. For example, some research describes the way that learners
make use of multimodal texts to support learning the (language of the) discipline (Johns, 1998; Med-
way, 2002; Roozen, 2009). Other second language research (e.g., Prior, 2010) considers the multiple
modalities that are involved in the process of construction of specialized texts, seeing this process
as one of ‘semiotic remediation’ (Prior & Hengst, 2010) that involves transformations across modes
and media. Prior (Prior, 2010; see below p. 32) shows how participants in a university art and design
group who are engaged in the activities of talking, gesturing, drawing, writing, computer program-
ming, and electronic databasing all contribute to the creation of an interactive art object. In addition,
the multimodal analysis of interaction in the second language classroom is of course also relevant to
learning processes. In the L1 context, examples of this kind of analysis include Lemke’s (1998) study
of interaction in a science classroom and Jewitt’s (2006) study of multimodal technology-mediated
learning. These studies demonstrate how, in order to understand classroom interactions, it is neces-
sary to consider a complex web of semiotic resources all working together. Students simultaneously
attend to all of the following: the teacher’s words; their accompanying gestures, facial expressions,
and use of body and space; writing and images/drawings on the board; relevant textbooks and online
resources; and the notes that students are composing on paper or screen. In the L2 context, the use
of conversation analysis to study classroom interaction at times engages with multimodal aspects of
communication. This work is covered in the chapter on conversation analysis (Chapter 2) and I will
not outline it further here.

Key concepts in multimodal discourse analysis

The aim of multimodal discourse analysis is to avoid privileging any one single mode in the analysis,
recognizing instead that meaning is made simultaneously by a range of modes working together.
Rather than focussing on the linguistic mode, as is common in some kinds of discourse analysis,
a multimodal discourse analysis attempts to account for the entire multimodal ensemble. In their
introduction to multimodality, Jewitt, Bezemer, and O’Halloran (2016) state that there are three key
premises of multimodality, as described in the following quote (p. 3):

1 Meaning is made with different semiotic resources, each offering distinct potentialities and
limitations.
2 Meaning making involves the production of multimodal wholes.
3 If we want to study meaning, we need to attend to all semiotic resources being used to make a
complete whole.

They go on to introduce a wide range of approaches and methods, focussing especially on those
that are grounded in systemic functional linguistics, social semiotics, and conversation analysis.

26
 Multimodal discourse analysis and second language research

They also mention geo-semiotics, multimodal (inter)action analysis, multimodal ethnography, mul-
timodal corpus analysis, and multimodal reception analysis. Their review highlights the point that
there are many different approaches that one can take to multimodal discourse analysis.
To perform a multimodal discourse analysis, the analyst needs to first understand a few key con-
cepts. Those that I introduce in the rest of this section are derived from theorizing by researchers allied
with influential traditions, especially the social semiotic approach to multimodality or systemic func-
tional multimodal discourse analysis. These traditions provide a useful set of concepts when it comes
to the analysis of multimodal artefacts. In general, the intention of a multimodal discourse analysis
is to uncover the way that semiotic resources like writing and image are strategically used as part of
a multimodal whole in order to achieve social goals. The following key concepts support that goal.

Mode: According to Kress and Jewitt (2003, pp. 3–4), modes of representation are ‘the re-
sources that a culture makes available as the means for making representations and meaning—
speech, writing, image, gesture, music, and others’ (emphasis in original). A mode has both
material-semiotic and sociocultural dimensions. For example, a mode like writing presents a
coherent system of signs with particular affordances (see the definition later in this list). At the
same time, the meanings that a mode makes available also depend on cultural norms: that is,
they are limited to those meanings that are tacitly assumed to be available within the norms and
conventions of particular communities.

Medium: Media refer to ‘the technologies for making and distributing meanings as messages’
(Kress & Jewitt, 2003, p. 4; emphasis in original). So, for example, an image can be inscribed
on the wall of a cave, on canvas, on paper, or on a screen. Each provides a different material
medium.

Affordances: Different modes have different ‘affordances’ for making meaning. This refers
to ‘what it is possible to express and represent readily, easily, with a mode’ (Kress & Jewitt,
2003, p 14). Writing, for example, is linear and sequential, allowing us to represent sequences
of words and affording easy discussion of conceptual categories and the way they relate. By
comparison, image is spatial and simultaneous, allowing us to make representations in space,
finely graded representations of colour, and complex representations of relationships between
variables, as in a graph, for example. Again, the affordances of modes have material and cul-
tural elements: that is, the way that a mode can be used is shaped by historical use and cultural
expectations.

Functional specialization: Some modes are better suited to some forms of representation than
others. For example, writing is good at expressing relationships between abstract concepts, as
in the sentence ‘Democracy leverages the accountability of leaders to provide positive out-
comes for a people’. Image, on the other hand, is good at ‘showing’ a concrete scene, as in
a photograph, indicating spatial relationships, as in a map, or visually representing complex,
changing relationships, as in a graph of stock price over time. Functional specialization refers
to the way that a well-designed multimodal text draws on the specialized affordances of differ-
ent modes to achieve particular communicative functions.

Multimodal ensemble: A multimodal discourse analysis is a study of a multimodal ensemble,

that is, a combination of modal resources in text or interaction. The analyst can pay attention to
the way that such an ensemble has been designed, with various modes orchestrated as part of
the whole to achieve a particular purpose.

27
 Christoph Hafner

Text/image interaction: Some multimodal discourse analysis focusses especially on the way
that writing and image is combined, for example in textbooks. Unsworth (2008) points out that
such an analysis can show a relationship of: concurrence, where meanings in the written text
and the image are in agreement; complementarity, where meanings in different modes support
each other and ‘fill in’ different details; divergence, where meanings in the written text and in
the image are different, a pattern that one often sees in humour.

Semiotic remediation: The process of textual transformation, for example taking notes on a
meeting and writing them up in minutes (a spoken interaction is transformed into a written
text). This concept was developed by Prior and Hengst (2010) and the process is increasingly
relied on by language educators who design tasks requiring students to ‘remediate’ writing as
a video text (or the other way around), for example.

Language and literacy education researchers and practitioners can draw upon these key con-
cepts in order to develop multimodal communicative competence in second language learners.
These concepts can also form the basis of a multimodal discourse analysis in second language
research. In the following section, I outline the main qualitative and quantitative methods that can
be used.

Main research methods in multimodal discourse analysis and second

language research
Multimodal discourse analysis provides second language researchers with a set of analytical tools
that they can use to understand issues of communication and learning as these are reflected in multi-
modal texts and interactions. Although there is clearly strong interest in issues of multimodal design
in second language research, it is only recently that researchers have begun to make use of conceptual
tools and systematic analytical methods developed in the field of multimodality. When researchers
are doing a multimodal discourse analysis, they need to consider issues related to: (1) data collec-
tion—what data to collect and how to collect it; (2) data processing—especially how to transcribe the
data; and (3) data analysis.

Data collection
With respect to data collection, researchers tend to adopt one of two main approaches. Firstly, they
may focus on the collection of multimodal texts and interactions, with the aim of describing these
artefacts and generating insights into the way that they are multimodally constructed. If a suffi-
ciently large number of artefacts is collected, this is an approach that is amenable to a quantitative
multimodal corpus analysis capable of providing representative findings. Secondly, researchers may
combine the collection of multimodal artefacts with detailed data that describe the context of com-
munication and learning, with the aim of providing an in-depth account of multimodal discourse
processes from the point of view of participants. Such a multi-perspectival approach usually relies
on a smaller number of artefacts and employs ethnographic techniques like observations, inter-
views, and the use of field notes in order to ‘flesh out’ the analysis. This second approach can pro-
vide qualitative accounts of complex, ‘messy’ processes of learning and text construction, including
the goals of designers. The analysis must combine findings from the multimodal discourse analysis
with perspectives uncovered using ethnographic techniques in a process of data triangulation. In the
rest of this section, I will focus on issues related to the multimodal analysis of artefacts, as this is
the main focus of this chapter.

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 Multimodal discourse analysis and second language research

Data processing and analysis

Whatever the approach to data collection, it is necessary to process the multimodal texts collected,
and a key issue here is how to transcribe. If a quantitative approach is adopted, it will be necessary
to transcribe all artefacts collected, a process that can be facilitated with tools that automatically
tag elements of images (like the UAM Image Tool; see http://www.wagsoft.com/ImageTool/index.
html). If a qualitative approach is adopted, then it may be possible to transcribe selectively after
identifying key extracts through a process of repeated ‘reading’ or viewing. However, the tran-
scription process is itself useful as a first step in the analysis, serving to draw the analyst’s attention
to the way that multimodal features combine in the artefact. This kind of ‘manual’ transcription
can be aided by software like Multimodal Analysis Image, Multimodal Analysis Video (both at
http://multimodal-analysis.com/index.html), and ELAN (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguis-
tics, 2022).1
The transcription procedure will vary depending on the kind of multimodal artefacts that have
been collected. This is because different multimodal artefacts will tend to make use of somewhat
different semiotic resources. For example, the range of semiotic resources available in a scientific
textbook are different to those available in a video. Different kinds of multimodal artefacts include:

• Text/image ensembles, for example graphical abstracts, infographics, websites, tweets.

• Video ensembles, for example video abstracts, video methods articles, digital stories.
• Interactions, for example video recordings of interactions in the classroom.

Text/image ensembles include the printed page (e.g., science textbooks) and the web page. In cre-
ating a transcription, the goal is to note the selection of semiotic resources in different modes so that
one can subsequently analyse systematically how these interact. Jewitt et al. (2016) illustrate these
principles with reference to captioned images found on web pages. Drawing on a systemic functional
perspective, they show how the image can be annotated to indicate how various meaning potentials
are realized. Specifically, the image is transcribed to highlight the following dimensions: experiential
meanings expressed through the setting, participants, processes, posture, and dress; interpersonal
meanings expressed through camera angle, shot distance, lighting, proportion, gaze, and visual ad-
dress; textual meanings expressed through framing and visual composition, that is, the relative place-
ment of episodes and figures.
Designed video ensembles like films are more complicated because they include a sequence of
multimodal ensembles. In transcription, it is necessary to first break the ensemble down into shots
and visual frames. This kind of artefact is often composed of numerous shots, which can be defined
as ‘a continuously filmed stretch of video, without cuts’ (Hafner, 2014, p. 666). A shot can either
present a single visual frame, for example a visual configuration or composition, or it can present
multiple frames. This happens when the shot itself involves a pan or a zoom, changing the angle or
distance of the shot respectively. Once the shot and visual frame boundaries have been identified,
different elements of the ensemble can then be transcribed. In their sample, Baldry and Thibault
(2006) annotate: (1) row number and time specification; (2) visual frame (a still image copied from
the video); (3) visual image, including visual information, perspective, distance, visual colloca-
tion, visual salience, colour, coding orientation, and visual focus or gaze of participants; (4) kinesic
action, that is, meanings and interpersonal modifications of movement; (5) soundtrack; (6) meta-
functional interpretation. To this, we could add transcription of speech (by participants or voiced
over) and on-screen writing.
Videos of interactions, for example those that occur in the language classroom, present a dif-
ferent kind of multimodal ensemble once again. These videos will usually have been recorded by

29
 Christoph Hafner

the researcher and will therefore not have been carefully planned or produced for any particular
audience. The choice of particular shots, visual frames, camera angles and distances, and so on is
not meaningful in this context. Instead, what is relevant is the way that speech is combined with
other embodied resources like gesture and gaze as well as with texts and material resources in the
environment (PowerPoint slides, whiteboard, textbook, student’s notes, physical realia, and so on).
Transcription systems designed for conversation analysis can be useful here as long as they take into
account all relevant resources that are oriented to. Useful reflections on a range of possible transcrip-
tion systems can be found in Jewitt et al. (2016, chap. 5).

Data analysis
As already suggested, the analysis itself can involve both quantitative and qualitative data sources.
Quantitative measures relate to the frequency of particular semiotic choices within and across modes,
providing an ‘etic’ view of the way that a certain text type is constructed. In a multimodal corpus
analysis of a large number of texts, the inquiry would most likely stop here. In contrast, a multi-
perspective analysis that attempts to provide an ‘emic’ view of text-making practices, taking into
account the perspectives of participants in those practices, would triangulate the findings of text
analysis with other data, like interviews. Such an analysis would attempt to engage with contextual
factors in a systematic way, including information about the communicative goals of designers and
the text-construction process.

Sample studies in multimodal discourse analysis and second language research

Rowley-Jolivet (2002): Visual discourse in scientific conference papers

The multimodal discourse analysis in Rowley-Jolivet (2002) engages with the first kind of question
identified in the previous section, ‘Overview of multimodal discourse analysis and second language
research’, namely: ‘what are the multimodal features of expert target texts and interactions that sec-
ond language learners may encounter and produce?’ The study examined multimodal presentation
in the genre of scientific conference papers, with an analysis of video recordings of a total of 90
papers—30 each from geology, medicine, and physics—presented at five international conferences
in the early 1990s in France. These included presentations by both first and second language English
users. Rowley-Jolivet highlights the multimodal nature of conference presentations, which combine
a sequential oral presentation with visual slides that draw on the spatial logic of the screen. The study
focused primarily on the use of the visual mode in conference presentations, occasionally referencing
accompanying speech when needed in the analysis in order to account for the distribution of informa-
tion between the visual and verbal modes. Two thousand and forty-eight visuals (slides or transparen-
cies) were analysed, with each visual coded for the following: chronological order of appearance in
the presentation; projection medium (slide or transparency); single-screen or double-screen projec-
tion; B/W or colour; the type of visual (see the next paragraph); composition; content; and the role of
visual and verbal modes in conveying information.
The analysis showed that visuals were frequently used in the presentations, on average one
visual every 51 seconds. This suggested that visuals played the important role of ‘showing’. Four
types of visuals were observed: graphical visuals, for example charts, graphs, and drawings; figu-
rative visuals, for example photographs, of which there were two kinds—’ordinary’ photographs
that realistically depict scenes of interest, and enhanced photographs that depict ‘data’ like X-
rays or MRI or CT scans; scriptural visuals, such as text-based slides used to organize the talk or

30
 Multimodal discourse analysis and second language research

summarize conclusions; and numerical visuals that depict mathematical formulae and calculations.
Visuals were found to play an interpersonal role, with scientists using ‘popular imagery’, for ex-
ample portraits of famous scientists or images of scientists at work in the lab or field, in order to
establish an informal or humorous tone. Visuals also played an important text-organizing function,
framing the paper at the beginning and end, marking boundaries by signalling the beginning of a
new section, and closing by providing summaries of conclusions. Rowley-Jolivet concludes by
arguing that English teachers can pay more attention to the visual aspects of scientific presenta-
tions, thereby enhancing both comprehension and production skills. In terms of the key concepts
discussed earlier in this chapter (in the section ‘Key concepts in multimodal discourse analysis’),
the paper highlights affordances of the visual mode, including how different kinds of visuals are
used for communicative effect.

Hafner (2014): Students’ digital video projects as multimodal ensembles

The multimodal discourse analysis in Hafner (2014) engages with the second kind of question,
namely: ‘what are the multimodal features of novice texts created by second language learners?’
Hafner describes a project-based EAP course in English for science, which ‘embeds’ multimodal
digital literacies in the course design. Students engage in group work in an ‘English for science
project’, in which they carry out a modest field study or quasi-scientific experiment and report their
findings in two ways: (1) as a team, producing a digital scientific video documentary, intended for a
non-specialist audience and shared online through YouTube; (2) in the form of individual scientific
reports written by each student, designed for a specialist audience. The study adopted a qualitative in-
terpretive approach, with multiple different data sources collected. These included comments posted
by 62 students to a course blog, interviews with 21 students, and videos created by three student
teams. A multimodal transcription of these three videos was created using the software ELAN, first
dividing each video into shots and visual frames, and for each shot or visual frame the following
dimensions were transcribed: speech; soundtrack; setting, participants; action, gesture, gaze; camera
position, perspective, camera distance.
The analysis, informed by student perspectives in blog comments and interviews, identified three
different ‘rhetorical hooks’ in the videos, corresponding to three distinct discourse identities adopted
by students. These included: student as ‘scientist’; student as ‘reporter’; and student as ‘traveller’ on
a ‘journey of experiment’. The analysis demonstrated how these identities were multimodally con-
structed. As an example, students adopting the scientist identity presented their documentary as the
investigation of a startling fact—namely, that humans have a blind spot in their eye—a fact that the
team then explored using a simple experiment. The scientist identity was adopted throughout and was
especially clearly constructed in the interpretation of results. One of the students appears on screen,
seated in a lecture hall, wearing a lab coat and typing on a computer. After a few seconds, he looks
up, gazes into the camera and explains: ‘From the result and theoretically, the size of optic disc is
not related to the gender …’. After his explanation he turns back to the screen and continues typing.
Here, the dress, setting, and tools of the scientist are appropriated and combined with an engaging
use of gaze, as well as language typical of the scientific register, in order to claim that identity. Ac-
cording to the analysis, ‘The scientific image cultivated through the visual images is matched by a
corresponding scientific register in the verbal text … demonstrating the students’ successful integra-
tion of verbal and nonverbal communication modes’ (p. 673). In terms of the key concepts identified
earlier, students need to understand the affordances of a range of modes, the functional specialization
of these modes to carry certain kinds of meanings, and possible text/image interactions as visual
modes, speech, and on-screen writing combine to create meanings.

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Prior (2010): Semiotic remediation in the design process

The multimodal discourse analysis in Prior (2010) engages with the third kind of question, namely:
‘what are the multimodal features of texts and interactions that play a role in the learning and text
construction process?’ This study describes the design process of an interface for an interactive art-
work. The observations of the university art and design team focused mainly on ‘two professors and
two non-native English speaker (NNES) graduate research assistants’ (Prior, 2013, pp. 527–528). A
wide range of different kinds of data were collected, including observations of team meetings, which
were video and audio recorded; observations of individuals working on the project outside of team
meetings, also audio and video recorded; interviews with team members; and collections of texts,
such as screen captures and documents.
The multimodal discourse analysis focused on three interactions taking place over a period of 10
months, during which participants negotiated the look of the interface at the same time as working
on the necessary computer code and database structure. Discussing the way that the interface could
potentially generate images of different sizes, members of the team utilized drawings and writing on
a whiteboard, gesture, verbal utterances, input on a laptop, ‘virtual’ mouse gestures, and paper docu-
ments in order to reach agreement about the design of the digital artefact they were producing. The
analysis shows how the text-construction process emerged from a complex interaction of transforma-
tions, or ‘semiotic remediations’, as discussions, drawings, and gestures were gradually transformed
into drafts of code and ultimately, a final product. Prior argues that writing or ‘inscription’ must be
seen in terms of an activity rather than as a material artefact and that it is an activity that is located in
‘longer chains of distributed activity’ (p. 211). Such multimodal accounts of writing processes have
clear implications for teachers and learners in language and literacy education. The key concept of
semiotic remediation, discussed in the earlier section ‘Overview of multimodal discourse’, shows
how the design product emerged from other kinds of texts and interactions.

Implications for second language learning, teaching, and use

With multimodal discourse analysis, second language researchers can pay attention to the full range
of semiotic resources involved in communication. The studies clearly demonstrate that language
learning, teaching, and use involve complex combinations of a range of semiotic resources, whether
this be inside or outside the classroom. As a result, it is important that language education researchers
and practitioners find ways to develop multimodal communicative competence in their students. One
pedagogical approach that has gained prominence is ‘Digital Multimodal Composing’ or ‘DMC’.
DMC refers to ‘activities that engage learners in the use of digital tools to construct texts in multiple
semiotic modes, including writing, image, and sound (to name a few)’ (Hafner, 2015, p. 487). The
approach encompasses a wide range of digital production activities, from websites to digital video
projects. Versions of the approach have been adopted in a wide range of contexts, from community
centres to schools to universities. In addition, there is now considerable scholarly interest in DMC,
with the Journal of Second Language Writing devoting a special issue and a ‘Disciplinary Dialogues’
section to it (Belcher, 2017; Yi et al., 2020).
By engaging students in the creation of multimodal texts, DMC provides plentiful opportuni-
ties for students to develop multimodal communicative competence under the guidance of their
teachers. For example, students designing posters, brochures, websites, or videos can reflect on the
varied affordances of image, layout, writing, speech, and other modes, considering how particular
modes might be more suited to particular kinds of meanings, that is, how they are ‘functionally
specialized’, as well as how they interact meaningfully in the final multimodal ensemble produced.
However, research shows that DMC goes far beyond issues of multimodality alone. Summarizing

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work on multimodality and digital design, Belcher (2017) makes a powerful case for adopting the
DMC pedagogy. She notes the following benefits (Belcher, 2017, as cited in Hafner & Miller, 2019,
p. 156): DMC

meets the real-world needs of learners in a digitally mediated world; it enhances state-of-the-art
language teaching strategies like task-based language teaching and learning, by allowing for
the easy integration of multiple skills; it engages students with authentic audiences, providing
real-world motivation; it is ‘voice-enhancing’ and can ‘embolden struggling writers to express
themselves’.
(Belcher, 2017, p. 82)

Further, DMC heightens genre awareness as a result of transformation processes that occur in the com-
position process; and it increases learner autonomy and encourages independent language practice.
In spite of evidence of wide-ranging benefits, some scholars (e.g., Manchón, 2017) have raised
concerns about the notion of explicitly engaging with multimodality in second language education.
These concerns are theoretical in nature rather than being grounded in any empirical observation
that tests the approach. In essence, it is argued that involving students in multimodal productions
could potentially distract them from a focus on language. However, this critique misses the point
that multimodal productions involve language learning and use both in their process and in their
outcomes. The critique assumes that students must either engage with DMC or engage with language
production and learning. Empirical descriptions of DMC processes show that such an assumption is
problematic. Most recently, Lim and Polio (2020) point out that ‘the use of monomodal writing as a
pre-multimodal task production step, as Jiang (2018) and Dzekoe (2017) did for their participants,
might address Manchón’s (2017) concern that multimodal tasks may not facilitate acquisition’ (p. 6).
The critique also discounts the motivational effect of DMC which likely leads to students being bet-
ter engaged, spending more time on their English projects, and ultimately, learning more (Hafner &
Miller, 2011, 2019; Jiang & Luk, 2016). Only a few studies have directly compared DMC with other,
more traditional forms of composition in terms of language output. Using a pre- and post-test design
and comparing multimodal composing groups (in both in-class and out-of-class contexts) with a non-
intervention group, Vandommele et al. (2017) concluded that multimodal composing contributed
positively to L2 writing skills. Kim and Belcher (2020) compared student writing on ‘traditional’ and
DMC tasks and found that accuracy in both tasks was comparable, suggesting ‘that multimodality use
does not lessen attention to language’ (p. 98).
The pedagogical implications of multimodal discourse analysis and second language research
extend further to the policy level. Given the prominent role that multimodal communication forms
like websites, social media posts, YouTube videos, and many other forms of representation play in
the contemporary lives of second language learners, it should come as no surprise that English lan-
guage and literacy curricula in some places have been significantly reformed. One example of this is
in Singapore, where the English Language 2010 Syllabus (Ministry of Education, Singapore, 2010)
expanded the scope of the curriculum. Receptive skills were described as ‘Listening, Reading, and
Viewing’ while productive skills were described as ‘Speaking, Writing, and Representing’, with the
explicit aim of developing students’ abilities vis-à-vis ‘multimodal texts and text forms’ (p. 10). Such
progressive policies that engage with multimodal communicative competence naturally also bring
demands on teacher education. For teachers to effectively implement such policies, a comprehensive
and systematic effort is needed to promote effective teaching practices. This means understanding
what is going on in English classrooms, developing teaching materials, and putting in place profes-
sional development structures. Teachers themselves need a better understanding of what multimodal
communicative competence entails and how to teach it.

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 Christoph Hafner

Future directions for multimodal discourse analysis and

second language research
The use of multimodal discourse analysis in second language research is a relatively recent devel-
opment. A potential weakness of the studies in second language research is the lack of a systematic
approach to multimodal discourse analysis. Robust methods of analysis that are compatible with
common theoretical frameworks, like genre analysis in English for specific purposes (ESP) for
example, are still being developed. Such work should continue in future, so that the theoretical and
methodological tools needed in order to understand multimodality in second language education
contexts become gradually more refined and user-friendly. A fertile area for theorization is the role
that cultural values (including those of disciplinary cultures) play in multimodal representation.
On a more practical level, the issue is how understandings from multimodal discourse analysis can
be incorporated into teaching and learning practices. Here, there are currently efforts underway
to develop and evaluate a metalanguage of multimodality for classroom use (Shin et al., 2020;
Unsworth & Mills, 2020). Much more work is needed in this area. Furthermore, as we develop
such a metalanguage, we must also continue to evaluate classroom practices, in order to avoid
falling into a ‘paint-by-numbers’ approach to multimodal communicative competence. Teachers
and learners must understand how to critically evaluate the affordances of different modes so that
they can make creative use of such resources in their language and literacy practices. Finally, a lot
of work still needs to be done with respect to the issue of teacher training. We need to know more
about how multimodal discourse analysis can be incorporated into teacher training, so that teach-
ers feel empowered to develop curricula and pedagogies that address multimodal communicative
competence.

Note
1 ELAN is a computer program for the annotation of sound or video files, which was developed at the Max
Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Its full name is the EUDICO Linguistic
Annotator (EUDICO stands for European Distributed Corpora Project).

Further reading
Cummins, J., & Early, M. (Eds.). (2011). Identity texts: The collaborative creation of power in multilingual
schools. Trentham Books.
This book focusses on school contexts, looking at the positive ways in which multilingual and multimodal
‘identity texts’ can be used in language and literacy instruction, especially among marginalized students. In ad-
dition to a theoretical overview, the book includes 18 short vignettes showcasing identity texts in educational
settings, and an evaluation of the emerging themes.
Hafner, C. A., & Miller, L. (2019). English in the disciplines: A multidimensional model for ESP course design.
Routledge.
This book describes a project-based approach to language teaching and learning, which engages students at
university with digital multimodal composing. Taking a case-study approach, the book develops a multidimen-
sional model of course design, including an important focus on multimodality as one of the emerging needs of
ESP learners.
Jewitt, C., Bezemer, J. J., & O’Halloran, K. L. (2016). Introducing multimodality. Routledge.
This book is a must-read for those interested in multimodal research and analysis. It introduces relevant
concepts, engages in detail with three important traditions in multimodality (social semiotics, systemic func-
tional multimodal discourse analysis, and conversation analysis), and concludes with a chapter on designing a
multimodal study.

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 Multimodal discourse analysis and second language research

Kress, G. (2010). Multimodality: A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. Routledge.

This book provides an overview of key concepts related to multimodality as an approach to communication.
It describes a social semiotic theory of multimodality, elaborating concepts such as mode, design, and multi-
modal ensemble, and applies the theory to the education context.
Norris, S. (2019). Systematically working with multimodal data: Research methods in multimodal discourse
analysis. John Wiley & Sons.
This book describes a systematic way of doing multimodal discourse analysis based on mediated discourse
theory. The book provides examples of analysis of small, medium, and large data sets, including multimodal
analysis conducted in both experimental and ethnographic studies.

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 4
NARRATIVE INQUIRY AND
SECOND LANGUAGE RESEARCH
Doris Warriner and Anne Pomerantz

Introduction
In this chapter, we describe the affordances of narrative inquiry for second language (L2) research.
By narrative inquiry, we are referring to the array of approaches used in the social sciences to identify
and analyze accounts of personal experience. Such approaches, while diverse in their disciplinary
origins and technical applications, share a view of narrative as a universal and fundamentally hu-
man way of making sense of one’s experiences (e.g., Polkinghorne, 1988), subjectivity, or self (e.g.,
Bruner, 1990). They are united in their view of narrative as a way of imposing meaning on the oth-
erwise disparate experience of being in the world. Thus, L2 researchers have focused on the themes
that emerge in learners and language educators’ stories, as well as the semiotic resources narrators
draw on to represent, animate, co-construct, and reflect their experiences. More recently, as issues of
researcher positionality and power have come to the fore, some have begun to examine the “narrative
knowledging” (Barkhuizen, 2011) or sense-making that figures into the production, representation,
and consumption of findings within narrative research (Barkhuizen & Consoli, 2021).
Not all research that focuses on narrative or employs narrative approaches to inquiry, however,
shares this epistemological stance. As Barkhuizen (2014) has noted, “[in L2 research,] narrative,
whether as text/artefact, method of analysis, or both, has become a popular catchall term for much
activity in qualitative, interpretive research which focuses on the experiences of research partici-
pants” (p. 590). In this chapter, we limit our discussion to work that is explicitly grounded in the idea
of narrative as a “mode of understanding” (Freeman, 2015) to showcase what this analytic approach
might offer L2 researchers and to establish why and how L2 researchers are drawn to this research
paradigm. Our chapter is aimed at L2 scholars who are “narrative curious” or interested in what new
or complementary insights specific forms of narrative inquiry might bring to their research.
Our chapter begins with an account of the origins of narrative research within second language
acquisition (SLA), then explores why L2 researchers might find narrative inquiry to be useful and
productive. We consider some of the arguments in favor of narrative inquiry as a worthy and legiti-
mate pursuit before identifying the kinds of questions about L2 acquisition and use that narrative data
are particularly suited to address. Our discussion then turns to some of the methodological issues
that L2 researchers must grapple with if they wish to undertake work from a narrative perspective.
Here, we consider what “counts” as a narrative or story within narrative research, the importance of
understanding the circumstances under which narrative data are (co)constructed and collected, and

38 DOI: 10.4324/9781003177579-5
 Narrative inquiry and second language research

the criteria by which narrative research might be presented, analyzed, and evaluated. We then review
what findings from narrative research have contributed to our understanding of the conditions and
experiences of SLA. Our discussion ends with potential directions for further inquiry, as well as a list
of suggested resources.

Overview of narrative inquiry and second language research

To understand the place of narrative inquiry within L2 research, it is important to consider when and
how narrative, first as a form of data and later as a research paradigm, entered into methodologi-
cal discussions. Whereas scholars have long been interested in the narratives of multilinguals, SLA
researchers generally cite Schumann and Schumann (1977) as the first published study within SLA
to offer a systematic and theoretically informed analysis of learners’ (and in this case the authors’)
language learning “diaries” or first-person narratives of their individual experiences. This work soon
gave rise to other diary studies which also sought to identify subjective, affective, social, and stra-
tegic aspects of the language-learning experience that were difficult to document via other methods
(see Barkhuizen, 2014, for a history of narrative research in SLA). While this early work positioned
learners’ narratives as legitimate and productive sources of data, it was not necessarily informed by
work in fields such as literary theory, psychology, anthropology, and sociolinguistics, which viewed
narrative as a fundamentally human way of sense-making. Instead, defenses of diary studies in the
1980s and 1990s (e.g., Bailey, 1991; Bailey & Ochsner, 1983) focused on the validity of introspection
as a methodological approach, the need for more open-ended and naturalistic forms of inquiry within
SLA, the potential for narrative data to be triangulated with other forms of data, and the possibility
for deriving longitudinal accounts of the language-learning process (cf. Benson, 2018).
In the early 2000s, a small group of L2 researchers (e.g., Bell, 2002; Lantolf & Pavlenko, 2000;
Pavlenko, 2001a, 2001b, 2002) demonstrated what narrative theory might offer to the study of second
(or additional) language learning, development, teaching, and use. Their work countered many SLA
researchers’ longstanding reluctance to view language learners’ (and language teachers’) narratives
as legitimate forms of data. By engaging with theoretical and methodological insights from narrative
inquiry, Lantolf and Pavlenko (2000), for example, argued for the centrality of narrative as both a
way of knowing and as a legitimate approach to the collection and analysis of data. They questioned
the dominance of the “learning as acquisition metaphor” within SLA and argued that language learn-
ing could be viewed as both the addition of new communicative resources (“acquisition”) and a
process of affiliation and belonging (“participation”). To Lantolf and Pavlenko, recognition of new
metaphors for learning required not only new forms of data and new approaches to analysis, but also
a shift in the prevailing epistemologies governing SLA research. Like the earlier proponents of di-
ary studies, they argued that narrative data “bring to the surface aspects of human activity, including
SLA, that cannot be captured in the more traditional approach to research” (p. 159). Moreover, they
questioned the privileging of “third-person distal observations” over “first-person accounts in the
form of personal narratives” in research on human experience (p. 157).
SLA researchers found narrative inquiry to be an effective way to obtain “an emic or insider’s ac-
count of the cognitive, social, and emotional dimensions of SLA” as well as a “rigorous examination
of learners’ perspectives, stances, moral frameworks, and social positions or relationships as situated
in particular sociocultural contexts” (Pomerantz, 2013, p. 1). Specifically, they emphasized the sense-
making function of narrative (Bell, 2002; Lantolf & Pavlenko, 2000), noting how individuals engage
in emplotment to confer temporal order and causality on otherwise disparate events, actions, and per-
ceptions. Yet, this work also emphasized the ways in which individual narratives are always subject
to the storylines, character types, chains of causality, and moral frameworks circulating around and
available to narrators. Moreover, early work on narrative in SLA also drew attention to narrative as

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a site where individuals’ identities get constructed. Bell (2002), for example, highlighted the power
of narrators to refashion their stories in light of new events or insights, pointing to narrative’s role in
reflecting, and as some would argue, constructing a dynamic self. Likewise, Pavlenko (2002) noted
the emancipatory potential of narrative and narrative research, as “the telling of life stories in a new
language may be a means of empowerment that makes it possible to express new selves and desires
previously considered untellable” (p. 214).
These appeals to narrative theory by L2 researchers in the early 2000s were notable for broadening
the theoretical base of SLA, developing a strong warrant for examining narrative data, and offering an
approach for the analysis of this data that included but also went beyond the identification of themes
or patterns within individual learners’ texts. Moreover, the priorities of narrative inquiry seemed to
be aligned with a growing interest in understanding the particulars of emergent multilinguals’ expe-
riences, and responsive to Norton Peirce’s (1995) call for SLA research to see language learners as
inextricably tied to their social contexts and subject to particular, and often inequitable, relations of
power. More recent studies of identity from an SLA perspective now routinely “consider how peo-
ple’s understandings of who they are changes as they acquire and use new linguistic resources” and
draw confidently on narrative as a legitimate source of data and narrative analysis as a productive
methodological tool (Pomerantz, 2013, p. 3). Indeed, as Benson has noted,

One of the more general outcomes of narrative inquiry in applied linguistics, therefore, lies in
the way that studies repeatedly show that learning a language is much more than learning its
forms and structures and developing relevant skills; it is also a matter of acquiring and develop-
ing new identities.
(Benson, 2014, p. 165)

Thus, with these affordances in mind, SLA researchers have increasingly turned to narrative in-
quiry to analyze and understand processes of second or additional language development from a
more emic, ecological, and socially situated perspective.

Main research approaches in narrative inquiry and second language research

One of the first challenges narrative researchers face is determining what will count as narrative in the
data. Accordingly, L2 researchers have drawn on various understandings of narrative, ranging from
more text-centric approaches (which tend to see narrative as structurally distinctive and comprised
of recurring, outwardly identifiable features) to more performative accounts of narrative (which typi-
cally highlight the culturally influenced, interactionally situated, co-constructed, and fragmentary
nature of storytelling). More recently, L2 research has begun to examine a wider range of narrative
texts and embraced multiple views of narrative, with more researchers adopting a social-practice
view. Indeed, as Benson has noted, the coherence of narrative research within L2 studies lies “less in
its concern with particular text-types and more in its focus on the activity of storytelling” (Benson,
2014, p. 155; see also De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2012, 2020). In this chapter, we highlight Free-
man’s (2015) functional definition of narrative as a “mode of understanding” as this aligns with the
purpose of narrative inquiry within L2 research.

Autobiographical narratives and life histories

Many L2 researchers adopting a narrative approach focus on autobiographical narratives or life his-
tories to understand the experience of becoming or being multilingual (e.g., Barkhuizen et al., 2013;
Coffey & Street, 2008; Kinginger, 2004; Pavlenko, 2001a, 2001b; Quan & Menard-Warwick, 2021;

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Simon-Maeda, 2011). Such work, especially that which examines trajectories, struggles, and profes-
sional visions of multilingual language educators (e.g., Golombek & Johnson, 2004; Tsui, 2007),
has flourished since the early 2000s as the “identity turn” and “the multilingual turn” (Douglas Fir
Group, 2016; May, 2019) took hold in SLA research. For example, by analyzing narrative data from
interviews with language educators, a line of inquiry that has become increasingly prominent in L2
research, Golombek and Johnson (2004) explored how “narrative functions as a mediational tool”
(p. 486) to facilitate teacher professional development and “to expose how teachers’ understandings
of phenomena are infused with interpretation from within their individual and social world”—their
stance guided by the assumption that “teacher inquiry will ultimately bring about productive change
in teaching practice” (p. 487). Contributors to Benson and Nunan’s (2005) edited collection exam-
ined the long-term process of learning a second language through the lens of difference and diversity
in second language learning with a focus on how learners made sense of their experiences. As Benson
and Numan argue in their introduction to the volume, “researchers can use the stories that comprise
their data to cast light on dimensions of difference and diversity that would otherwise remain con-
cealed” (p. 3).
Evoking diary studies, Simon-Maeda (2011) examined “the personal and socially constructed
aspects of language acquisition,” exploring her own process of becoming a fluent Japanese speaker.
She described her “autoethnographic investigation” as “part of a recent surge in alternative SLA and
applied linguistics approaches to capturing the complexities of language learning and use” from a
firsthand perspective (p. 25). In an effort to explore the complexity of language learning in an increas-
ingly globalized world, Quan and Menard-Warwick (2021) conducted a thematic analysis of narra-
tives constructed by a Vietnamese American learner of Spanish and her use of translingual practices
to reflect on the relationship between her lived experiences and her emerging identities and to “navi-
gate multiple identities, cross linguistic and social boundaries, and employ an array of resources to
make meaning” (2021, p. 355; cf. Kiernan, 2019).
Within this work, texts ranging from published memoirs to oral stories elicited through inter-
views, to spontaneous reports of events or experiences, and to emergent, digitally mediated accounts
are often identified as narratives because they offer first-person accounts of personal experience over
a specific period of time. They are narratives not because they necessarily adhere to a specific form,
but because they function as acts of sense-making. Researchers identify and examine these oral,
written, signed, and, more recently, multimodal texts for content or themes that might offer more
emic accounts of L2 development, learning, teaching, and use. The goal of such work is to docu-
ment not only the common threads that emerge across stories, but also the peculiarities of individual
narrator’s experiences that might complicate, broaden, or challenge existing research findings or
perspectives.

Grand narratives
In keeping with this emic perspective, some scholars have been particularly attuned to the ways
individuals’ stories are shaped by and shape grand narratives or larger, culturally circulating story
lines. De Fina’s (2003) work on the narratives of undocumented Mexican immigrants to the United
States showed how individual acts of storytelling were interanimated by and were in conversation
with wider storylines about immigrants and immigration. She offered a multi-scalar approach to
studying identity in narrative, with a particular emphasis on the formation and narration of collective
identities. Likewise, Coryell, Clark, and Pomerantz (2010) drew on the social psychological notion of
symbolic convergence theory to illustrate how adult heritage learners of Spanish constructed shared
“cultural fantasy narratives” to understand their language-learning histories and desires. They argued
that a close look at such narratives might contribute to the development of pedagogies that are more

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sensitive to the larger social and historical contexts in which heritage learners of Spanish operate and
the emotional dimensions of heritage language learning itself. Such work illustrates the power of
identifying themes within narratives and demonstrates that the ways in which narrators psychologi-
cally understand themselves and their experiences are always embedded in, subject to, and constitu-
tive of the contexts in which they are told.

Canonical narratives
L2 researchers interested in understanding how forms of narrative might vary across languages,
cultures, or a language learner’s developmental trajectory have been drawn to models that see
narrative as a constellation of recurring structures or characteristics. While some of this work
focuses on the development of narrative expertise (e.g., Minani, 2015), other work focuses on
how emergent multilinguals draw on particular narrative structures—or canonical story forms—
to make sense of experiences and construct their identities. Conceding that such forms might
vary across contexts and aspects of speakers’ identities (e.g., ethnicity, race, social class), this re-
search tends to look at how narrators draw on, achieve, manipulate, or transform these structures
in their own acts of storytelling. Koven (2007), for example, drew on Labov’s (1972) model
of stories of personal experience to examine how French–Portuguese bilinguals enacted their
identities differently in stories told across both languages. She found that, whereas participants
reported feeling like a “different person” when they used a different language, their narrative
performances were influenced by the range of social identities available in particular sociolin-
guistic contexts and narrators’ sense of “entitlement” to these social identities. This work shows
how L2 researchers might draw on particular models of narrative to document how idealized
narrative forms might vary across cultural contexts, aspects of narrators’ identities, or along
learners’ developmental trajectories.

Narrative-in-interaction
L2 researchers have also been drawn to work in sociolinguistics and/or linguistic anthropology that
recognizes both the sense-making aspects of narrative and its emergent, fragmentary, and sometimes
inchoate character. These researchers use narrative inquiry to investigate not only how everyday con-
versational narrative and “mundane” events or practices can be/become a site for working through
who we are but also how teachers and learners should act, think, and feel (e.g., Ochs & Capps, 2001,
p. 17). Later, scholars pursuing small stories research (Bamberg & Georgakopoulou, 2008; Georga-
kopoulou, 2021; Simpson, 2011; Vásquez, 2011) demonstrated what a focus on these kinds of texts
can contribute to our understanding of narrative as a tool for sense-making and identity construction.
Diverging from a focus on “full-fledged” or canonical stories, small stories research is primarily
interested in identifying and systematically analyzing “underrepresented narrative activities, such
as tellings of ongoing events, future or hypothetical events, and shared (known) events, but it also
captures allusions to (previous) tellings, deferrals of tellings, and refusals to tell” (Bamberg & Geor-
gakopoulou, 2008, p. 381). For example, Pomerantz and Kearney (2012) illustrated how a small sto-
ries approach can help L2 researchers to see how emergent multilinguals’ perspectives on language
learning and on themselves as language users are continually “developed, evaluated, and reworked”
within and through the “multiple and unrehearsed” stories they tell about their experiences. In rec-
ognizing the ever-changing and nonlinear aspects of learners’ experiences and thus their narratives,
such work resonates with work in SLA that sees L2 development as a dynamic and un-finalizable
process (Douglas Fir Group, 2016).

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The narrated event, the narrating event, and context

As new theories of narrative and narrative analysis have emerged, narrative inquiry in SLA has
underscored the analytic importance of attending to the interactional conditions under which nar-
rative data are collected (e.g., Ochs & Capps, 2001; Pavlenko, 2001a; Wortham, 2001). From this
perspective, it is not only the structural characteristics of the story itself, or its genre or content, that
attract researchers’ attention, but also the work tellers do to command, sustain, and interact with their
interlocutors. This work offers L2 scholars additional theoretical and discourse-analytic tools for
examining the interplay between the narrated event (the story) and the narrating event or the act of
storytelling itself.
As Baynham (2011) observed, the research interview can be “a site for narrative performance”
(p. 72) where “interviewers and interviewees align themselves to the forms of professional prac-
tice under consideration, smoothly laminating both social and discourse roles” (p. 73). Prior (2011),
for example, relied on “a narrative constructionist framework” informed by conversation analysis
(CA) to show that autobiographical narratives in L2 ethnographic interviews are collaboratively con-
structed, sensitive to context, and influenced by prior interaction. According to Kasper and Prior
(2015), insights and techniques from CA can be leveraged to illuminate how autobiographical narra-
tives get jointly constructed during research interviews. They observe that

although autobiographic stories have been utilized as rich resources for understanding the lived
realities of groups and individuals, a detailed analysis of how these stories take shape in the
course of their production offers insight into the co-participants’ interactional realities.
(Kasper & Prior, 2015, p. 229)

Likewise, Koven (2016) analyzed what narrators do interactionally (within the narrating event)
and as storytellers (within the narrated event) to “invoke generational, historical, and national time
scales” (p. 19); she examined the narrative strategies used by Franco-Portuguese youth and showed
“how storytellers perform a type of upward scale shift, by switching from narrating one-time events
to asserting general types, situations, and principles, which co-present participants ratify” (p. 20).
Prior and Talmy (2021) have advocated for a discursive constructionist approach to narrative re-
search, characterized by an epistemology that focuses on processes of narrative construction—or
the ways narrators mobilize resources within and beyond the interaction to “build narrative worlds.”
They argue that this approach “offers an innovative, powerfully reflexive, and methodographic lens
for a range of narrative projects and frameworks” and that it reveals “the agentive, epistemically
driven, action-oriented work that goes into building and versioning narrative worlds” (p. 1).
As L2 researchers have come to embrace narrative inquiry, some have turned to theories of po-
sitioning to offer more linguistically informed analyses of autobiographical accounts of language
learning, language teaching, or living (e.g., Bamberg, 1997; Barkhuizen, 2010; Baynham, 2011,
2016; Giroir, 2014; Kari-Aydar, 2021; Miller, 2010; Pomerantz & Schwartz, 2011). Miller (2010),
for instance, drew on theories of positioning and agency (cf. Davies, 1991) to examine the autobio-
graphical accounts of adult immigrant small-business owners and examine “ideological positioning”
and “the interactional and linguistically recurring ways of speaking that allow us to make sense of
ourselves, to (re)enact those selves, and to respond to being positioned by our interlocutors” (p. 466).
Baynham (2011) analyzed 40 life-history interviews with English-language teachers and found that
the teachers used narrative to communicate particular linguistically encoded stances in relation to
policies in the local context, their learners, and processes of teaching and learning. Offering a more
micro-analytic account of narrative, such work looks carefully at the ways in which narrators draw
on alignment, attribution, and causality to construct their stories.

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A special issue of System (guest-edited by Barkhuizen & Consoli and published in 2021) calls
for greater reflexivity and accountability among narrative researchers, with particular attention to
how “story” is conceived, questions about types of researcher engagement, the nature and dimen-
sions of researcher positionality, challenges involved in data gathering and data analysis, and how
to represent both stories and one’s analysis of those stories. Kari-Aydar (2021) has recently offered
a framework that “consists of three layers that focus on identifying and analyzing positions and
story lines, relational positionings, and social consequences or implications of identified positions/
positioning in story lines in the context of educational research” and that demonstrates some of the
ways that “positioning is a complex and multilayered interactional move” (p. 8). Such work has been
helpful in identifying how (emergent) multilinguals construct identities that are shaped by particular
ideologies, identity categories, and interactional practices. It also demonstrates how L2 researchers
might consider how relations of power mediate language learning, development, teaching, and use.

The temporal and spatial dimensions of narrative

In keeping with this view of narrative as more emergent and nonlinear, L2 researchers have also been
increasingly interested in theorizing the temporal and spatial dimensions of narrative. As Ochs and
Capps (2001) observed, narratives of lived experience tend to occupy several temporal dimensions
at once, often ebbing and flowing between past, present, and future. They argued that “such temporal
elasticity lies at the heart of personal narrative, in that narrative time is human time, and human time
flows back and forth from moments remembered, to the unfolding present, to moments imagined”
(p. 200). Likewise, Mishler (2006) considered how context influences narrative (events and tellings)
and “how temporal ordering is a function of both cultural preferences for well-formed stories and the
situated nature of storytelling” (p. 30). While examining narratives of displacement and resettlement,
Baynham (2003) critiqued unexamined assumptions about space and time (e.g., that they set the stage
for the action) and urged sociolinguists to adopt “more complex and nuanced accounts of the ways in
which orientations in space and time contribute to the construction of oral narrative” (pp. 347–348).
Georgakopoulou (2003) explored how “relationships between time and place transcend the bounda-
ries of one taleworld and involve the interplay between different narratives” (p. 415). Warriner (2013)
examined “how movement and connections across space and time are represented and described
by individual migrants and refugees” and found that temporal elasticity (Ochs & Capps, 2001) and
“temporal border crossing” can serve as interactional resources for second language users narrating
experiences of displacement and belonging. Such approaches have served to broaden and complexify
the ways in which L2 researchers understand multilinguals’ identities and experiences.

Implications for second language learning, development, teaching, and use

Many of the misgivings L2 researchers previously had about the legitimacy of narrative data and nar-
rative inquiry have given way to a proliferation of studies documenting and analyzing (emergent)
multilinguals’ and language educators’ stories of language learning, development, teaching, and use.
As this chapter demonstrates, narrative inquiry offers a way to examine individuals’ perceptions of
experience, sense-making processes, and identities in theoretically motivated ways (e.g., Barkhuizen
et al., 2013; Benson & Nunan, 2005; Coffey & Street, 2008; Golombek & Johnson, 2004; Kinginger,
2004; Pavlenko, 2001a, 2001b; Quan & Menard-Warwick, 2021; Simon-Maeda, 2011; Tsui, 2007). By
foregrounding the sense-making functions of narrative, such research offers an argument for how emic
accounts of being and becoming multilingual can inform our overall understanding of L2 processes.
Moreover, narrative inquiry has revealed aspects of the language-learning process that are not always
visible through other means. For example, it can illuminate some of the complex interplay between the

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language learner and the language-learning context at varying scales (e.g., Coryell et al., 2010; DeFina,
2003) and highlight issues of positionality and agency in learners’ experiences (e.g., Barkhuizen, 2010;
Baynham, 2016; Giroir, 2014; Kari-Aydar, 2021; Koven, 2016; Miller, 2010, Pomerantz & Schwartz,
2011, Prior, 2011; Warriner, 2013). Thus, narrative inquiry resonates with calls within applied linguis-
tics to adopt more ecological approaches to second language development by moving beyond the search
for cognitive universals to more sociocognitive perspectives (e.g., Douglas Fir Group, 2016).
Over a decade ago, Barkhuizen (2011) called for L2 researchers to recognize and engage with
narrative knowledging or “the meaning making, learning, or knowledge construction that takes place
during the narrative research activities of (co)constructing narratives, analyzing narratives, reporting
the findings, and reading/watching/listening to research reports” (p. 395). Increasingly, researchers
are asking important questions about how data has been collected, generated, or co-constructed; how
the researcher should represent others’ words, stories, accounts; and how language is managed during
data collection, analysis, and representation. While narrative inquiry has never claimed “objectivity,”
it is important for L2 researchers to articulate how one’s positionality, stance, goals, and motives are
shaping one’s agenda, analysis, findings, and methods of representation.
As authors/researchers work to be more intentional in these ways, they are also increasingly ex-
pected to provide a clear rationale for their choices. L2 researchers working in bi/multilingual con-
texts have an important role to play in this process. As Pavlenko (2007) has argued, narrative inquiry
reveals “the ways in which storytellers use language to interpret experience and position themselves
as particular kinds of people” (p. 167). In addition, L2 researchers must also be attentive to both the
language in which narrative data are collected and the ways in which it is transcribed (Pavlenko,
2007). Kasper and Prior (2015) observe that “stories need to be analyzed with reference to the context
and medium through which they get told” (p. 228). In a study of USA-based adult language learners
(of Spanish), Menard-Warwick (2022) offered reflective comments on the challenges of conducting
“insider research” and raised questions about how “similarities with [her] interviewees” might have
influenced the co-construction and analysis of data (p. 6).

New/future directions for narrative inquiry in second language research

In keeping with increased attention to methodology, the 2021 special issue of System also encourages
increased researcher reflexivity and action. Barkhuizen and Consoli (2021), for instance, encourage
researchers to consider using more “innovative ways of generating and working with narrative data”
(p. 1). Contributors to this special issue also invite the field to apply the insights of small stories re-
search to the analysis of digital stories and social media (Georgakopoulou, 2021), for instance by us-
ing the tools and methods of narrative analysis to examine visuals and multimodal texts (Greenier &
Moodie, 2021). Other recommendations include systematically examining how narratives worlds are
constructed (Prior & Talmy, 2021), carefully managing complex ethical responsibilities (De Costa
et al., 2021), “pay[ing] more attention to issues of space” (Benson, 2021), and considering the role
of spatial and material resources in shaping narratives and identities (Canagarajah, 2021). Of poten-
tial interest to L2 teacher educators, Golombek and Johnson’s (2021) article discusses the value of
inviting language teachers to engage in narrative inquiry by participating in a process of “recurrent
restorying”—a practice that encourages teachers to

in their own voices, connect their evolving understandings to pedagogical and academic con-
cepts and approaches introduced in their LTE programs and through their learning-to-teach
experiences that are personally and professionally meaningful to them in their own social and
professional circumstances as developing language teachers.
(p. 8)

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Importantly, L2 researchers are now considering the ways in which narrative research might
contribute to efforts to decolonize and decenter L2 research (e.g., Motha, 2020) as well as to de-
velop more multilingual theories of L2 development (e.g., Ortega, 2019). Motha (2020) observes
that the field of applied linguistics has had “a long-standing investment in objectivity” and argues
that this objectivity often protects and obscures Whiteness and White supremacy. According to
Motha (2020), applied linguists should question “the material effects” of our practices—even
when those effects may not be intended—and ask whether the field is capable of moving beyond
the hierarchies and limitations of the discipline’s early founding. For narrative researchers, this
means, at the very least, considering the kinds of stories we document, how we represent them,
and what perspectives or “logics” are leveraged in analyzing them. Likewise, Flores and Rosa
(2019) argue that “a raciolinguistic perspective demonstrates how race can organize the imagina-
tion of particular language practices in relation to specific times and places” (p. 148). Like Motha
(2020) and Ortega (2019), Flores and Rosa (2019) urge applied linguists to reflect on the persis-
tent and robust nature of deficit ideologies that continue to circulate and shape the experiences
of minoritized bilinguals and reconsider “how the field has been and continues to be complicit in
the production of raciolinguistic ideologies” (p. 149). For example, Rosa (2016) examined how
language users from different ethnoracial backgrounds view the past and future trajectories of
languages such as Spanish and English to understand how representations racialize the languages
of marginalized speakers—and showed that “whereas the Spanish language and bilingualism are
framed as backwards problems to be overcome when contextualized in relation to Latinas/os,
these linguistic emblems are framed as valuable contemporary and future assets when contex-
tualized in relation to normative Whiteness” (p. 116). Ortega (2019) urges applied linguists to
“engage with the notion of multilingualism as central to both the human experience of language
and the research goals of SLA, simultaneously bringing into center stage social justice as it relates
to language learning” (p. 23). In addition, a review of literature on race and language teaching by
von Esch, Motha, and Kubota (2020) identifies

an urgent need for the international educational community to continue to develop a complex
understanding of how language teaching and learners’ lives are shaped by our global history of
racist practices of colonial expansion, including settler colonialism and transatlantic slavery.
(p. 391)

Such work portends new and exciting directions for second language research in the years to
come, and we concur that such advances in the field more generally should inform how narrative
inquiry is used to investigate second language learning, development, teaching, and use.
Second language researchers have also been experimenting with using narrative inquiry to exam-
ine online/digital spaces. While exciting new developments are emerging from such projects, con-
straints and questions are emerging about the qualitatively different nature of the data, the nature and
scope of recirculation, and how to manage thorny ethical dilemmas—for example, whether and when
to obtain permissions from authors of words posted in public spaces. In addition, recent advances
in technology and artificial intelligence (e.g., ChatGPT) raise important questions about how such
technologies are used (or managed) in educational spaces. With new ways of communicating and
new modes of meaning-making continuing to emerge, how we define and analyze narrative is also
evolving. While all of this presents new opportunities for examining how diffuse, multi-authored
stories get constructed and distributed—and the dialogic, heteroglossic, multimodal, multisemiotic
ways in which meaning is made—researchers must also consider how such stories are constructed
and circulated within and through social media.

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Conclusion
Nearly two decades ago, Mishler (1995) articulated several questions to guide researchers in-
terested in using narrative inquiry: What is narrative? Does it have a distinctive structure? Are
there different genres? When are stories told and for what purpose? Who has the right to tell
them? What are their effects—cultural, psychological, social? More than 25 years later, such
questions continue to inform and animate debates and developments in the area of narrative in-
quiry, including among L2 researchers. Observing that narrative is “a problem-centered area of
inquiry,” Mishler argued that “it will always include a multiplicity and diversity of approaches”
but that “we can learn from one another and thereby strengthen our separate directions of work”
(p. 88). As we have seen throughout this chapter, recent and current work on the value of narra-
tive inquiry to L2 research coheres “less in its concern with particular text-types and more in its
focus on the activity of storytelling” (Benson, 2014, p. 155). As L2 researchers have embraced
narrative inquiry, they have contributed not only to our understanding of language learning,
development, teaching, and use, but also our understanding of narrative and narrative analysis.
Thus, L2 research and narrative inquiry have come to interanimate one another in meaningful
and productive ways.

Further reading on narrative and second language research

Barkhuizen, G. (2014). Narrative research in language teaching and learning. Language Teaching, 47(4),
450–466.
This article contains an accessible and thorough timeline of 56 narrative studies in second language research
conducted between 1977 and 2014. With a focus on the relationship between narrative form, content, and con-
text, the timeline traces key developments and influences over time in three areas: narrative accounts of language
teachers’ professional development and practices; language learners’ accounts of language learning and use; and
narrative approaches to analysis. The timeline provides full bibliographic information for each work listed on
it and describes the methodological approach(es) and central findings of each. This will be a great resource for
second language researchers curious about narrative studies and/or trying to understand historical influences on
recent or current scholarship.
Benson, P. (2018). Narrative analysis. In A. Phakiti, P. De Costa, L. Plonsky, & S. Starfield (Eds.), The Palgrave
handbook of applied linguistics research methodology (pp. 595–613). Palgrave Macmillan.
This handbook chapter begins with an overview of narrative inquiry in the social sciences, explains the nar-
rative turn in applied linguistics, and then discusses when and why applied linguists became interested in using
narrative ways of knowing. The author describes narrative analysis as “a distinct mode of narrative inquiry in
which storytelling plays a significant role in the analysis of data and reporting of findings” (p. 598), explains
the difference between narrative analysis and a thematic approach to coding, discusses the value of attending to
temporal order/chronological time, and lauds narrative analysis for being an alternative to persuasive argument
(or “academic knowledge and discourse”).
De Fina, A., & Georgakopolou, A. (Eds.). (2015). The handbook of narrative analysis. Wiley Blackwell.
This volume brings together sociolinguistics and discourse/micro-analytic research on narrative, story-
telling, narrative-in-interaction, and small stories. It illustrates the contributions that this work has made to
the study of narrative and shows the value of analyzing stories told by “ordinary people” from many different
environments. The volume advances a shift from texts to practices, includes foundational works and newer
work representing recent trends, and demonstrates ways to explore topics such as time, space, embodiment,
reflexivity, subjectivity, and identity. It discusses and demonstrates the various disciplinary influences on
discourse-analytic and sociolinguistic approaches to narrative analysis. Moreover, it introduces different
ways to approach narrative analysis, highlights exemplary work, and provides guidance on different ways
to analyze narrative.

47
 Doris Warriner and Anne Pomerantz

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 5
DISCIPLINARY DISCOURSES AND
SECOND LANGUAGE LITERACIES
A systemic functional linguistic perspective
Nicole Siffrinn and Meg Gebhard

Introduction
This chapter provides second language acquisition (SLA) scholars with an introduction to Halliday’s
theory of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and highlights how SFL has informed discourse per-
spectives on disciplinary literacy development in world language classrooms. In outlining Halliday’s
dynamic text/context perspective of discursive practices at the elementary, secondary, and university
levels, this chapter assumes a broad view of how learners develop the ability to read, write, and criti-
cally discuss disciplinary texts in a language that differs from the home and community meaning-
making resources they use to accomplish academic work in school. In this respect, Halliday’s SFL
does not construct defined boundaries between first and second language practices, oral and written
discourse, or essentialized home and school ways of using language. Rather, it offers researchers
and practitioners a nonbinary way of understanding how languages, varieties of language, and other
meaning-making systems such as images, equations, and diagrams evolve at the individual and soci-
etal levels in the contexts in which discourses are used and change.
Halliday’s social semiotic perspective of individual language learning and the evolution of cul-
tural meaning-making systems maintains that as learners mature and interact in the world, they have
more experiences to share with a greater variety of people through different ways of communicat-
ing, first at home with family members, then with different members of their local community, next
at school with classmates and teachers, and eventually at work with co-workers and bosses (e.g.,
Christie & Martin, 1997). These ways of communicating include gestures and oral communication
in one’s home language (Gebhard, 2019); print in one’s home language and additional languages
(Kartika-Ningsih & Rose, 2021); and multimodal computer-mediated means of interacting (e.g.,
Mohan & Luo, 2005). Halliday and other SFL scholars also suggest that through interacting with a
greater variety of people for a large number of purposes, individuals learn to use oral, written, and
multimodal texts to not only exchange information about an expanding range of topics, but also to
negotiate complex shifting identities across different contexts that are shaped by power dynamics
(e.g., Christie & Martin, 1997).
In addition, as individuals mature, they learn how to manage the flow of information and shifting
social dynamics in extended discourse in the diverse contexts of culture in which they participate
(Halliday & Hasan, 1985). Halliday argues that the expansion of communicative purposes and social
roles across one’s lifespan and across different contexts drives the expansion of one’s individual

DOI: 10.4324/9781003177579-6 51
 Nicole Siffrinn and Meg Gebhard

semiotic repertoire as well as the evolution of social semiotic systems themselves (see Byrnes, 2006
for a discussion of logogenesis, ontogenesis, and phylogenesis in L2 research). Similar to other socio-
cultural and critical approaches to SLA, SFL attempts to attend to macro historical forces, changing
technologies of communication, and the mediating role institutions play in the production and repro-
duction of knowledge, ideologies, and power dynamics at the micro level, especially in classrooms
(e.g., Douglas Fir Group, 2016).
To explain Halliday’s conception of text/context dynamics in relation to multilingual learners’
(MLs)1 development of disciplinary discourses, this chapter begins with a discussion of SFL’s
three metafunctions of language, the concepts of register and genre, and the teaching and learn-
ing cycle. Next, we provide examples of how SFL/SLA researchers have designed investigations
of the development of L2 literacy practices across disciplines at the elementary, middle, sec-
ondary, and university levels. This review of selected studies is followed by a discussion of the
implications of SFL/SLA research for classroom practice and conducting future SFL-informed
research.

SFL’s theoretical underpinnings and key constructs

Halliday’s contribution to SLA is found in his conceptualization of grammar as a social semiotic
resource (e.g., Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014). This meaning-making understanding of grammar
stands in contrast to Skinner’s form-focused perspective of verbal behavior and Chomsky’s psy-
cholinguistic conceptualization of language acquisition. SFL’s conception of grammar is more
commensurate with sociocultural and critical perspectives of language socialization that theorize
how discursive practices, institutional structures, and power dynamics influence the development
of speaking, listening, reading, writing, thinking, and being in one’s home language(s) and addi-
tional languages. Halliday (2002) writes: ‘Grammar is what brings about the distinctively human
construction of reality; and by the same token, grammar makes it possible for us to reflect on this
construction’ (p. 370).
Applied to SLA, this context-sensitive perspective of grammar begins with a multimodal/multilin-
gual conception of text and the embedded contexts in which classroom-based L2 literacies develop
in schools as historical, economic, and political institutions. Within this framework a text can be any
combination of gestures, languages, print, images, diagrams, graphs, or equations that people develop
the ability to use to accomplish a wide variety of cultural, cognitive, and political work using more
than one language.

SFL’s three metafunctions of language

As shown in Figure 5.1, Hallidayan scholars maintain that a text performs three metafunctions si-
multaneously to reflect and construct the context in which it unfolds (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014).
The ideational function constructs ideas and experiences through the choice of field resources, which
include types of verbs or processes, nominal groups or participants, and adverbs and prepositions,
called circumstances.
The interpersonal function enacts social roles and power dynamics through choice of tenor re-
sources, which include mood choices (e.g., declaratives, imperatives, and interrogatives), modal
verbs, adverbs, and nouns (e.g., must, always, certainty); and appraisal resources to express emo-
tions, evaluations of things, and judgments of people (e.g., hopeful, remarkable, compassionate).
Last, the textual function manages the flow of field and tenor resources to make extended dis-
course coherent and cohesive through mode resources. These resources include ways of weaving

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 Disciplinary discourses: A systemic functional linguistic perspective

Figure 5.1 SFL’s text/context dynamics in classroom SLA. From Teaching and Researching ELLs’ Discipli-
nary Literacies, First edition by Meg Gebhard, Copyright (2019) by Routledge. Reproduced by
permission of Taylor & Francis Group.

together given and new information (e.g., repetition, use of synonyms and pronouns, pattern of the-
matic progression), cohesive devices and conjunctions (e.g., in addition, however, in sum), and nomi-
nalizations to create abstractions that can be further packed with information (e.g., revolt, revolution,
technological revolution, unprecedented technological revolution).
As depicted in Figure 5.1, a central premise of a Hallidayan perspective of SLA is the idea that a
text is constructed through the conscious and unconscious choices learners make within their evolv-
ing multilingual/multimodal semiotic repertoire while interacting with others for specific purposes
in classrooms as highly structured discursive spaces. Equally relevant is how members of a class-
room community respond to these choices given prevailing norms of production and interpretation in
schools as ideologically shaped historical and political institutions. For example, a number of schol-
ars have documented how schools, as modernist institutions, strive for standardization and efficiency
and tend to advance a belief in drill-and-practice approaches to learning, a form-focused perspective
of language, and the superiority of nationalized written varieties of language over students’ home
language(s) (e.g., Gebhard, 2019).
A second important aspect of SFL-informed ways of theorizing and researching SLA is the concept
of choice within a stratified and evolving system of choices (e.g., phonology, graphology, lexicogram-
mar, semantics; see Byrnes, Maxim, & Norris, 2010). By focusing on the choices available to multilin-
guals based on their previous socialization in using disciplinary literacies, SFL-informed approaches
to L2 research attempt to expand, not replace, the semiotic repertoires of students so they are able to
participate more equitably and productively in content-based instruction (e.g., Gebhard, 2019).

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Register
In further defining a text, SFL scholars propose the concept of register variables that are combined in
a specific context of situation to realize the ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions in oral,
written, or multimodal discourse (Halliday & Hasan, 1985). As explained by Schleppegrell (2004):

A register emerges from the social context of a text’s production and at the same time realizes
that social context through the text … The features of the social context that the grammar helps
instantiate include what is talked about (field), the relationship between speaker/hearer or writer/
reader (tenor), and expectations for how particular text types should be organized (mode).
(p. 18)

Genre
As described by Martin (Martin & Rose, 2008), register variables are further patterned to form recog-
nizable genres, defined as staged, goal-oriented social processes that unfold in expected ways within
a given context of culture (Halliday & Hasan, 1985). Martin maintains genres are social processes
because members of cultural groups interact through them; that they are goal-oriented, because they
have evolved over time to accomplish particular purposes; and that they are staged, because it usu-
ally takes more than one step to achieve a particular goal such as telling an engaging story, accurately
recounting the procedures in a science experiment, explaining the causes of an important historical
event, or making a compelling political argument.
In the development of SFL theory, some scholars question the need to add the concept of genre
to Halliday’s stratified model of meaning-making systems. For example, Hasan (1995) maintains the
concept of register and an analysis of register configurations associated with field, tenor, and mode
suffice in accounting for variations in text/context dynamics in a reflexive way. In contrast, Martin
(1992) maintains texts can be further classified in ways that cut across the metafunctional compo-
nents of field, tenor, and mode in predictable ways. For example, different kinds of recounts, narra-
tives, reports, explanations, and arguments have evolved to have predictable schematic structures that
strongly influence how registerial resources are patterned in texts.
In the debate regarding adding additional layers to Halliday’s stratified model of semiotic systems,
Martin’s conception of genre has been critiqued for its role in reproducing text types and associated
ways of knowing, being, and doing in schools (Luke, 1996). Nonetheless, the concept has been pro-
ductive for L2 literacy scholars and practitioners, particularly as it relates to theorizing, teaching, and
researching the development of disciplinary genres in different content areas (Schleppegrell, 2004)
and world languages (Byrnes, Maxim, & Norris, 2010).

The teaching and learning cycle

In the 1980s, Australian scholars, teacher educators, and classroom teachers combined Halliday’s
theory of language with Vygotsky’s (1978) concept of development to address equity issues in educa-
tion (e.g., Callaghan & Rothery, 1988; Rose & Martin, 2012). A central premise of this approach is
that teachers provide students with a visible pedagogy (Bernstein, 1975), especially students whose
knowledge and language traditions have been historically excluded from the formation of different
subject areas and schooling practices. This pedagogical approach, called the teaching and learning
cycle (TLC), has evolved over time, but typically includes five stages (Derewianka & Jones, 2022):

• Draw on students’ prior experiences and linguistic resources to build their knowledge of the field
of discourse before tackling challenging content-based reading and/or writing tasks;

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 Disciplinary discourses: A systemic functional linguistic perspective

• Support L2 reading by jointly deconstructing texts with students to make disciplinary genres and
selected register features visible, comprehensible, and open to critique;
• Model disciplinary writing practices by co-constructing disciplinary texts with students so they
can make informed genre and register choices in producing texts of their own;
• Provide students with incrementally less scaffolding so they can take independent control of dis-
ciplinary text production and interpretation practices over time; and
• Assess students’ progress and provide targeted feedback.

SFL and SLA: The development of an appliable linguistics

SFL scholars have used Halliday’s social semiotic conception of grammar as a multilingual/mul-
timodal meaning-making system to explore a wide variety of social practices, including those that
shape medical, legal, media, and pedagogical discourses (e.g., Mahboob & Knight, 2010). In devel-
oping SFL scholarship from a distinctively praxis perspective, the focus of SFL research has been to
create a highly “appliable linguistics” rather than to inform a parsimonious theory as represented by
Chomskian scholarship (p. 1). Within the domain of SLA, the primary aim of SFL scholarship has
been to address persistent inequities in education and support the development of robust approaches
to teaching and learning content in a variety of world languages. Central to this aim has been the use
of SFL concepts to conduct needs analyses of the types of discourses MLs are apt to participate in as
they advance through school. In addition, this agenda has coupled Halliday’s trinocular approach to
conceptualizing semiotic systems with Vygotsky’s conception of development to inform the design
and testing of the efficacy of curricular interventions in different content areas for the purposes of
informing SFL theory, research methodologies, and classroom praxis (e.g., Moore et al., 2018).
In enacting this agenda, SFL scholars have used a wide variety of methods including analyses of
classroom talk (Gibbons, 2003); text analyses of genre and register features of disciplinary texts (e.g.,
Brisk, 2015); longitudinal analyses of L2 literacy development (e.g., Byrnes et al., 2010); analyses of
students’ and teachers’ use of SFL metalanguage to support critical language awareness (Gebhard &
Graham, 2018); critical ethnographies of students’ text production and interpretation practices draw-
ing on students’ linguistic and cultural resources (Harman, 2018); mixed-method analyses of quali-
tative and quantitative changes in language learners’ multimodal text production and interpretation
practices (e.g., Achugar & Tardio, 2020); corpus studies of students’ uses of specific register or genre
features over time (Whittaker & McCabe, 2020); analyses of language textbooks (e.g., Zhang, 2017);
and research-based proposals regarding the knowledge base of teaching (de Oliveira & Smith, 2019).
While a comprehensive review of these studies is beyond the scope of this chapter, several are worth
highlighting because of the role they have played in shaping the field of SFL-informed SLA research.

SLA classroom discourse: Shifting along the mode continuum

In regard to classroom discourse analysis, Gibbons (2003) conducted a landmark study that coupled
Halliday’s (1978) conception of mode with Vygotsky’s (1981) understanding of mediation. She
collected transcripts of classroom interactions, curricular materials, and samples of student work to
analyze how fifth-grade English language learners (ELLs) attending an elementary school in Aus-
tralia shifted along a mode continuum between oral-like and written-like registers. She documents
how teacher–student interactions enable ELLs to shift from everyday ways of using language to
construct everyday ways of understanding natural phenomena to using scientific language to con-
struct a scientific understanding of magnetism. The data suggest that teachers can build linguistic
and cognitive bridges between everyday and discipline-specific ways of using language and know-
ing by recasting and expanding on students’ contributions to discussions and by targeting students’

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 Nicole Siffrinn and Meg Gebhard

understanding of key lexical items (e.g., attract and repel). Teachers can also model and prompt
students to use lexicogrammatical constructions that enable them to generalize and formulate ab-
stractions using nominalizations, such as “magnetic attraction occurs only between ferrous metals”
(p. 252). Based on her analysis of classroom interactions, Gibbons highlights the importance of
teachers recontextualizing personal knowledge using targeted disciplinary linguistic resources in
classroom discussions and prompting students to reformulate everyday ways of knowing using sci-
entific discourse.

Disciplinary literacy development at the elementary level

Other studies have built on Gibbons’s scholarship to design, implement, and research MLs’ devel-
opment of grade-level disciplinary literacy practices. For example, Brisk (2015) describes how she
collaborated with colleagues and doctoral students at Boston College and teachers and administrators
at Russell Elementary School in Boston. At the time of this collaboration, Russell was attended pri-
marily by students of color, over half of whom were officially designated as ELLs. Through various
publications, Brisk documents how the partnership supported multilinguals in engaging with grade-
level academic tasks, producing more expert extended texts in English, and passing high-stakes ex-
ams as mandated by No Child Left Behind legislation. In her groundbreaking book, Brisk (2015)
provides clear definitions of SFL concepts and detailed examples of how teachers implemented the
TLC to scaffold MLs’ abilities to analyze, discuss, and write discipline-specific procedures, recounts,
explanations, arguments, and narratives. Each chapter provides excerpts from classroom transcripts;
excerpts from mentor texts used to teach content and language simultaneously; samples of SFL-
informed lesson plans and activities; samples of student writing; and examples of SFL-informed
rubrics.
Research related to this long-term partnership demonstrates how teachers were able to set high
expectations, provide sustained high levels of instructional scaffolding, and affirm students’ linguis-
tic and cultural identities. For example, Brisk and Ossa Parra (2018) illustrate the benefits of using
students’ home language(s) in each of the different stages of the TLC. Brisk and Zisselsberger (2011)
demonstrate how students, even in kindergarten, are able to discuss genre stages during story time
(e.g., orientation, sequence of events, resolution). In science, Rosa and Hodgson-Drysdale (2023)
provide a case study that documents how a fourth-grade ML developed the ability to write an animal
classification report that exhibited the expected genre stages and register features after her teacher
provided students with the following: practice in how to keep a science notebook, in which they
recorded observations and scientific drawings of live animals; an advanced organizer to support the
deconstruction of the genre and register features of mentor texts; and guided practice in using key
features of scientific discourse in their writing. Collectively, Brisk’s research with her colleagues at
Russell Elementary School provides examples of how literacy scholars working at the elementary
level in the field of SLA have operationalized SFL concepts to design curricular interventions, pro-
vide teachers with targeted professional development, and analyze data regarding the development of
MLs’ disciplinary literacies over time (e.g., Brisk et al., 2011).

Disciplinary literacy development at the middle school level

Humphrey and Macnaught (2016) report on a three-year intervention of how nondominant MLs
attending a middle school called “Metro” developed the ability to read, analyze, and produce
disciplinary texts over time. At the time of data collection Metro was a boys’ high school
with 97.5% of its students having language backgrounds other than English. The authors used

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 Disciplinary discourses: A systemic functional linguistic perspective

longitudinal qualitative and quantitative data to document how teachers used the TLC to ex-
plicitly teach students how to read, write, and analyze disciplinary texts, with positive results.
They report that 67% of students showed higher-than-expected growth on a national exam that
included a writing task. Similar to Brisk and her colleagues, Humphrey and Macnaught (2016)
report students made measurable gains on pre- and post-writing assessments developed by the
research team.
In accounting for these gains, the researchers provide evidence of the importance of providing
MLs with explicit instruction in how language works to construct disciplinary ideas (field), interact
with different audiences about disciplinary topics (tenor), and cohesively organize information de-
pending on the nature of the discourse (mode). Key to the design of this study was researching the
implications of teachers introducing students to functional metalanguage or language for talking
about how language works to make meaning in disciplinary discourse. This metalanguage, which
was used schoolwide, drew students’ attention to and named how subject-specific discourses are
typically patterned at the genre, paragraph, sentence, and word levels. Specifically, the research
team developed the curriculum, supported teachers in implementing lessons, and tested the use of
functional metalanguage in classroom practice to support students in making connections between
how linguistic forms and functions relate to one another in their contexts of use. The authors
conclude that the implementation of the TLC with facilitating metalanguage enabled teachers to
provide instruction that made visible the patterns of language valued for disciplinary learning in
middle school.
In addition, Humphrey and Macnaught’s study supports research conducted in other contexts
regarding the benefits of introducing multilinguals to a functional metalanguage that enables them,
with teacher guidance, to read texts at the literal, inferential, and critical levels. For example, in an
ethnographic study, also conducted in a middle school, Gebhard and Graham (2018) used case study
methods to analyze how seventh graders used SFL metalanguage and invented their own functional
linguistic categories in the context of learning to read, write, and critique texts about a disease that
was decimating the bat population in Massachusetts. In this study, their teacher, the second author,
introduced students to SFL metalanguage when implementing an environmental studies unit using
the TLC. During this unit, students used terms such as genre, genre stage, processes, participants,
and circumstances to deconstruct and construct texts. In addition, they invented their own meta-
language to capture aspects of field, tenor, and mode that supported their critical engagement with
grade-level scientific discourse. The authors provide transcripts of classroom interactions, samples
of student work, and students’ scathing critiques of a government document to demonstrate how
students used phrases such as a science register and bossy language, which they contrasted with
everyday language and chitchat. These expressions were used to describe the degree to which au-
thors, including students, used declarative statements and technical lexis to construct observable
scientific facts rather than use emotional language and mental verbs to construct personal opinions.
In addition, students invented linguistic categories such as sticky words to capture how conjunctions
function to connect clauses in specific ways (e.g., additive, causal, and contrasting relationships).
Students also developed the independent ability to use different colored highlighters to determine
whether and how a grammatical participant tracked across a text to build the main idea. In critically
discussing texts and in giving one another feedback on their writing, they determined whether a
lexical chain tracked well or should be dropped in order to make claims about the development of
main ideas and a reader’s need for more information. This study, as well as others, demonstrates
that SFL metalanguage is not too complex or theoretical for teachers and students regardless of
students’ age (Moore & Schleppegrell, 2014), the content being taught (Forey, 2020), or students’
level of proficiency in a heritage language such as Spanish (Achugar & Colombi, 2008). Moreover,

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other studies suggest the use of SFL metalanguage to examine the linguistic choices of authors can
facilitate teachers’ and students’ critical awareness of language and critical literacy practices (e.g.,
Carpenter et al., 2015).

Disciplinary literacy development at the high school level

At the secondary level, beginning in 2001, Schleppegrell and her colleagues, who were associated
with the California History Project (CHP), inaugurated a research agenda that continues to inform
SLA theory, methods, and pedagogy in highly influential ways (e.g., Achugar et al., 2007; Schleppe-
grell & de Oliveira, 2006). This project used SFL discourse-analytic tools to analyze language de-
mands placed on MLs by textbooks, state curricular frameworks, and aligned high-stakes exams.
The goal was to support the professional development of content-area teachers, who are increasingly
responsible for the education of MLs, and to address the equity gap that has long existed in educa-
tional outcomes between dominant and nondominant students at the secondary level. Specifically,
the research team provided a five-day workshop for participating secondary history teachers. These
workshops provided teachers with demonstration lessons regarding how to linguistically unpack the
meaning of dense textbook passages and primary source documents; they did so by first attending to
aspects of genre so teachers, and later students, could recognize when a text was recounting an event
chronologically, presenting a causal explanation, and making an argument. Later the team introduced
teachers to SFL’s metalanguage to support them in noticing and eventually teaching students to de-
construct the meaning of passages by attending to aspects of field, specifically types of processes
(e.g., material, verbal, relational verbs), participants (e.g., agentive nouns), and circumstances (e.g.,
time markers). Within the tenor system, teachers—and eventually students—developed the ability
to identify linguistic resources that construct power dynamics and an author’s point of view. They
were also able to identify mode resources that built cohesion within an extended stretch of discourse
by noticing thematic progression patterns, the formation of lexical chains, referencing systems using
pronouns, and conjunctions.
In researching the implication of their work with teachers on student learners, members of the
CHP collected observational field notes, videos of classroom interactions, samples of curricular ma-
terials, samples of student writing, focus group interviews with participating teachers, and students’
scores on state exams. Using a variety of methods, including qualitative case studies of teachers’
practices and control-group experiments of student learning, Schleppegrell and her colleagues pro-
vided evidence that CHP teachers planned lessons that incorporated SFL analyses and found that this
approach enabled more in-depth discussion about and understanding of historical events. In sum-
marizing the findings, Achugar, Schleppegrell, and Oteíza (2007) write that students whose teachers
participated in CHP made significantly greater gains on state exams than students whose teachers had
not participated in the workshops, and ELLs were among those who showed the greatest benefits.
Collectively, insights from the CHP have informed other intervention studies focusing on supporting
teachers in using SFL and the TLC to apprentice multilinguals, even very young learners, and thereby
enabling them to read, write, and discuss disciplinary discourses across content areas (Brisk, 2015;
Fang & Schleppegrell, 2008).
Within the European context, L2 literacy scholars have also used SFL and SFL-informed peda-
gogy to teach language and content simultaneously (e.g., Llinares et al., 2012). This approach, known
as Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), came to the fore in the 1990s in response to
global demographic shifts and calls to improve the teaching and learning of content-based L2 litera-
cies within the European Union. While not all CLIL research is informed by SFL, those researchers
using a Hallidayan framework report the benefits of a social semiotic perspective of L2 development.
For example, in a nonintervention study, Whittaker and McCabe (2020) used corpus tools to analyze

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 Disciplinary discourses: A systemic functional linguistic perspective

texts written in English by a cohort of Spanish/English bilinguals over three years as they transitioned
from primary to secondary grades. The researchers identified developmental pathways regarding the
coupling of field resources used to construct knowledge-and-appraisal resources to evaluate infor-
mation in discipline-specific ways. This study, like many SFL studies, provides practitioners with
insights into how they can design curriculum to scaffold advanced L2 literacies as students transition
from reading, writing, and discussing more everyday topics to managing denser, more technical dis-
course at the secondary level.

Disciplinary literacy at the university level in world language classrooms

At nearly the same time as Schleppegrell was applying SFL concepts to the study of L2 literacy devel-
opment at the secondary level, Byrnes and her colleagues in the German department at Georgetown
University began exploring the use of SFL to inform SLA theory and L2 learning at the collegiate
level (e.g., Byrnes et al., 2010). Georgetown’s groundbreaking research focused on reconceptual-
izing from a cultural studies perspective the teaching and learning of world languages to adults with
academic literacy in their first language. Other SLA scholars have followed suit in using Halliday’s
perspective of text/context dynamics to teach and research the development of L2 proficiency in
Arabic, Chinese, French, German, and Spanish (e.g., Troyan, 2021).
Similar to qualitative and quantitative analyses of SFL interventions conducted in K-12, studies at
the collegiate level have produced positive findings regarding L2 students’ abilities to read, write, and
discuss culturally authentic texts that have identifiable genre stages, dense clause structures, packed
nominalizations, patterned ways of constructing an objective and authoritative voice, and complex
referencing chains in extended discourse (see Ryshina-Pankova, 2018 for a review). For example,
Byrnes (2009) analyzes the writing development of L2 learners of German (n =14) who participated
in genre and task-based instruction that integrated content and language learning over multiple se-
mesters. She examines how students develop the ability to produce written narratives related to a
German novel at Level Two, journalistic reports about Vietnamese immigration to Germany at Level
Three, and arguments about social, economic, and political issues in Germany after completing Level
Four. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of writing samples show an increase in syntactic complex-
ity using measurements such as number of words, T-units, and clauses. In addition, using the SFL
concept of grammatical metaphor, Byrnes notes a change in students’ writing between Level Three
and Four in that students begin to use lexicogrammatical constructions such as nominalizations.2
Nominalizations remove agents from actions and turn actions into things that can be categorized, in-
terpreted, and evaluated in genres such as explanations and arguments, which students were required
to produce at Levels Three and Four. In contrast, narratives, which students produced at Level Two,
tend to be more verb-driven in that they construe what happened and personal reactions to events in
a chronological order. Byrnes and others demonstrate that the shift to advanced academic L2 profi-
ciency relies in part on students’ ability to use nominalizations and other grammatical metaphors in
increasingly nuanced ways (e.g., Ryshina-Pankova, 2010, 2015, 2018).
Collectively, SFL studies of L2 literacy development at the university level have contributed
significantly to theoretical understandings of L2 syntactic development; advanced L2 proficiency;
L2 writing development; and the bidirectional nature of L1 and L2 literacy development (Byrnes,
Maxim, & Norris, 2010; Ryshina-Pankova, 2010, 2015, 2018; Troyan, 2021). They have also con-
tributed to innovative approaches to curriculum design; the use of authentic cultural artifacts in be-
ginning language classes; and the development of SFL-informed rubrics. Moreover, these studies
have addressed the unproductive “bifurcation” between the “content-indifferent language courses”
students enroll in during the first semesters and the “language-indifferent” content courses students
take at advanced levels (Byrnes, 2009, p. 50).

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 Nicole Siffrinn and Meg Gebhard

Implications for second language learning, teaching and use

A primary goal of SFL scholarship has been to inform practice while also analyzing students’ use of
semiotic systems in the contexts in which they evolve. SFL studies have therefore provided practi-
tioners with:

• A meaning-making perspective of language and other semiotic systems educators can use to de-
sign, implement, and reflect on their students’ content-based reading and writing development
over time regardless of learners’ proficiency level, age, or the content area being studied.
• A research-based analysis of L2 literacy development rooted in qualitative and quantitative stud-
ies of classroom practice, often conducted with classroom teachers. These studies can inform how
teachers design curriculum and assess their students’ literacy development by using SFL-informed
rubrics and precise measures of academic language proficiency (e.g., use of nominalizations).
• A functional metalanguage to support students’ close reading of assigned texts and critical discus-
sions of authors’ semiotic choices.
• Examples of classroom transcripts, teaching materials, and analyses of student work that demon-
strate how teachers have responded to state and national standards while also providing opportuni-
ties for multilinguals to critically explore disciplinary topics of relevance to themselves.

Future directions
SFL offers L2 researchers discourse-analytic tools for examining disciplinary literacy development in a wide
variety of contexts. To expand SFL-informed research in SLA, the following lines of inquiry are promising:

• SFL and transdisciplinary research as advocated by the Douglas Fir Group: Recent avenues of ex-
ploration include legitimation code theory (e.g., Maton et al., 2016); Schema of a Complete Basis
of Action (e.g., Fernández & Donato, 2020); cultural historical activity theory (e.g., Martin, 2020);
spatial theory (e.g., Vuorsola, 2022); multimodality (e.g., Shin et al., 2020); translanguaging (e.g.,
Troyan et al., 2021); embodiment (e.g., Siffrinn & Harman, 2019); and raciolinguistic ideologies
(e.g., Accurso & Mizell, 2020).
• SFL and community engagement: Critical and culturally sustaining SFL praxis can provide a lens
to examine and support agency, activism, and collaboration among multilingual youth, teachers,
and community partners (e.g., Harman, 2018).
• SFL in computer-mediated communication: SFL has potential to inform the design and imple-
mentation of virtual instruction through explorations of how ideational, interpersonal, and textual
meanings are realized in distance education (e.g., Zhang, 2021). This line of research is particu-
larly relevant given the shift to online learning in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
• SFL analyses of languages other than English and their development: Research in this area is emerg-
ing (e.g., Troyan, 2021). However, analysis of the teaching and learning of world languages is valu-
able theoretically in relation to informing SLA theory (e.g., Byrnes, 2009), language typologies
(e.g., Martin & Quiroz, 2019), and innovative pedagogical approaches (e.g., Troyan et al., 2021).

Notes
1 “Multilingual learner” is a term used to refer to students institutionally classified as English language learners
(ELLs), former ELLs, emergent bilinguals, heritage language learners, and students who speak varieties of
English. In this chapter it also refers to students learning an additional language.
2 For a comprehensive discussion of Halliday’s understanding of grammatical metaphor, see Byrnes et al.
(2010) and Ryshina-Pankova (2015).

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 Disciplinary discourses: A systemic functional linguistic perspective

Further reading
Martin, J. R., & Rose, D. (2008). Genre relations: Mapping culture. Equinox.
This text is critical for SFL researchers interested in the Sydney School’s treatment of genre. Beyond provid-
ing a theoretical and analytic framework for understanding genres as recurrent configurations of meaning that
can be mapped culturally, Martin and Rose offer descriptions of five families of genres: stories, histories, reports,
explanations, and procedures. They also show how these genres are classified and linked.
Byrnes, H., Maxim, H. H., & Norris, J. M. (2010). Realizing advanced foreign language writing development in
collegiate education: Curricular design, pedagogy, assessment. The Modern Language Journal, 94, 1–235.
This monograph contributes in significant ways to the reconceptualization of world language teaching, learn-
ing and research at the collegiate level. The authors review the literature in SFL, genre theory, and genre-based
pedagogy and recontextualize key concepts for SLA studies in groundbreaking ways. They also report on the
development, implementation, and evaluation of a department-wide curriculum used in the German department
at Georgetown University in ways that continue to contribute to SLA theory building, research methods, and
pedagogy.
Schleppegrell, M. J. (2004). The language of schooling: A functional linguistics perspective. Taylor & Francis.
This book is essential for educational linguists. One of its central aims is to support researchers and teachers
in understanding the language demands of schooling. It breaks down differences between functional and tradi-
tional grammar and emphasizes the link between language, text, and context. It also draws on the Hallidayan
notion of register to show how language builds knowledge in different disciplines. Additionally, it provides a
framework for applying functional grammatical analysis to written genres of power such as the expository essay.

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 6
GENRE, DISCOURSE, AND
SECOND LANGUAGE RESEARCH
Christine M. Tardy and Jeroen Gevers

Introduction
Since its introduction to discourse studies in the 1980s, genre has become a remarkably productive
concept in understanding second language acquisition and discourse. Exploring discourse in terms of
genre draws attention to the common forms of language that are used in order for people in communi-
ties to carry out specific activities and goals. Scholars have examined both the typical forms of genres
and the ways they are used, although the former approach has tended to dominate in second language
research. Because so much of our oral and especially written communication is carried out through
genres, they offer a lens for understanding—and potentially teaching and learning—language use
across settings.
This chapter shares an overview of genre and details its value in understanding second language
acquisition and discourse. We begin with a description of genre’s history within applied linguis-
tics and an introduction to key terms and concepts used in genre theory, such as discourse com-
munity, community of practice, rhetorical moves, conventions and variations, intertextuality, and
genre knowledge. The chapter then outlines common research approaches within genre studies that
have been important in understanding second language acquisition from both social and cognitive
perspectives (e.g., text-based genre analysis, ethnographically oriented research, and case studies),
followed by presentation of two studies that illustrate these approaches. The chapter concludes with a
discussion of implications for second language learning and teaching as well as future directions for
genre-oriented second language research, including attention to increased multimodality and genre
use across languages and contexts (Tardy et al., 2020).

Overview of genre studies and second language research

Genre emerged as an important concept through which to understand discourse, language, and rheto-
ric among various scholars nearly simultaneously in the 1980s. In applied linguistics, the term ap-
pears to have been first used in publication in a 1981 article in the English for Specific Purposes
Journal. Its authors, Tarone et al. (1981), did not explicitly define genre, but described textbooks
and journal papers using this term. At the same time, at the University of Aston, John Swales turned
to genre as a way to understand the conventional linguistic and rhetorical practices he was finding
in journal-article introductions, which he was teaching to international graduate students in the UK

64 DOI: 10.4324/9781003177579-7
 Genre, discourse, and second language research

(Swales, 2009). Swales’ first extended scholarly exploration of genre is found in his book, Genre
Analysis. Here, Swales defined genres as “a class of communicative events” (1990, p. 45) in which
language plays a significant role. He emphasized that texts could be considered examples of the same
genre based on shared communicative purposes—not on similar forms or stylistic features alone. He
noted, for example, that a parody may bear great linguistic and stylistic similarities to the genre it is
parodying, but it cannot be classified as that genre because its communicative purpose is quite differ-
ent. Other important points emphasized in this early work included the observation that instances of
genres vary, with some examples being more prototypical than others, and that genres are used and
shaped by discourse communities (which have mutual goals and establish ways of communicating to
accomplish those goals).
Though Swales’ work was firmly focused on teaching unique language practices to specialized
second language writers, his thinking was heavily influenced by developments in genre theory in
the related areas of rhetoric and systemic functional linguistics. Rhetorician Carolyn Miller’s (1984)
work in particular guided Swales’ argument that genres are a rhetorical (not linguistic) category,
defined not by their form but by their communicative purposes, or what Miller termed their social ac-
tion. According to Miller, genres’ typified forms result from a recurring rhetorical situation, or, more
specifically, rhetorical situations that are similar enough to be perceived as recurring. Despite this
similarity, no rhetorical situation is exactly the same, and this inherent “newness” of each instance of
a genre is in part responsible for the variation that is always found across texts within a genre.
A relatable illustration of genre can be found in Russell’s (1997) discussion of a grocery list. The
exigence of needing to purchase food on a regular basis and the tendency to forget needed items cre-
ate a recurring rhetorical situation—the grocery list is a response to this situation. Grocery shoppers
have unique approaches to compiling and composing their lists of items to shop for—some may be
organized by grocery aisle or store, others haphazardly thrown together; some now in a mobile phone
app, others scrawled or even typed on paper; some multilingual, and others monolingual. Despite
these variations, the action of creating a grocery list is common enough that we repeat it over and
over, even as we move across cities and countries. Apart from the list itself, the “grocery list” genre
also includes the activity of producing and using this text. In second language research, less attention
is often paid to the rhetorical situation or the activity of using the genre and more is given to the form,
as the latter tends to be the focus for understanding L2 development or teaching. Still, the notion that
genre is not a text in and of itself but a textual trace of a recurring action is essential.
Genre theory also has a strong history in systemic functional linguistics (SFL). In SFL, genre is
one part of a more general model of language in social context, and here again genres are considered
primarily social in nature. Martin (1985, p. 250), for example, states that “Genres are how things get
done, when language is used to accomplish them.” In this way, they are considered cultural forms of
life and “staged goal-oriented social processes” (Martin, 1993, p. 142). In SFL genre theory, there is
a strong emphasis on unpacking the semiotic resources that genres use to carry out their goals (see
Siffrinn and Gebhard, Chapter 5 in this volume, for a more in-depth discussion of SFL, including
genre).
Our discussion so far has highlighted several key concepts in understanding genre as it relates to
second language research: that genres are defined and classified by their actions or goals rather than
their linguistic or structural forms; that genres are shaped by discourse communities; and that genres
are not entirely stable or static but rather vary across situations and users and over time. The inter-
textual nature of genres is also important for understanding second language learning. First, genres
may develop out of or have some relation to other genres (Bhatia, 2004; Devitt, 2004). For example,
an author bio, a professional profile on a webpage, and a social media profile are all different genres
but share many similar goals and features. Therefore, as genre users we can draw on our knowledge
of related genres as we approach new, unfamiliar ones. In addition, communities use multiple genres

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in coordination to carry out their work (Bazerman, 1994). Taking on different roles in the genres of a
particular community can also support newcomers in learning those genres (Tardy, 2009). Research
articles, for instance, are usually evaluated by academic peers before they can be accepted for pub-
lication, a process that involves additional written genres such as reviewer invitations, guidelines
for reviewers, reviewers’ reports, and editorial decision letters based on those reports. Early-career
scholars will likely benefit from acting as peer reviewers of others’ manuscripts when the opportunity
arises, as doing so can give them a clearer sense of how research articles take shape.
Theorizing genre as a form of social practice realized through language has important implica-
tions for second language acquisition. Because genres are much more than a linguistic form, learning
them involves learning a form of discourse, in Gee’s (1989) sense of discourse as “an identity kit”
(p. 7), a way “of being in the world” (p. 6), or a combination of “saying (writing)-doing-being-­
valuing-believing” (p. 6). As a result, genre knowledge—or what we know when we know a genre—
is generally viewed from a sociocognitive perspective as a kind of situated cognition (Berkenkotter
& Huckin, 1995). That is, much of what experienced users know about a genre is developed through
social interaction and participation in a community.
Given that genre is a rhetorical category and that genres are highly situated within communi-
ties of use, genre knowledge necessarily involves more than a knowledge of text form or structure,
though formal knowledge is one (very visible) part of genre knowledge. One way to understand
genre knowledge is to think of it as embracing two interrelated components: genre-specific knowl-
edge and genre awareness (Tardy et al., 2020). Genre-specific knowledge entails users’ knowledge
of a particular genre or genres, including the genre’s form, rhetorical situation, processes for produc-
ing and distributing the genre, and the relevant content (Tardy, 2009). Take, for example, the journal
article. Writers need to know the appropriate register, common lexicogrammatical patterns, and
typical structures, but these formal features are insufficient. A successful journal-article author will
also understand their audience’s expectations, effective processes for writing a journal article, how
to navigate the review process, and the field-specific content of the paper. Paired with genre-specific
knowledge is a more metacognitive knowledge—knowledge about genres and how they work, often
termed genre awareness. Genre awareness can be described as a critical consciousness that writing
occurs through genres and that communities shape genres. Writers with strong genre awareness
often have a repertoire of strategies for learning about unfamiliar genres or extending their learning
of familiar genres.
The construct of genre knowledge is particularly relevant to second language research because
it informs an understanding of what L2 genre users know and how those layers of knowledge
might be developed. As social practices, genres are often best learned through participation in a
community’s activities. Optimally, newcomers are supported in their use of new genres through
legitimate peripheral participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991) with more experienced users. Gradu-
ate students, for example, may collaborate with more experienced students or faculty to learn
genres like conference presentations or grant proposals. Explicit classroom instruction can also
help scaffold genre learning, though it may be most effective for developing formal knowledge
and genre awareness (Tardy, 2009). Toward this aim, genre-based pedagogies emphasize rhetori-
cal consciousness-raising (Swales, 1990) through guided exploratory activities analyzing genres.
In a genre-based L2 writing course, for example, students may examine texts in a target genre,
identifying common patterns for lexicogrammatical features, organization, or even design or cita-
tion use. These patterns are considered in relation to the audience and rhetorical context, which
can be further explored through interviews with genre users. Such activities help connect formal
conventions of a text with the social context through conscious noticing (Schmidt, 1990). Regular
inductive analysis of genres can also raise L2 learners’ more general genre awareness, ultimately
supporting their genre knowledge development.

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 Genre, discourse, and second language research

Main research methodologies in genre and second language research

Broadly speaking, genre research can be divided into two categories: studies of genres themselves,
and studies of genre users, including those who are learning new genres. We will provide an overview
of the most common research methods within each category.

Moves analysis
Perhaps the best-known approach in English for specific purposes (ESP) text-based genre studies is
moves analysis. This method seeks to identify the textual segments of a genre that fulfill distinct goals
and thereby help to accomplish the genre’s overarching purposes (Hyon, 2018). These segments, the
(rhetorical) moves, may vary in size and form, ranging from a mere clause or sentence to a longer
stretch of text or speech. Swales, who pioneered this approach, defined a move as “a discoursal or
rhetorical unit that performs a coherent communicative function in a written or spoken discourse”
(2004, pp. 228–229). Swales’ (1990) analysis of a corpus of research article (RA) introductions re-
vealed a three-move structure referred to as the Create a Research Space (CARS) model, in a nod
to this genre’s purpose of clarifying how researchers envision their contribution to the field. The
recurring moves are as follows: having established the research area (Move 1), RA writers normally
explain the need for their research (Move 2), before indicating how they intend to address this need
(Move 3). Although these moves are commonly used across disciplines, they can be realized in many
different ways, as later studies highlighted. Samraj (2002), for instance, noted how conservation biol-
ogists may point to a “real-world” problem to justify their research in Move 2, rather than a so-called
“research gap,” thus showing how the CARS moves are shaped by unique disciplinary concerns (in
this case within environmental science).
Most moves analyses deal with written academic genres, including learner genres like theses/
dissertations as well as book reviews, funding proposals, and reviewer reports, but scholars have in-
creasingly examined move patterns in spoken academic genres, such as lectures, seminars, and thesis
defenses (Swales, 2004), as well as professional genres (Bhatia, 2004). Regardless of the genre that
is examined, the typical procedure involves collecting multiple genre samples and identifying recur-
ring functional units by marking and labeling them (Upton & Cohen, 2009); next, the units can be
classified based on whether they appear to be expected or even required (obligatory moves), common
but not required (optional moves), or rare. While it can be tempting to construct templates based on
linguistic patterns associated with moves, it is important to keep in mind that moves “vary in their
shape and style” (Hyon, 2018, p. 30) and that moves analysis is more interested in how moves are
used to accomplish rhetorical goals than in simply describing formal patterns.

Lexicogrammatical analysis
In contrast, lexicogrammatical analysis, the other main approach in ESP text-based genre research,
focuses on language patterns rather than communicative function, making it a helpful complement to
move analysis. The leading exponent of this approach is Ken Hyland, whose extensive research docu-
ments the use of language features in academic genres of both published and student writing, often
drawing from large corpora. For instance, Hyland (2000) considered the strategic use of phrases that
can serve to adjust the strength of knowledge claims, also known as hedges and boosters, in scientific
letters. His research formed part of a series of studies in which Hyland further showed how the use
of certain features in the same genre (e.g., citations, reporting verbs, and self-mentions) often differs
across disciplines, a finding that has clear implications for learners and teachers (Hyland, 2008; Pal-
tridge, 2014). Such differences may be motivated by shared “epistemological assumptions and social
practices” in scholarly communities (Hyland, 2002, p. 1098); the comparatively lower frequency of

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 Christine M. Tardy and Jeroen Gevers

cognitive verbs like think and believe in scientific RAs, for example, makes sense within a positivist
epistemology which values objectivity and impartiality, whereas the researcher’s interpretive role
can be more openly acknowledged in the humanities. Other studies have relied on lexicogrammatical
analysis to consider how authors convey a sense of authorial presence, again pointing to differences
across linguistic, disciplinary, and cultural settings (Dressen-Hammouda, 2008; see also Nelson &
Castelló, 2012).

Ethnographic analyses
These text-oriented approaches to genre can be distinguished from studies of genre users, or commu-
nities of genre users, which borrow research perspectives and tools from ethnography (see Chapter 14).
By interviewing participants, carrying out observations, and writing ethnographic field notes, schol-
ars who follow this approach try to gain a more contextualized understanding of genres and how they
are used (Paltridge et al., 2016). Indeed, these data-collection methods are considered essential to
understanding the social and rhetorical aspects of genres, which cannot be reduced to their linguistic
features. However, unlike traditional, in-depth ethnography as practiced by cultural anthropologists,
ethnographic genre studies tend to be more limited in terms of the time spent at the research site
and the use of extended (participant) observation (Ramanathan & Atkinson, 1999). Genre scholars
therefore often prefer to characterize their research as “ethnographic” or “ethnographically/emically
oriented” (Paltridge et al., 2016), acknowledging the difficulty involved in providing a holistic ac-
count of genre communities. More rarely, genre scholars have carried out autoethnographic studies
to situate their own writing practices within the social contexts in which they participate (e.g.,
Canagarajah, 2012).
Textography is a specific type of ethnographic research in which both textual analysis and eth-
nographic methods are used to study what shape certain genres take and why. Swales (1998) first
used the term textography in his study of the writing of people who worked on different floors of
the same university building, specifically botanists and English-language scholars. Swales showed
how these scholars approached their writing differently as a result of individual histories as well as
shared values, motivated by the respective local communities in which they found themselves, which
Swales called place discourse communities. Extending this work, Paltridge et al. (2012) conducted a
textography of doctoral writing in the visual and performing arts in Australia.

Critical genre analysis

As a methodological alternative to the above approaches, critical genre analysis moves beyond con-
ventional genre analysis to provide a more detailed account of the social practices and power dynam-
ics in which genres are embedded, especially in professional or corporate settings and promotional
discourse. This method was developed by Bhatia (2017), who argued that genre studies often do not
sufficiently consider the outcomes of genres, and that it is necessary to focus “as much on what is im-
plicitly or explicitly said in and through genres as on what is not said” (p. 9), noting that professional
writers often find ways to incorporate their “private intentions” (p. 12) in specialized genres. Using
textual, ethnographic, and institutional data, Bhatia (2017) examined genres in corporate disclosure
and litigation practices, showing how strategic uses of various discursive elements serve to uphold a
positive corporate image. While critical genre analysis aims to scrutinize the activities and practices
that are performed through genre, the approach differs from critical discourse analysis (CDA) as it
does not directly offer a social critique. However, some genre scholars have done analyses that are
more ideologically oriented, showing how genres may be used to uphold (or resist) power asym-
metries and social inequities (e.g., Paré, 2002).

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 Genre, discourse, and second language research

Rather than limiting themselves to one specific research method, genre scholars often combine
multiple methods in their studies. In fact, such a multi-pronged approach is common in research
that looks at genre learning, which is particularly relevant from the perspective of SLA. Like tex-
tography, studies of genre learning typically combine textual analysis, especially of texts produced
by novices, with interviews and (to a lesser degree) observations, with the aim of capturing genre
knowledge development over periods of time. Typically, participants are interviewed multiple times,
and “talk around text” is complemented by conversations that address participants’ experiences with
and interests in the genres they produce more generally, so as to obtain an emic, or insider’s, point of
view (Lillis, 2008). For example, Tardy (2009) used this approach in longitudinal case studies of two
multilingual graduate students, showing how their rhetorical knowledge of their disciplinary com-
munities became increasingly sophisticated as they completed various assignments and progressed
through their programs. In order to make the learning process more tangible, studies of genre learning
sometimes also employ additional data-collection methods, such as reflections and process logs in
which learners comment on their writing activities (e.g., Prior, 1998), or visualization tasks which
require them to conceptualize their evolving knowledge in mind maps or other visual representations
(Gevers, 2021; Negretti & McGrath, 2018). While most studies of genre knowledge development
focus on learning in naturalistic settings, others have explored the potential of pedagogical interven-
tions such as scaffolded classroom tasks in facilitating genre learning (e.g., Cheng, 2018). In addition,
some studies of learners have directed attention to processes of identity development of which genre
learning forms part (Dressen-Hammouda, 2008; Gevers, 2021).

Sample studies in genre and second language research

As the discussion in the previous section suggests, multiple methods are used to study genres and
how they are learned. In this section, we describe two studies in more depth to show how these meth-
ods can be and are used in combination. We first share a study that adopts a more text-based perspec-
tive and then detail one that focuses on the contexts and processes of learning genres.
Hyland’s (2005) study of engagement features in academic argument offers a strong example of
how text-based methods can be combined with interviews in productive ways to understand a genre
and how users approach it. Hyland’s approach in this study aligns with what Lillis (2008) refers to
as “talk around text”—an approach that still centers text as the primary source of data but uses talk
about the text (most typically through interviews) to provide additional insight. Though this study
is not recent, it is one of the very few that we know of that adopts a text-based approach to genre
analysis that includes L2 writing and incorporates writer interviews as a way to understand textual
choices. For this reason, we feel it offers a nice illustration of the kind of text-based genre research
that takes writers’ rhetorical knowledge into account. Hyland’s (2005) study looks specifically at
the final-year undergraduate report, a high-stakes genre common in Hong Kong universities. In this
genre, students must review literature and then conduct and present research following the research
paper format in their disciplines. Hyland’s focus in this study is on how the writers (L2 English
users) interact with their readers when writing this genre, given the challenging rhetorical task of
demonstrating “confident independence and cautious respect for the readers’ greater knowledge of
the field” (p. 365).
The study examines five common features of engagement that are used to acknowledge read-
ers’ expectations and also predict and respond to their potential objectives. These features include:
questions, direct reader references, directives (e.g., imperatives and obligation modals), references
to shared knowledge, and asides. To understand how the student writers engage with their read-
ers, Hyland compiled a corpus of final-year undergraduate reports from eight disciplines, totaling
around 630,000 words. He additionally used a corpus of 240 research articles across eight similar

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 Christine M. Tardy and Jeroen Gevers

disciplines (1.3 million words) as a point of comparison, allowing him to see how student writers
and expert published writers might engage with readers in similar and different ways. Both corpora
were searched for more than 100 lexicogrammatical items that produce reader engagement and fall
into the engagement feature categories described above. In addition, Hyland carried out focus group
interviews with 23 final-year students in groups of four or five. These small-group interviews adopted
a discourse-based interview approach, in which the interviewer shares text extracts to elicit students’
interpretation of the effects of functions of different language choices, and also asks open-ended
prompts about writing. Interview data is valuable in giving insight into why writers may use or avoid
certain features in their writing and can also offer information about how writers understand a genre
(that is, their genre knowledge).
The text-based analysis in this study found that both the published research articles and students’
research reports made use of engagement features, though the features were far more common in the
published articles. In addition, the analysis reveals that students seemed to avoid certain features,
such as the use of you or your to refer to readers. Interview data help illuminate possible reasons for
such avoidance, such as students’ belief that such features are too informal or personal. Interview data
also suggest that student writers can see their options for engaging with readers as somewhat limited
and constrained by their role as students within an institution. In sum, while the text analysis offers a
powerful means of seeing lexicogrammatical and rhetorical patterns within this genre, the interview
data suggest reasons why such patterns might appear and how writers understand their options and
constraints as writers of the genre. Hyland’s research also provides a powerful illustration of the ways
in which linguistic resources are used to achieve rhetorical goals—in this case, comparing expert,
published writing (presumably including L1 and L2 writers) with novice, L2 student writing. Thus,
learners need to know how certain linguistic forms can be used to achieve complex rhetorical goals
in community-preferred ways.
In contrast to the close text analysis we see in Hyland’s (2005) study, Parks’ (2001) research
draws primarily on methods designed to understand genre users, their practices, and their contexts of
use. Here, Parks examined the genre of the nursing care plan, emphasizing that genres are dynamic
rhetorical structures that “both shape and are shaped by the social actions undertaken in response
to recurrent situations within discourse communities” (p. 407). Parks’ study takes place in the fran-
cophone province of Quebec, Canada, and Parks emphasizes the unique nature of this context: in
English-medium hospitals in Quebec, nursing care plans are a common practice, drawing on nursing
notes written once during a nursing shift; in contrast, in French hospitals nurses do not commonly
produce care plans but do document chronological notes throughout their shift. Parks’ research spe-
cifically focuses on francophone nurses employed in an anglophone hospital, requiring them to learn
how to produce nursing documentation following the genre conventions in English, their L2.
Like Hyland’s (2005) study described earlier, we find Parks’ study to offer an exceptional exam-
ple of research that takes into account multiple data sources to understand genre. Very few studies
capture the development of genre knowledge across language and spaces, utilizing so many differ-
ent types of data to do so. Specifically, Parks’ study adopts an ethnographically oriented case study
approach, following 11 nurses over a 22-month period, including a clinical orientation, a mentored
preceptorship, and full-time hospital work. Prior to this time period, none of the nurses had produced
nursing documentation in English. In order to understand how the nursing care plan is taken up by
these nurses in both the clinical orientation and in their professional practice, Parks collected a wide
range of data: work and school documents produced by the nurses, interviews with the nurses and
clinical educator, observations of the nurses at work, and feedback sessions with the clinical educator.
In addition, the nurses completed a formal writing task, producing a nursing care plan in response
to a case study; the task was completed three times, once at the start of the study, again at the end
of the preceptorship, and then after nine months working in the hospital. The nurses also discussed

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their care plans (including how later plans compared with earlier ones) and compared them with the
care plans they wrote at work. Further, the clinical educator discussed and evaluated the nurses’ three
care plans.
Through these multiple approaches to data collection and analysis, Parks’ study allows readers to
see how genre is used as a tool by communities—how users shape the genre and how the genre also
shapes the users’ practices. In the nurses’ internships as students, they learned to write the genre as an
academic task; at French hospitals, the genre was not used. In contrast, the English hospitals did make
wide use of the care plans, but they differed from the care plans taught at university. For example,
when using the care plans at work, the nurses might include medical diagnoses, while at university
they were taught to only include nursing diagnoses. Diagnoses were also taught in a particular form
at university, but at work it was most common to simplify this form. In short, the nurses’ care plan
practices and products were adapted through an enculturation process at work, including collabora-
tion with colleagues and exposure to model care plans. Parks’ insights about the genre and the nurses’
ways of using and understanding them are possible only through triangulation of multiple types of
data that show the genre “in action.” Her research also illustrates how learning genres is indeed a
process of learning social practices. Learners need to navigate new discourse communities, and their
associated values, practices, and ways of using language.

Implications for second language learning, teaching, and use

As our discussion of research so far has emphasized, genre offers a view of language use as social
practice. Though genres are both oral and written, the construct has been especially helpful for un-
derstanding complex written communication. Through genre, we can see how language use is shaped
through the activities of communities striving to accomplish various goals; in turn, common genres
shape how a community carries out their work as well (Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995). Crucially, a
genre perspective highlights not just the unique linguistic or rhetorical forms of language use but also
the social activities and values that those forms index.
An important implication of this view of language is that learning genres in an additional language
requires learning more than a form—it requires learning how things are done by communities. There-
fore, research on second language genre learning repeatedly illustrates that learners need to develop
a multilayered knowledge of form, rhetoric, content, and process (Tardy, 2009), a kind of knowledge
that may be difficult to develop in a decontextualized classroom setting. Another important implica-
tion is that second language learners often bring with them prior genre knowledge that may resem-
ble or contradict the practice of genre in a new linguistic community, since genres may be realized
differently across languages. The process of learning genres is thus often characterized as one of
recontextualizing prior knowledge so that it can be adapted to new situations (Tardy et al., 2020).
This process appears to be facilitated through a metacognitive awareness of genre (e.g., Negretti
& McGrath, 2018) as well as through collaboration and support from mentors or other community
members and interaction with textual instantiations of genre (Tardy, 2006). Research also shows that
such learning—especially in a second language—can be aided by instruction that helps learners ex-
plicitly discover how writers use language in socially preferred ways (e.g., Cheng, 2018).
Such explicit genre-based teaching can take multiple forms. To begin with, students may engage in
a guided exploration of the formal conventions of genres following the principles of lexicogrammati-
cal analysis and move analysis. In addition, class activities may consider the rhetorical situations to
which genres correspond, as well as the ways in which genres are used by communities (Bawarshi &
Reiff, 2010). Interviews with community members can further demystify the social practices in which
genres are embedded and the complex goals they fulfill. This way, considerations of textual patterns are
connected to audience and purpose with the aim of rhetorical consciousness-raising (Swales, 1990).

71
 Christine M. Tardy and Jeroen Gevers

Guided exploratory activities are seen as an important step in preparing students to become effective
users of specific genres, sometimes as part of a longer scaffolded process. For instance, in the teaching/
learning cycle, an approach developed by SFL genre scholars, learners are first guided through an analy-
sis of samples of a genre, after which they jointly compose a new text in that genre with their teacher;
then, finally, they independently create their own texts (Caplan & Farling, 2017). Devitt (2009) has
extended this staged process to include opportunities for critique and genre change or transformation.
Genre-based pedagogies often focus on genres that students are expected to produce in their target
contexts, in line with language for specific purposes (LSP) approaches to language teaching. For ex-
ample, university writing courses typically highlight discipline- or genre-specific aspects of academic
writing, and perhaps consider connections between various academic genres. Yet genre instruction
can also engage learners’ prior genre knowledge by considering everyday genres, such as wedding in-
vitations or consumer restaurant reviews, so as to practice genre analysis with familiar genres before
moving on to new and more specialized ones (Johns, 1997). Genre research suggests that repeated
opportunities to analyze genres and consider how they function can enhance learners’ metacogni-
tive genre awareness more generally, including awareness of genre as a conceptual framework, and
that such broader genre awareness in turn appears to support genre-specific knowledge development
(Negretti, 2021; Negretti & McGrath, 2018). In other words, an increased awareness of both genre
and genres can help learners tackle new writing situations more effectively. For this reason, genre
scholars have advocated classroom pedagogies that combine attention for specific target genres with
activities aimed at broader awareness-raising (Cheng, 2018; Devitt, 2009; Tardy et al., 2020).

Future directions for genre and second language research

Genre research that relates to discourse and second language acquisition has flourished in the past
two decades, and several recent developments suggest important avenues for future research. Three
of the most important future directions, in our mind, include research into genre learning and use
across languages, multimodal genres, and the rapid evolution of emerging genres.
To date, most research of genre use has looked at how genres are realized in single languages,
though in some cases genres are compared across languages. For example, research has explored dif-
ferences in the research article genre across languages in terms of features like rhetorical moves (Loi,
2010) or the use of metatext (Moreno, 1997). However, there has been less attention to how individu-
als carry out genres across languages or when writing for and in different communities. One excellent
example of such research is Canagarajah’s (2006) case study of a Sri Lankan scholar, Sivatamby,
writing for publication in English and Tamil for local and international journals. Canagarajah specifi-
cally looks at the use of rhetorical moves in the introductions of three research articles by Sivatamby:
one in Tamil for a local journal, one in English for a local journal, and one in English for an interna-
tional journal. Such research has the potential to provide further insights into how individuals bring
a full range of multilingual resources to their writing across languages. Additional research into how
writers learn new genres across languages is also needed, especially adopting a multilingual lens to
look at their emerging knowledge and production of genres across languages. Sommer-Farias’ (2020)
research of a Portuguese-as-an-additional-language classroom shows how students in the course uti-
lized their knowledge of genres in Spanish and English when writing in Portuguese; more studies of
learners at various stages of linguistic development and with varying levels of genre experience will
be valuable. Future research could also consider opportunities for genre-based pedagogies to actively
engage and foster such multilingual genre knowledge, for example through classroom tasks involv-
ing crosslingual genre analysis and translation—activities which appear to encourage reflection on
similarities or differences in genre conventions, shifts in audience and purpose, and recontextualiza-
tion processes more generally.

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Many of the methodological approaches to studying genre use, described earlier in this chapter,
were developed to explore genres in which the textual product is primarily word-based, such as
research articles, dissertations and theses, or various forms of professional communication. In these
cases, analysis of textual features or rhetorical moves is extremely helpful in order to understand the
written choices that writers make to carry out their goals. Yet, with the technological innovations
of the 21st century, everyday users now have an expanded ability to create texts that increasingly
integrate multiple modes of communication, including sound, images, or gestures. Many existing
genre analysis methods can be (and have been) adapted to this increased multimodal environment,
but analysis may also benefit from the development of new tools for exploring rhetorical features that
cross and blend modalities (see, for example, Chapter 3). Such research has interesting implications
for the study of second language genre learning as well. By expanding our toolkit beyond linguistic
resources, researchers and teachers can gain insight into how learners utilize multiple semiotic re-
sources—not just language—to learn and participate in genres.
Finally, readers of this chapter will be fully aware that digital communication has led to apparently
rapid change in existing genres as well as the emergence of new genres. Students, for example, are
producing a broad range of multimodal genres, such as digital portfolios, professional web pages, and
documentaries (Lim & Polio, 2020). Likewise, academic researchers now have more genres available
to them by means of which to communicate their research, including podcast interviews, research
group websites, research announcements on social media, and video abstracts. Many of these new
digital genres are marked by their ability and attempts to reach multiple audiences at once, resulting
in what has been referred to as “context collapse,” a phenomenon illustrated particularly well through
social media platforms where friends, family, professional colleagues, and the general public may all
see a user’s posts (see, Pérez-Llantada, 2021, and Reid & Anson, 2019 for further discussion of context
collapse). In this environment, more research is needed to understand how individuals develop and
expand their genre repertoires and how they adapt existing genre knowledge. Even more critically,
research can examine whether and how multilingual individuals might have more agency in shaping
and innovating with emerging and evolving genres in this new digital and global environment.

Further reading
Hyon, S. (2018). Introducing genre and English for specific purposes. Routledge.
In this fairly recent monograph, Hyon outlines key principles and methodologies in genre analysis and genre-
based learning and teaching from an English for specific purposes perspective. The book offers an excellent intro-
duction to procedures for carrying out genre analysis as a researcher and as a component of genre-based instruction.
Miller, C. R., & Devitt, A. J. (Eds.). (2019). Landmark essays on rhetorical genre studies. Routledge.
This volume is a compilation of major works in the conceptualization of genre, with an emphasis on theory.
Works were selected for their contribution specifically to rhetorical genre studies, but applied linguists will find
the volume useful as well. Particularly valuable are the early theoretical contributions from Mikhail Bakhtin,
Carolyn Miller, John Swales, and Amy Devitt.
Paltridge, B. (2014). Genre and second-language academic writing. Language Teaching, 47(3), 303–318.
In this article, Paltridge offers a useful timeline of research on genre and genre-based pedagogies in the context of
second language writing in English at the university level. The timeline consists of brief entries for key publications
between 1981 and 2014, including both theoretical and practical works, which are presented in chronological order.
Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge University Press.
Although this monograph represents early work in genre studies, it remains a key resource for understanding
genre as it relates to discourse and to second language learning and teaching. In addition to an accessible and robust
overview of genre theory, this book offers a thorough discussion of the theoretical foundations and practical imple-
mentation of genre-based pedagogy, with an emphasis on English for specific purposes and graduate-level writing.

73
 Christine M. Tardy and Jeroen Gevers

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 7
GRAMMATICAL COMPLEXITY,
DISCOURSE, AND SECOND
LANGUAGE RESEARCH
Ge Lan

Introduction
The construct complexity began to receive growing research attention in applied linguistics in the
1990s in areas such as second language acquisition (SLA) and second language (L2) writing. Mile-
stone works were published on grammatical complexity in the late 1990s, for example Wolfe-­Quintero
et al.’s (1998) research synthesis on CAF (complexity, accuracy, and fluency) studies, and in the early
2000s, for instance, Ortega’s (2003) research synthesis on grammatical complexity measures in
L2 writing. From the 1990s to the present, an increasing number of studies have investigated gram-
matical complexity due to its close relationship with important research constructs, such as language
development and writing quality. These existing studies can be found across multiple subareas of ap-
plied linguistics, including SLA, L2 writing, discourse analysis, and English for academic purposes
(EAP). The discussion in this chapter is based on how grammatical complexity is used to analyze
two SLA constructs in L2 written discourse: language development and language performance. The
chapter first provides an overview of grammatical complexity, with an emphasis on key concepts and
methods. Then, the chapter summarizes sample studies regarding how grammatical complexity has
been used to investigate language development and language performance in L2 written discourse.
Based on these sample studies, teaching and research implications are provided.

Overview of grammatical complexity: Background and key concepts

From the 1990s to the present, there has been a long discussion of how to understand grammatical
complexity, a discussion which has played an important role in analyzing grammatical characteristics
of written discourse in L2 studies. In SLA, scholars have gradually reached the consensus that there
are two fundamental components to grammatical complexity: grammatical variation and grammati-
cal sophistication (Lu, 2011; Norris & Ortega, 2009; Ortega, 2003). This can be seen in two of the
earliest definitions of grammatical complexity, which held that it was firstly (a) elaborated language
use and varied grammatical patterns (Foster & Skehan, 1996) and secondly (b) a range of basic and
sophisticated grammatical structures (Wolfe-Quintero et al., 1998). Then, in a research synthesis,
Ortega (2003) defined this construct as “the range of forms that surface in language production and
degree of sophistication of such forms” (p. 492). This definition was echoed in the taxonomy of L2

76 DOI: 10.4324/9781003177579-8
 Grammatical complexity, discourse, and second language research

complexity proposed by Bulté and Housen (2012). Bulté and Housen theorized grammatical com-
plexity in a taxonomy with two similar components: (a) systemic complexity (i.e., grammatical vari-
ation), which refers to the breadth of grammatical patterns an L2 learner can access, and (b) structural
complexity (i.e., grammatical sophistication), which refers to the depth of grammatical construction
an L2 learner can build. In addition, grammatical complexity has also received research attention in
other language-related areas.
From the perspective of register studies and functional linguistics, grammatical complexity is
argued to consist of two components as well: grammatical form and grammatical function. In a
large-scale corpus analysis with diverse spoken and written registers, Biber et al. (2011) proposed a
form–function framework to describe grammatical complexity. They pointed out three types of gram-
matical forms (i.e., finite dependent clauses, nonfinite dependent clauses, and dependent phrases)
and three types of grammatical functions (i.e., adverbials, complements, and noun modifiers). This
framework includes a comprehensive set of grammatical features and their associated functions, for
instance, attributive adjectives, finite adverbial clauses, and nonfinite complement clauses. It is also
important to note that grammatical complexity studies often include numerous measures or features
to comprehensively represent the nature of complexity (e.g., Biber et al., 2011; Lu, 2011; Yoon,
2017). In contrast to discourse-based grammar studies, which often draw strong connections between
form, function, and context, grammatical complexity studies focus less on context, the most promi-
nent context being the context of academic language use at the university level.

Main research methods in grammatical complexity and second

language research

Grammatical complexity measures and features

This section presents the two major ways to measure grammatical complexity in existing studies: (a)
large-grained syntactic complexity measures in SLA, and (b) fine-grained individual grammatical
features in register studies. It is important to acknowledge that the term grammatical complexity is
used in a broad sense to refer to both complexity represented by syntactic structures (e.g., clauses per
T-unit) and complexity represented by individual grammatical features (e.g., attributive adjectives,
verb complement clauses). This broad sense ensures a comprehensive discussion of grammatical
complexity research across subareas of applied linguistics, for example, SLA, L2 writing, and EAP.
With regard to large-grained syntactic measures, effective measures were proposed in Lu (2011) to
explore grammatical complexity and L2 writing development. Lu summarized publications on gram-
matical complexity and language development in SLA, for example Wolfe-Quintero et al. (1998) and
Ortega (2003). Then, 14 measures of syntactic complexity were selected that were frequently used
and were effective at indicating language development in L2 academic written discourse. These 14
measures included five grammatical types, with each type being associated with specific syntactic
measures: length of production (e.g., mean length of clauses), subordination (e.g., clauses per T-
unit, dependent clauses per T-unit), coordination (e.g., coordinate phrases per T-unit), sentence (i.e.,
clauses per sentence), and particular structures (e.g., complex nominals per clause, complex nominals
per T-unit). Lu (2011) applied these 14 measures as objective benchmarks to analyze the language
development of L2 students in academic writing. These 14 measures have also been applied to inves-
tigate other variables in SLA, such as writing quality (e.g., Casal & Lee, 2019), L1 background (e.g.,
Lu & Ai, 2015), and written genres (e.g., Yoon & Polio, 2017).
In contrast, with regard to fine-grained grammatical features, Biber et al. (2011) proposed the
hypothesized developmental index of writing complexity features by comparing a wide range of

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grammatical features between spoken and written discourse. In their index, five developmental stages
were proposed, and 28 grammatical complexity features were associated with the corresponding
stages. These features were categorized in terms of three grammatical forms (i.e., finite dependent
clauses, nonfinite dependent clauses, and dependent phrases), with each grammatical form having
three possible grammatical functions (i.e., complements, adverbials, and noun modifiers). For in-
stance, finite complement clauses controlled by common verbs (e.g., think, know, say) are placed at
the first stage, indicating the beginning stage of language development. In contrast, appositive noun
phrases are placed at the fifth stage, suggesting an advanced stage of language development. The
advantage of this index is that it is evidence-based, being supported by actual language use. Biber
et al. also called for validation of this hypothesized developmental index, which generated a group
of empirical studies (e.g., Ansarifar et al., 2018; Parkinson & Musgrave, 2014; Staples et al., 2016).

Computational tools
The aforementioned grammatical complexity measures and features can be generated by compu-
tational tools. In regard to large-grained syntactic measures, the Second Language Syntactic Com-
plexity Analyzer (L2SCA) can automate the calculation of 14 measures of grammatical complexity
(Lu, 2010). Lu (2010) provided a detailed description of his L2SCA in his chapter in the Routledge
Handbook of Corpus Linguistics. Also, Lu (2014) offered step-by-step instructions on the installa-
tion and application of this computational tool. With respect to fine-grained grammatical features,
the Biber Tagger is a computational tool that can tag a wide range of lexicogrammatical features.
The tool was firstly designed to explore register variation (Biber, 1988; Biber, 1992), but it has
more recently been applied to analyze grammatical complexity in L2 writing research (e.g., Lan &
Sun, 2019; Lan et al., 2022; Staples & Reppen, 2016; Staples et al., 2016). One of the advantages
of this tool is that, for many lexicogrammatical features, the Biber Tagger can not only annotate
their grammatical form but also their grammatical function. For example, when the tagger annotates
adjectives, the tagger has special tagging fields to indicate the grammatical form (i.e., adjectives)
and grammatical function (e.g., attributive or predicative). Although the Biber Tagger is not publicly
accessible at present, Nini (2014) replicated it to develop the Multidimensional Analysis Tagger
(MAT). The MAT allows users to not only explore register variation but also to study grammatical
complexity in L2 research.
Finally, it is important to mention the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Syntactic Sophistication
and Complexity (TAASSC). The tool was developed by Kyle (2016), making it more recent than
the L2SCA and the Biber Tagger. The TAASSC can calculate a wide range of syntactic measures,
including the 14 large-grained measures in Lu (2010) and numerous fine-grained syntactic measures
regarding clausal complexity and noun phrase complexity. Although this is a relatively new tool, the
TAASSC has already been applied in recent L2 studies. For example, Kyle & Crossley (2018) used it
to investigate the relationship between grammatical complexity and holistic scores of writing quality.

Sample studies on grammatical complexity, discourse analysis, and SLA

The sample studies in this section include grammatical complexity studies that focus on L2 develop-
ment and performance in L2 written discourse. These sample studies are primarily based on the 14
effective large-grained measures that Lu (2011) proposed by reviewing previous SLA studies and
the hypothesized index of writing complexity features that Biber et al. (2011) proposed by compar-
ing spoken and written registers (or discourse types). Before proceeding, it is important to note that
grammatical complexity studies in SLA and L2 writing have some points of overlap because multiple
variables are investigated in both areas (e.g., language development, writing quality, genres).

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Grammatical complexity, discourse, and L2 development

Grammatical complexity has been used to benchmark the language development of L2 learners in
different types of written discourse. This includes cross-sectional studies and longitudinal studies.

Cross-sectional studies of L2 development

There are two major ways to conceptualize the notion of L2 development in cross-sectional stud-
ies: development across academic levels and development across proficiency levels. For development
across academic levels, multiple studies were conducted in the 2010s based on Biber et al.’s (2011)
developmental index to investigate the relationship between grammatical complexity and L2 develop-
ment. Biber et al. (2011) cogently argued that phrasal construction, rather than clausal subordination,
is indicative of the grammatical character of advanced academic writing. This seminal work has gener-
ated a group of recent studies regarding language development in L2 writing. For example, Parkinson
and Musgrave (2014) compared the use of noun phrases in argumentative essays from EAP students
to its use in theses from MA in teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) students at a
New Zealand university. The authors extracted 11 types of noun modifiers (e.g., attributive adjectives,
relative clauses) from Biber et al.’s (2011) index to represent noun phrase complexity. The findings
showed that the EAP students relied on attributive adjectives, a basic noun modifier, whereas the MA
TESOL students produced significantly more alternative types of noun modifiers, such as premodify-
ing nouns, preposition phrases as postnoun modifiers, and appositive noun phrases. As another ex-
ample, Ansarifar et al. (2018) compared phrasal complexity features in research abstracts from three
groups of writers: professional writers of published research articles, and L2 Persian writers on both
MA and PhD programs in an Iranian university. They also extracted noun modifiers from Biber et al.’s
(2011) index (e.g., premodifying nouns, appositive noun phrases). The study found that MA students
used phrasal modifiers significantly less than the other two groups, whereas the PhD group did not
show many differences in their use of these phrasal modifiers compared to published writers.
With regard to large-grained measures, Lu (2011) analyzed the language development of L2 stu-
dents in argumentative essays across four school levels based on 14 large-grained measures. Lu
(2011) noted that proficiency levels were conceptualized using school level, namely, the first, second,
third, and fourth years of undergraduate programs. Based on his L2SCA, Lu automated the calcula-
tion of the 14 measures and then used the measures to differentiate the four school levels. He found
seven “good candidates” that progress linearly with school level, which represent L2 development:
(a) three measures of length of production (i.e., mean length of sentences, mean length of clauses, and
mean length of T-units); (b) two complex nominal measures (i.e., complex nominals per clause, and
complex nominals per T-unit); and (c) two coordinate phrase measures (i.e., coordinate phrases per
clause, coordinate phrases per T-unit). None of the large-grained syntactic measures of subordinate
clauses were found to be “good candidates.”
Yoon (2017) is a more recent study that shows how L2 development is conceptualized across
proficiency levels. In this study, development was conceptualized based on the participants’ language
performance on proficiency tests. The participants were then classified into corresponding levels of
the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (from lower to higher: A2, B1.1,
B1.2, and B2). With a corpus of 1,198 L2 argumentative papers written by Chinese students, Yoon
applied seven of the 14 large-grained measures along with selected lexical and morphological meas-
ures to capture proficiency differences. Although there is a topic effect on most complexity measures,
the results indicated that phrasal-level measures were significantly different across proficiency levels,
whereas clausal-level measures were not significantly different. It was also found that there were
significant differences across proficiency levels for lexical and morphological measures.

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Longitudinal studies of L2 development

Regarding longitudinal studies, empirical research has been conducted based on both large-grained
syntactic measures and fine-grained grammatical features. For example, Bulté and Housen (2014) ex-
plored the language development of 45 ESL learners in academic essays over a semester-long English
program. The authors found that although multiple large-grained measures (e.g., mean length of sen-
tences, mean length of noun phrases) can capture the language development of L2 learners, different
subcomponents of grammatical complexity (e.g., sentential, clausal, and phrasal complexity) develop
at different rates in academic written discourse. Yoon and Polio (2017) worked on a similar study. The
authors investigated the language development of 37 ESL learners in narrative and argumentative es-
says in an American university using Lu’s (2011) 14 large-grained measures. Based on two types of
essays written at different intervals, the 14 measures only captured a genre effect instead of language
development. Recently, Polat et al. (2019) examined the longitudinal growth of syntactic complexity
in Turkish English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners over three semesters in an intensive Eng-
lish program. The authors used Lu’s (2011) 14 measures to analyze the writing samples of 284 EFL
learners at three different proficiency levels: elementary, lower-intermediate, and intermediate. They
found that the EFL learners at elementary and lower-intermediate levels heavily relied on phrasal co-
ordination structures in their writing, whereas the learners at the intermediate level produced diverse
syntactic structures. All three groups of learners demonstrated L2 development, but this occurred
based on different grammatical types (e.g., length, subordination, phrasal construction). Thus, longi-
tudinal development is not “necessarily straightforward or incremental across three levels,” a finding
that reveals the unpredictability of language development (Polat et al., 2019, p. 688).
Scholars have also recently used individual grammatical features to study longitudinal language
development. For example, Biber et al. (2020) tracked the language development of 22 university
students over two years, examining selected grammatical features (e.g., relative clauses, premodify-
ing nouns). The findings generally support the hypothesized developmental stages in Biber et al.
(2011) and strengthen the argument that language development in academic writing is accompanied
by the increasing use of phrasal complexity features. Furthermore, Gray et al. (2019) studied the
longitudinal development of Chinese EFL learners at clausal and phrasal levels through spoken and
written tasks in the Internet-Based Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL iBT). According
to the authors, language development occurred in the following way: “discourse styles at Time 1 were
not always aligned with mode- and task type-specific discourse patterns but developed over time,
with discourse styles at Time 2 better approximating expected norms and exhibiting increased task
differentiation” (p. 1). The clearest case of longitudinal development was found in the independent
writing task, which showed increasing use of phrasal complexity features over time.
Some longitudinal studies have focused on other languages in L2 research. Spoelman and Ver-
spoor (2010) conducted a longitudinal case study on the language development of a Finnish as a
foreign language (FSL) learner in a university in the Netherlands. They tracked the FSL learner for
three years and collected 54 writing samples in academic contexts. Grammatical complexity was ana-
lyzed at the morphological level, noun phrase level, and sentence level. Based on selected measures
of grammatical complexity (e.g., sentence length, simple sentence, complex sentence), they found
intra-individual variability in longitudinal development, and the interaction between these meas-
ures kept changing over a three-year period of study. A noticeable pattern is that complexity at the
noun phrase level and complexity at the sentence level are competitors with each other: increases in
noun phrase complexity are accompanied by decreases in sentence complexity. In addition, Vyatkina
(2013) tracked two German-as-a-second-language (GSL) learners over four semesters and analyzed
their use of grammatical features in German, such as coordinate clauses, nominal phrases, and rela-
tive clauses. Linguistic profiles were built to show the longitudinal development of their German over

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the four semesters. Although the two GSL learners both showed longitudinal development in gram-
mar use (e.g., they produced longer sentences and used more diverse grammatical features), their
developmental paths were different from each other. Then, Vyatkina et al. (2015) tracked the longitu-
dinal changes of grammatical modification structures (e.g., attributive adjectives, cardinal numbers,
relative clauses) in 12 beginning-level GSL learners in an American university. Over four semesters,
the overall range (modifier types) and size (modifier tokens) of modifiers in their writing showed no
significant changes, but the composition of the modifiers gradually changed, with “cognitively more
difficult (e.g., inflected and clausal) categories” of modifiers being more frequently used (p. 28).
The uses of the noun modifiers also showed the high variability of language development within the
participants.

Grammatical complexity, discourse, and L2 performance

Grammatical complexity has been used to describe language performance in different types of L2
discourse. From the perspective of grammatical complexity, L2 performance can be influenced by
several factors. Some of the major factors are summarized below, including genre, register, language
background, and L2 writing quality.

Genre and register

Grammatical complexity has been used to compare language performance across different genres and
registers. Regarding the genre effect, Lu (2011), using the 14 large-grained measures, examined how
grammar use is influenced by two genres (narrative essays and argumentative essays) in work written
by Chinese ESL students. It was found that 13 of the 14 measures showed significantly higher values
in the argumentative essays. The findings indicate that argumentative essays require more complex
grammar use than narratives. Yoon and Polio (2017) applied the same 14 measures, along with lexical
measures, to analyze the longitudinal language development of ESL students based on narrative and
argumentative essays. The authors found there was a significant genre effect on six of the 14 syntactic
measures, and the results showed that ESL students produced more complex grammatical structures
at phrasal and nominal levels in argumentative essays, exhibited by significantly higher values for the
mean length of clauses, complex nominals per clause, and complex nominals per T-unit. Recently,
Bi (2020) explored the genre effect by comparing argumentative and narrative essays written by
Chinese EFL learners at three institutional levels (junior high school, senior high school, and uni-
versity). In total, ten lexical and grammatical measures were applied to analyze the students’ writing
performance between the two genres. It was found that students at all the three institutional levels
produced more complex grammatical structures in argumentative essays. While junior high school
students only showed a difference in their use of subordinate clauses, senior high school students and
university students showed differences in their use of subordinate clauses, complex nominals, and
general sentence length.
Different registers also have different grammatical characteristics because grammatical forms
have specific grammatical functions in different registers. Multidimensional analysis (MDA), pro-
posed in Biber (1988), has been applied to L2 research to study this register effect. Based on 23
spoken and written registers, Biber (1988) proposed an MDA framework with five latent communi-
cative functions1 of co-occurring lexicogrammatical features. This MDA framework has been used
to provide linguistic and functional descriptions of registers in L2 research. For example, Hardy
and Römer (2013) investigated cross-disciplinary register variation based on the Michigan Corpus
of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP), which includes 16 academic disciplines (e.g., physics,
nursing, engineering, English, sociology, economics). They established a four-dimensional model to

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distinguish cross-disciplinary variation in grammatical complexity features. The major dimension in

their MDA model was “Involved vs. Informational,” consistent with Biber (1988). In terms of written
discourse across different disciplines, they reported that written discourse in physics, civil engineer-
ing, and biology is more informational than written discourse in education and philosophy. Conrad
(2017) conducted an MDA to provide linguistic and functional descriptions of student academic
writing (e.g., research and lab reports) and practitioner writing (i.e., reports, site visit observations)
in civil engineering. The MDA showed a mismatch between the writing skills of university students
and the expected writing skills in the workplace. For instance, in the dimension “Elaborated vs. Situ-
ation-Dependent Reference,” student writing was found to be more elaborated, whereas practitioner
writing was based on more situation-dependent reference. The MDA findings and interviews with
students, faculty, and practitioners revealed the necessity of adjusting teaching practices to effectively
prepare students in civil engineering for professional communication in the workplace.

Language background
Connections between grammatical complexity and language background have also been studied in
L2 research, which can be summarized in three main categories: (a) L1 vs. L2, (b) different L1
backgrounds, and (c) cross-linguistic effects. Regarding the first category, several studies have in-
vestigated differences in grammar use between L1 and L2 writing. For instance, Lan et al. (2022)
compared noun phrase patterns in L1 and L2 essays based on the 11 types of noun modifiers in Biber
et al. (2011) (e.g., attributive adjectives, premodifying nouns, and relative clauses). The study found
that language background influences the use of noun modifiers: L1 students used a wider range of
noun modifiers to build diverse noun phrase patterns. On the other hand, L2 students used more
phrasal modifiers to build compressed noun phrase patterns, although L2 students also produced
many repeated cases of attributive adjectives, premodifying nouns, and of-prepositional phrases. As
another example, Eckstein and Ferris (2018) compared writing assignments from L1 and L2 students
who took the same first-year composition course at a public American university. They applied Lu’s
(2011) 14 large-grained measures to analyze the writing assignments. However, Eckstein and Ferris
found no differences in grammatical complexity between the L1 and L2 students. A possible reason is
that most of the L2 students in the study were generation 1.5, meaning they were long-term residents
of the United States.
Nonetheless, since L2 students are not a single unit but a diverse group with different L1s, schol-
ars have also analyzed how L1 background impacts L2 performance from the perspective of gram-
matical complexity. Lu and Ai (2015), for example, explored grammatical complexity in English
argumentative essays from university students with seven different L1 backgrounds: English, Chi-
nese, Japanese, Spanish, German, French, and Bulgarian. Lu’s (2011) 14 large-grained measures
were applied, and it was found that differences in grammar use between L1 and L2 students in
general were reflected by sentence length and complex nominal structures. The results also showed
there were varied patterns of difference among the seven L1 backgrounds, reflected by measures of
all grammatical types: length of production, subordination, coordination, and phrasal construction.
In addition, Staples and Reppen (2016) applied a lexicogrammatical approach to analyze grammar
use across three L1 groups (English, Arabic, and Chinese) in two written genres (argumentative es-
says and rhetorical analysis). Eight grammatical features were selected, e.g., attributive adjectives
and noun complement clauses. Across the three L1 groups, there were significant differences in the
use of three grammatical features, namely, attributive adjectives, premodifying nouns, and causative
adverbial clauses. The results also showed that Chinese and Arabic students repeatedly used specific
cases of adjective–noun sequences (e.g., violent videos) and noun–noun sequences (e.g., summer
vacations) in their academic writing. This was not the case for the L1 English students.

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Finally, cross-linguistic comparisons on grammatical complexity have not been common in L2

research. Clercq and Housen (2017) is perhaps the only cross-linguistic study on grammatical com-
plexity in recent literature. Using selected measures of grammatical complexity, the authors ana-
lyzed English and French language development in oral narratives from two individual groups of
adolescent learners with Dutch as their L1. The L1 English and French speakers’ data were used as
benchmarks in their analysis of the learners’ language production. The study found that both groups
of learners showed gradual development in regard to the length and diversity of noun phrases and
coordinate/subordinate clauses in their English and French oral narratives. This perspective should
receive more research attention on the topic of grammatical complexity in the future.

L2 writing quality
Scholars have also explored the relationship between grammatical complexity and L2 quality (primar-
ily L2 writing quality). Writing quality refers to human judgments of written text production based on
assessment rubrics, for example, scores and/or grades assigned by teachers or raters (Wolfe-Quintero
et al., 1998). Thus, writing quality is an objective way of assessing L2 performance. In L2 research,
grammatical complexity has been found to be indicative of human judgments of writing quality.
In the past decade (the 2010s), scholars have applied grammatical complexity measures to analyze
the writing quality of L2 learners. For example, Yang et al. (2015) explored the relationship between
Lu’s (2011) 14 large-grained measures and ESL writing quality in a collection of argumentative es-
says on two different written topics from 90 graduate L2 students. Using regression analyses, the
study found that one length measure (i.e., mean length of clauses) and two T-unit-based measures
(i.e., T-units per sentences and dependent clauses per T-unit) were effective predictors of writing
quality across two different topics. Kyle and Crossley (2018) applied a more comprehensive set
of syntactic measures to explore the writing quality of the TOEFL independent writing tasks. The
measures included Lu’s (2011) 14 large-grained measures as well as the fine-grained measures of
clausal and phrasal complexity. They reported that specific fine-grained measures of phrasal com-
plexity effectively contributed to predicting writing quality. Recently, Bi and Jiang (2020) investi-
gated the relationship between grammatical complexity and writing quality in 410 narrative essays
written by Chinese EFL learners. Lu’s (2011) 14 large-grained measures were applied, along with
one additional measure (i.e., the corrected type-token ratio of dependency relations). Their regression
analyses showed that three measures (i.e., mean length of sentence, complex nominals per clause,
and clauses per T-unit) were effective at predicting writing quality. Fine-grained individual features
have also been used to analyze writing quality in L2 writing. Taguchi et al. (2013) explored which
grammatical features indicate writing quality with a corpus of placement exam essays written by L2
students. The exam essays were rated by English teachers. Both clausal and phrasal complexity fea-
tures were included in the study to explore how they were used in high-rated and low-rated essays.
The authors found that high-rated essays included more phrasal modifiers (attributive adjectives and
prepositional phrases as postnoun modifiers), whereas low-rated essays included more verbal com-
plement causes and relative clauses.

Implications for second language learning, teaching, and use

Grammatical complexity has a close relationship with two important constructs: L2 development and
L2 performance. Appropriate instruction on grammar use can support the language development of L2
learners and enhance their language performance in specific registers. In the context of teaching and
learning, specific grammatical features (e.g., relative clauses and finite dependent clauses) tend to be
more teachable than large-grained syntactic measures (e.g., dependent clauses per T-unit) because they

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are linguistically motivated and interpretable in nature (Egbert et al., 2020). First, to facilitate the lan-
guage development of L2 learners, language instructors (e.g., ESL teachers) can refer to the develop-
mental index proposed in Biber et al. (2011). For instance, after analyzing their students’ writing, ESL
teachers can select grammatical features from the index that fit the specific learning needs of the students.
This will be effective at developing their grammar if features from a more advanced stage (e.g., Stage 3)
are taught to students who primarily produce grammatical features at a lower stage (e.g., Stage 2).
Second, recent research findings align with the argument on grammatical complexity that phrasal
complexity is a grammatical characteristic of advanced academic writing (e.g., Ansarifar et al., 2018;
Biber et al., 2011; Parkinson & Musgrave, 2014). For advanced L2 undergraduate students and L2
graduate students, it is important to raise their awareness of using phrasal complexity features in aca-
demic written genres. As phrasal complexity is based on compressed noun phrases (i.e., head nouns
with phrasal modifiers), grammar workshops on compressed structures can be given to these groups
of L2 students, who need to handle academic genres for university-level studies, such as research
articles, technical reports, and dissertations.
Third, in terms of the language performance of L2 students, genres and registers impact gram-
matical complexity. This should receive pedagogical attention in English for specific purposes (ESP).
ESP is often related to English use in specific disciplines, such as engineering, business, and the
medical sciences, to name a few. Inspired by the MDA studies (e.g., Biber, 1988; Conrad, 2017;
Hardy & Römer, 2013), two suggestions can be offered to discipline-specific English teachers: (a)
for discipline-specific language use, grammatical features often co-occur to build certain grammati-
cal structures that are expected by the intended audiences of those disciplines; (b) these co-occurring
grammatical features need to perform specific functions in communication in the target disciplines.
Thus, grammar instruction in discipline-specific English courses can focus on the co-occurrence of
grammatical features and draw connections between these features and their grammatical functions
in specific registers (e.g., business presentations or lab reports). Fourth, specific attention should be
paid to L2 learners with diverse L1 backgrounds. It is not surprising to find differences in grammar
use between L1 and L2 students. Nonetheless, L2 students with different L1 backgrounds often need
individualized grammar instruction to help them effectively improve their language use (e.g., Lu &
Ai, 2015; Staples & Reppen, 2016). For instance, an ESL instructor who has L2 students primarily
from China and Mexico needs to adjust their grammar-teaching materials for students with Chinese
and Spanish L1s. Curriculum developers and/or teachers can work closely with scholars of grammati-
cal complexity to adjust existing teaching materials.

Future directions for grammatical complexity and second language research

This chapter has summarized sample studies (primarily carried out in the 2010s) to represent recent re-
search on grammatical complexity, language development, and language performance in L2 discourse.
Based on this summary, future research directions can be suggested. First, more empirical studies
should be conducted to validate whether large-grained syntactic measures and fine-grained grammati-
cal features can capture language development in different contexts. Polio (2017) proposed such a re-
search agenda, with one of the research tasks being to validate the existing developmental measures of
grammatical complexity. Biber et al. (2011) also called for more empirical studies to triangulate their
hypothesized developmental index of writing complexity features. Considering that the application
of grammatical complexity measures and features can be influenced by different factors (e.g., sample
size, corpus size, statistical methods), more validation studies will help us identify the most effective
indicators of language development in L2 learners. Also, discipline-specific writing should receive
more research attention in the future. Most empirical studies of language development and language
performance focus on a limited range of academic genres and/or registers, for example, argumentative

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papers (e.g., Lu & Ai, 2015; Staples & Reppen, 2016); narrative papers (e.g., Lu, 2011; Yang et al.,
2015); writing tasks in the TOEFL iBT (e.g., Guo et al., 2013; Kyle & Crossley, 2018); and research/
published articles in general (e.g., Ansarifar et al., 2018; Biber et al., 2011). While acknowledging the
importance of these genres/registers, it is also meaningful to explore grammatical complexity in genres
within specific disciplines, for instance, business proposals and technical engineering reports. Moreo-
ver, few empirical studies have investigated language development and language performance from a
cross-linguistic perspective, an exception being Clercq and Housen’s (2017) cross-linguistic analysis
of how L1 Dutch speakers longitudinally developed their L2s in English and French. Scholars are
encouraged to conceptually replicate Clercq and Houen (2017) for different groups of participants, for
example, to explore how L1 Chinese speakers develop their L2s of English, Japanese, and/or Korean.
Last but not least, it is suggested that there be more classroom-based studies to examine the effective-
ness of teaching grammatical complexity features to L2 learners. So far, existing empirical studies
have contributed to answering the question of “what to teach” to facilitate L2 learners’ language de-
velopment (e.g., Biber et al., 2011; Parkinson & Musgrave, 2014) and/or to enhance their language
performance in specific registers (e.g., Conrad, 2017; Staples & Reppen, 2016); however, the question
of “how to teach” has not received substantial research attention.

Note
1 The five dimensions (i.e., communicative functions) in Biber (1988) are Dimension-1: Involved versus Infor-
mational production; Dimension-2: Narrative versus Non-Narrative Concerns; Dimension-3: Explicit versus
Situation-Dependent Reference; Dimension-4: Overt Expression of Persuasion; Dimension-5: Abstract Non-
Abstract Information.

Further reading
Biber, D., Gray, B., Staples, S., & Egbert, J. (2021). The register-functional approach to grammatical complex-
ity: Theoretical foundation, descriptive research findings, application. Routledge.
This book is a collection of major research work on grammatical complexity within the register-functional ap-
proach. Based on two strands of research (i.e., the study of sociolinguistic variation and the text-linguistic study of
register variation), the book introduces different topics related to grammatical complexity, including the register-
functional perspective on complexity, linguistic studies of synchronic patterns, and the relationships between gram-
matical complexity and different factors (e.g., L1 background, discipline, genre, and task type). Thus, this book is a
comprehensive resource for using the register-functional analysis approach to investigate grammatical complexity.
Housen, A., Kuiken, F., & Vedder, I. (Eds.). (2012). Dimensions of L2 performance and proficiency: Complexity,
accuracy and fluency in SLA. John Benjamins.
This book is a collection of research based on the CAF framework (i.e., complexity, accuracy, and fluency),
which is an important framework in SLA. The three dimensions represented by the CAF framework have a
close relationship with L2 performance and L2 development. The book begins with a discussion of definitions
and operationalizations of L2 complexity, and it then introduces important topics in CAF research, such as the
psycholinguistic approach, formulaic sequences, task complexity, language development, proficiency, and per-
formance in L2 speaking and writing. Thus, this book is a comprehensive resource for using the CAF framework
and applying it in second language acquisition research.

References
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 8
CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON
DISCOURSE AND SECOND
LANGUAGE RESEARCH
Qinghua Chen, Yanmei Zheng, and Angel M. Y. Lin

Introduction
This chapter first presents an overview of the historical context and key concepts underlying criti-
cal perspectives on (big “D”) Discourse and their contributions to second language research. The
term Discourse (with a capitalized “D”) refers to social and cultural models or ideologies that allow
people to “enact specific identifies and activities” (Gee, 2015, p. 1) through their use of language.
With examples from both North American and Asian Pacific contexts, the chapter takes as its focus
research in the contexts of second language learning and teaching, locating them within their respec-
tive sociopolitical contexts. It discusses how the intersection of Discourse and power continues to be
an important focal point for doing and analyzing second language research. Drawing on critical work
from the last two decades, we discuss Colonial and Neoliberal Discourse and their implications for
second language researchers, and we consider why and how the critical paradigm takes on the work
of exploring alternative ontologies of language not as discrete, neutral entities but as ideological
Discourses. Key research perspectives and methods in the critical paradigm are then summarized.
As an addition to traditional discourse-based approaches in second language acquisition (SLA) re-
search (Celce-Murica & Olshtain, 2005), critical perspectives towards Discourse in second language
research have immense implications for reshaping how we conceptualize and study second language
learning and teaching. For example, by rejecting the tendency to view second language learners
through the lens of Deficit Discourse, we describe how an asset-based lens can be an alternative, em-
powering approach, together with translanguaging pedagogies (see also Nikula and Pitkänen-Huhta,
Chapter 22 in this volume) that can be implemented in our research and professional practices. The
chapter concludes by suggesting future research directions based on reflections on current critical
Discourse-oriented work.

Overview of critical perspectives on Discourse in second language research

Second language research has never been independent of its historical, social, and political context
(Blair, 2019). Before World War II, second language research mainly embraced modernist and struc-
turalist approaches. Concepts such as “target language,” and “interlanguage” (Selinker, 1972) were
developed as central explanatory components of the “scientific” study of second language acquisi-
tion, and prevailing views approached the acquisition process as apolitical, natural, and ideology-free.

88 DOI: 10.4324/9781003177579-9
 Critical perspectives on discourse and second language research

Such views and related discussion, however, appear to ignore that the very need to study the phe-
nomenon of teaching and learning a second language was tied to the geopolitical and socioeconomic
situation after World War II, where rapid economic expansion and growing demand for transnational
communications prompted the need for second language research to help improve the speed of ac-
quiring a second language (Davies, 2007). Thus, even though (big D) Discourse was not explicitly
discussed in second language research, it has always influenced second language learning, teaching,
and research. For example, in many former colonies, learning a second language (L2) has become the
norm, and usually the more prestigious languages (e.g., English, French) of the former colonizers are
chosen as the target second languages. Countries that have gained independence from colonial rule
have faced the difficult task of designing a national or regional policy determining the status of local
languages and the languages of their former colonizers (Hornberger & Vaish, 2006). Many countries
see the importance of promoting the local language(s), while at the same time, they are faced with
the need to continue the use of former colonizers’ languages, which are usually more widely spoken
and are afforded elevated status in the global marketplace. The situation is even more complicated
in countries such as India and Singapore that have many different local languages and dialects from
diverse ethnic groups, which poses numerous challenges in creating national language policies. Thus,
second language learning and teaching have always been related to power and Discourse. It is thus
important to discuss and research second language acquisition in relation to various Discourses af-
fecting language instruction, such as national policies, identities, and economic interests, especially
when multiple languages are involved (Jenks & Lee, 2016).

Second language in discursive contexts

The learning and teaching of a second language has various implications in different societies. In
countries that adopt a “one country/nation, one language” model, under the influence of this ideo-
logical Discourse, the teaching and learning of the first language (L1) serves the purpose of building
national solidarity and constructing citizenship (Otheguy et al., 2015). In addition to the first lan-
guage, many such countries also require students to learn a second (i.e., additional) language, which
is usually for instrumental purposes, such as gaining a competitive edge in the job market. Thus, the
choice of which language to learn as the second language is a more complex issue and can depend
on specific and local Discursive contexts. For example, in China, Mandarin Chinese is taught as the
first language across the country regardless of the home language, while most students learn English
as their second language (Guo, 2013; Hu, 2005). In Canada, English and French are the two official
languages, and many English-speaking families compete to send their children to French-immersion
schools to learn French as their second language (Marshall et al., 2021). In both examples, what lan-
guage to learn as a second language is a subject directly bound up with the study of Discourse and
power in society, which helps us recognizes the reality that L2 learning is not always a choice, nor
is the specific language one learns. English replacing Russian as the most-chosen second language
in China was the direct result of national policy and the aim of strengthening China’s international
competitiveness (Guo, 2013). For Chinese language-education policymakers, learning English is
believed to provide access to global knowledge and technology, which in turn can contribute to
China’s development. For Chinese students, learning English is a requirement to graduate from
university and sometimes a passport to a better-paid job in a more-preferred location. Different
from China, however, the preference for French immersion in Canada, as many have argued, is the
result of elitism (Marshall et al., 2021). In that context, parents feel that schools offering French
immersion are better than monolingual schools and will provide their children with the opportunity
to grow up with children from elite families (Marshall et al., 2021). Critical scholars, however,
have questioned the consequences of such second language policies or orientations in society.

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For example, Nakagawa and Kouritzin (2021) argue that learning a second language for such prag-
matic purposes has further limited the use and survival of vernacular, traditional language varieties,
or in some cases has caused the extinction of minority language varieties, because there is much less
foreseeable benefit from learning them. In other contexts, such as Singapore, national policy makes
English the compulsory language for every child, and the learning of the child’s respective heritage
language as the second language has been contested in recent years because students feel that it is
much easier to just use English to communicate, and they perceive learning traditional languages to
be a waste of time (Curdt-Christiansen & Huang, 2020; Mirvahedi, 2021). Over the years, English
has replaced traditional or ethnic languages in many Singaporean families, further limiting the use
of traditional and local languages. At this point, people may ask, why not just let these traditional
languages die and have everyone speak English? Many scholars from the critical paradigm have
explored this question.
To tackle this issue, it is important to challenge the assumption underlying the claim that the func-
tion of traditional or local languages can be simply replaced by dominant languages. The “conduit”
model of language, which sees the function of a language as only a channel or medium to pass on
information, continues to face critique from critical scholars. It has been pointed out that losing a
language also means that individuals and communities lose the social semiotic, intergenerational and
cultural repertoires and resources available for communication. For example, many expressions that
describe the taste and smell of food in the first author’s own dialect (Hengyang Dialect) do not have
equivalents in the national standard spoken language (Mandarin). Throughout childhood, he used
descriptive terms and phrases to describe the different levels of tenderness of rice noodles in his lo-
cal dialect. Had the dialect become extinct because everyone in that region uses only Mandarin, then
people’s ability to describe and share the properties of local food so vividly would likely be lost along
with it. This is also true with the indigenous languages in Canada. For example, Khawaja (2021) has
mentioned that the loss of indigenous languages in British Columbia in Canada has resulted in gaps
in food knowledge between generations, causing health and diet issues for some indigenous com-
munities. Thus, losing one language does not only mean losing semiotic resources, it also leads to the
loss of a knowledge system—a way of seeing, understanding, and exploring the world. By examining
and reflecting on the Discursive contexts of language learning and language policy, which are usu-
ally taken for granted as norms or reality, we can open the door for creating alternative Discourses
regarding second language learning to best avoid the negative consequences of current Discourses.
In recent years, the concept of translanguaging has offered another important perspective on un-
derstanding the issue of second language use (García & Li, 2014; García & Lin, 2017). García and
Lin (2017) have proposed the concept of “complete/whole linguistic repertoire,” which disrupts the
discrete boundaries between “named languages” and argues against the suppressing of one language
for the benefit of learning another. Li (2017) has also argued that translanguaging practices have al-
ways been the norm in everyday communication. Thus, no language can be simply replaced in terms
of its function and significance by a dominant language. Recently, the translanguaging movement has
become an important strand of critical work that sheds light on the hidden structures of power that
drive the learning and teaching of a second language and sometimes language policy, and it calls for
more equitable language policies and language use at both the personal and national levels. Critical
work in second language research, thus, reveals the presence and implications of language ideolo-
gies in societies and helps the world to see the value of not only minority, vernacular, and indigenous
languages but also the knowledge systems and epistemologies embedded in these languages. Critical
work also explores multiple possible strategies and has initiated different projects in various contexts
to revitalize languages through examining and reflecting on the influence of various Discourses on
second language learning (Leonet et al., 2017). This brings us to the discussion of second language
research and the notion of Discourses.

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Second language research and Discourses

For decades, much “scientific” study of second languages and second language learning has been
informed by cognitive perspectives (Zuengler & Miller, 2006). Many of the assumptions of the cog-
nitive tradition have, however, been challenged from both sociocultural and critical perspectives
(Flores & Rosa, 2019). In addition, critical scholars have questioned the assumption that acquiring a
second language is a value-free process, positing instead that it is a sociopolitical reality with serious
implications for L2 learners, teachers, and, of course, second language researchers.
A very useful distinction has been made between “discourse” and “Discourse” (Gee, 2015), which
is used extensively in critical discourse research. The term “discourse” with a small “d” refers to
“any stretch of language in use” (Gee, 2015, p. 1). The traditional approach to discourse in SLA,
which usually views discourse as language use and examines its communicative function in terms of
coherence and unity, can be useful in communicative approaches to language teaching and learning
(Celce-Murica & Olshtain, 2005). Typically, however, it does not take into account the “Discourse”
with a big “D,” which refers to social and cultural models or ideologies that allow people to “enact
specific identifies and activities” (Gee, 2015, p. 1). Since the 1990s, much theorizing and discussion
has been carried out concerning the diverse Discourses affecting second language learning and teach-
ing. In the following section, we discuss two such macro-Discourses and examine their influence on
second language learning, teaching, and research.

Colonial Discourse
Colonial Discourse has always influenced second language learning and teaching and has constructed
many language user identities that are racially and ethnically based. For example, the term “na-
tive speaker” and related terms like “authentic English,” and “pure American/British accents” are
commonly used. As a Discourse, Colonial Discourse has long been established and sometimes de-
politicized as a technical term to describe and reify taken-for-granted “fact” in language learning.
However, critical scholars have increasingly critiqued the use of these terms because of their con-
nections to Colonial Discourses and hegemonic structures of power (Flores & Rosa, 2019; Kubota,
2001; Lin & Motha, 2021; Motha & Lin, 2013). Sketching the colonial history of Hong Kong, a
former British colony, Lin and Motha (2021) explain how the desire for colonial English emerged
and is still motivating English learners in Hong Kong and beyond to yearn for certain varieties of
“native English,” such as speaking in the way BBC reporters speak. Lin and Motha argue that native/
nonnative are subject positions of domination and subordination, much like the subject positions of
colonizer/colonized, heterosexual/homosexual, bisexual, and transgender; the strategy of “multiply-
ing our patterns of cultural identification and emotional horizons” can help us to avoid falling into the
trap of such structures of domination (Lin & Motha, 2021, p. 14). In language or literacy education,
this strategy seems to offer a way out of the “access paradox” (Janks, 2004, p. 33), a term used to
describe the dilemma between providing students access to the dominant forms of knowledge (i.e.,
genres, academic registers) that, on the one hand, support their future socioeconomic mobility, and,
on the other, reproduce Discourses of dominance, especially if critical awareness is not simultane-
ously raised.
Colonial Discourses or ideologies (i.e., native-speakerism) go beyond fueling the desire for cer-
tain varieties of English, as they have also been found to affect the identity construction of students
from racialized and other minoritized backgrounds (Flores & Rosa, 2019). If such students are
learning the dominant language (English as an example) in a society in which their home language
is not recognized or valued, their bilingualism or multilingualism is usually viewed as a deficit,
hindering the learning of their second language (the dominant language in the society). Some argue

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that when students are repeatedly viewed as having a deficit because of their linguistic and cultural
background and thus continuously receive more scrutiny than their nonracialized peers, they are
more likely to internalize various forms of Deficit Discourse and the deficit identities they ascribe
(Flores & Rosa, 2019).
To counteract the Deficit Discourse of English language learners, critical scholars have adopted
new lenses to study discourse and communication in a more holistic sense. Lin, Wu, and Lemke
(2020) investigated how communication works as a flow/process of meaning-making in which vari-
ous semiotic resources are used. Thus, though language learners may sometimes experience dif-
ficulties in making meaning via language, they will naturally draw on other semiotic resources to
achieve their communicative goals. And, since communication is at least a two-way (i.e., collabora-
tive) process, other parties also share the responsibility for adapting ways of communication with
their counterparts. For example, if a teacher is teaching a class of speakers of English as an additional
language, it is also the responsibility of the teacher to adapt her/his language practice for the suc-
cessful communication with the students. Realizing and being aware of the shared responsibility in
communication helps us to resist the influence of various forms of Deficit Discourses, which simply
lay all the blame on the students’ level of English ability for any failed communication.

Neoliberal Discourse
Neoliberalism and various forms of Neoliberal Discourse have also influenced language education
and SLA research. Lin (1997) described an early example of this in Hong Kong, where the labor
market had been demanding that Hong Kong’s education system produce English-ready workers
since the early 1990s. To meet such labor demands, public discourses, including official education
documents, demanded accountability on the part of the education system for the “deteriorating Eng-
lish language proficiency of Hong Kong students” (Lin, 1997, p. 3). These public discourses were
found to sidetrack other important goals of education in Hong Kong while providing English-ready
labor for the capitalist market. There are some basic beliefs in language education that are actually
forms of Neoliberal Discourse. First, the instrumentalization of language is a belief that learning a
foreign language (usually a dominant language) can lead to economic gains through enabling access
to more career opportunities or richer social connections (Kubota, 2011b). Those who have the ex-
perience of learning another language are likely to have held such a simple belief in the past or even
now. The instrumentalization of language has therefore created booming language learning, training,
and testing businesses in many Asian countries (Laobao, 2004). In Neoliberalist Discourse, it is the
responsibility of individuals to obtain and maintain necessary skills to be competitive in the labor
market, and language skills are viewed as an important component of that competitive skill set (Shin
& Park, 2015). To achieve this goal, many individuals have sought language training and become
certified by taking various standardized tests. Some have even quit their jobs and joined language
classes locally or abroad for a better future career that is usually not guaranteed. The fundamental
problem with Neoliberalist Discourse is that it basically ignores other factors, such as race, gender,
or socioeconomic status, in the success stories it promotes. Following the line of Flores and Rosa
(2019), the economic gain of learning a new language also depends on race. For example, the abil-
ity to speak English is usually considered a requirement for seeking employment in Canada, while a
foreign national’s ability to speak Chinese is usually viewed as an asset in China (Chen et al., 2021).
However, the Neoliberalist Discourse usually puts the responsibility of skill development on the
shoulders of individuals, which helps create the Deficit Discourse and masks inequality. For exam-
ple, imagine a successful teacher who has previously worked in other countries is seeking work in
Canada. They will have to go through more hurdles (i.e., the bureaucratic process of getting certified
as an international teacher) than just adapting to teaching in a new language. This process can easily

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make incoming teachers feel they have not yet met the Canadian standard and thus must work harder
to pass all the hurdles. Kubota (2011b) also found that the Neoliberalist Discourse of learning a new
language neglects existing gender bias. For example, one participant in Kubota’s (2011b) study found
that she was only recognized as a legitimate English teacher in Japan after marrying an American.
For L2 research, it is thus important to have a greater meta-awareness of the Neoliberal Discourse.
Understanding the impact of Neoliberalist Discourse on language teaching and learning is im-
portant; likewise, it is also worthwhile to explore its impact on SLA research itself. As May (2011)
pointed out, much SLA research is still pursuing the “academic seriousness of the discipline” (p. 239),
which is critiqued by the critical paradigm as problematic and neglecting the lived experience of
language learners. We would argue that this trend has been reinforced by the Neoliberalist Discourse
which values researching and applying teaching methods, pedagogy in the classroom to generate
measurable change in teaching effectiveness with little regard to individual experiences in learning
and teaching, despite the positive developments over the past decades (Hyslop-Margison & Ayaz
Naseem, 2007). In educational research contexts, Hyslop-Margison and Ayaz Naseem (2007) identi-
fied this type of research behavior as having a “fetish for standardized testing” (p. 106), which is also
common in SLA research. Neoliberalist Discourse values economic globalization and technological
jingoism, and subsequently demands that those working in social science fields such as SLA research-
ers research and produce pedagogies or a machine to teach a second language as quickly as possible,
and as cheaply as possible. When past decades of SLA research, despite generating large amount of
knowledge about learning a second language, have failed to come up with a one-size-fits-all method
of teaching, the blame either goes to the research for its lack of “scientific rigor” or teachers for not
applying scientific research findings correctly (Hyslop-Margison & Ayaz Naseem, 2007). In fact, as
critical researchers in SLA have argued, the problem we are facing in SLA is not just a cognitive one
that is bound to be solved by a more careful scientific design, but a social one embedded in social
practice of language use and connected to ideologies in society, including the Neoliberalist Discourse
itself. Research and the academy, further, are not immune to neoliberalist influence—especially when
researchers are expected to mass-produce research for their future career development.

Main research methodologies and methods in critical perspectives on discourse

and second language research
Critical perspectives on second language research value people’s nuanced lived experience and
require critical examination of everyday discourses as Discourses (Pennycook, 2010; Pennycook,
2021). The most frequently used research methods include open-ended questionnaires and surveys,
semi-structured interviews, narrative inquiry (Barkhuizen, 2014), critical ethnography (Madison,
2020), conversation analysis (Goodwin & Heritage, 1990), and action research (Carr & Kemmis,
1986; Cohen et al., 2017). The choice of research methods is directly related to the positionality of
the researcher of critical research as well as the goal of the research, including the researcher’s under-
standing of language and communication.
As discussed earlier in this chapter, SLA has been influenced by many problematic Discourses from
other social science research and one such example is various forms of Deficit Discourse. In much
traditional SLA research, the researcher has usually been seen as more knowledgeable than the re-
search subjects (Lin, 2015). Also, some second language research assumes that nonnative speakers of
English have a deficit to be fixed in their language proficiency, and much research has been conducted
to diagnose such a deficit (Angelova & Riazantseva, 1999). These forms of the Deficit Discourse run
the risk of establishing an oppressive relationship between the researcher and the participants which
needs to be critically reflected on and addressed, and critical reflection on researcher positionality
informs the choice of research method. Open-ended questionnaires and surveys are usually preferred

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because they allow participants the freedom to voice their stories and concerns about what matters
to them, rather than limiting them to only providing information that the researchers are looking for.
They also reduce the possibility of imposing Deficit Discourses onto the research participants. In this
case, participants have the choice to express things that matter to them, in relation to the research
topic. In addition, open-ended questionnaires and surveys serve as material for researchers to learn
about the participants’ discourse and thus adjust their research questions, making the research more
beneficial to the research participants. This also holds true for semi-structured interviews when they
are used in critical research. Semi-structured interviews have a conversational focus and at the same
time facilitate a discussion between the researcher and participants (Mishler, 1991). This is especially
the case when the researcher engages in a critical examination of interested issues together with the
participants, and the boundary and distinction between the researcher and the researched is thus
disrupted, generating data that would otherwise not be available. For example, Kubota et al. (2021)
designed interview questions such as “Is there any experience of racism that you would like to share
with the group?” and “As a racialized minority, what is it that we want?” (p. 7). First, the open-ended
question in the focus-group interview offered an opportunity for the participant to share their experi-
ence of racism, which prompted other responses in the focus group. Also, the phrasing of “we want”
disrupts the boundary between the researcher and the researched, as both parties are identified as a
racialized minority in this study. This line of questioning not only prompted sharing from the partici-
pants, but also facilitated a critical discussion on the influence of Colonial Discourses in everyday
language use. Critical perspectives and an understanding of Discourses require the researcher to be
more self-aware, reflective, reflexive, and sensitive to power and positionality.
Narrative inquiry (Barkhuizen, 2014) is another research method commonly used in Discourse-
oriented critical research. Coming from the social constructivist tradition, narrative inquiry offers
the opportunity for participants to interpret and reflect on their own lived experience in the form of
storytelling, which reveals not only what has been experienced by the participants from their own
understanding, but also their interpretations of these experiences. The researcher may also follow
and observe participants for an extended period of time and makes sense of participants’ stories and
narratives, connecting the lived experiences of the participants and their interpretations with various
macro-Discourses and power relations at the societal level. For example, Kayi-Aydar (2015) con-
ducted three interviews at different points in a participant’s life trajectory and obtained their journal
in order to understand their identity transformation and explore the underlying issues behind the
participant’s narrative that had caused them to give up teaching Spanish. Kayi-Aydar’s study provides
insights for future language teacher education programs, and for teacher educators, to help develop a
sense of belonging for preservice teachers in diverse language classrooms, it also demonstrates how
macro-Discourses are embedded in the everyday lived experience of the participants.
Critical ethnography is different from conventional ethnographic research, which aims to understand
a certain culture or a group. Critical ethnographic work has an emphasis on critically examining Dis-
courses and being transparent about the values, influences, and limitations of the ethnographers carrying
out the study (Madison, 2020). Stanley (2016) offers an example of critical ethnography in her study of
Westerners in Shanghai working as English teachers, in relation to multiple Discourses, including native
speakerism in EFL in China. Although Stanley had extensive experience of teaching English in many
countries, she thinks the teaching and living experiences in China were unique in terms of the way she
found herself practicing her professional identity. Stanley demonstrated in-depth reflexivity concerning
her own positionality in the study and how critical perspectives towards Discourse have influenced her
research. For example, in chapter 12 of her book, she offers an extensive discussion of the effect of her
study on the participants themselves. She explored the contingencies of debunking native speakerism as
a Discourse with her participants. She reported feeling reluctant to tell her participants that their lessons
were full of Colonial Discourses. She also reflected on the effect of her extensive experience of English

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language teaching, which could have been intimidating to some of the participants in her study who
were novice teachers. Because of this awareness, she tried to gain acceptance with the participants by
“identifying and emphasizing commonalities with the teachers” (Stanley, 2016, p. 72).
Critical action research is a collaborative research method where a researcher and a research
participant, usually a teacher, work together to diagnose a potential issue or problem in the field and
then come up with a solution (Carr & Kemmis, 1986). Action research assumes that a participant’s
knowledge is usually embedded in the everyday practice of teaching, so working with the participant
offers the necessary involvement required for such knowledge to emerge (Carr & Kemmis, 1986).
For critical action research, the influence of power relations often normalized as Discourses in educa-
tion are embedded in the everyday business of teaching, so participating in such critical and reflec-
tive processes helps the researcher to uncover hidden processes of oppression through examining
discourses in education. For example, emerging from fieldwork in the classroom, translanguaging
approaches have offered a new perspective on how second language learning disrupts the normalized
Discourse of discrete named languages. Using action research, Schissel et al. (2018) designed and
implemented a translanguaging approach to assessment in real second-language-teaching contexts
in Mexico. The action research method itself opens the door for such exploratory intervention to the
dominant, established monolingual assessment practices in school systems. During a focus group
interview, some participants reported their concerns with translanguaging approaches to assessment,
even though they personally were in favor of this approach. The participants and the researcher had
fruitful discussions and brainstormed counter-discourses to defend translanguaging approaches to
assessment and to involve more teachers and schools.
Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a common method in the critical paradigm for analyzing data
(Lin, 2014). Fairclough (2001) proposed a CDA framework as follows (p. 5):

1 Focus upon a social problem which has a semiotic aspect.

2 Identify obstacles to the problem being tackled.
3 Consider whether the social order (network of practices) in a sense “need” the problem.
4 Identify possible ways past the obstacles.
5 Reflect critically on the analysis (1–4).

To exemplify this analytical framework, we apply it to analyze a job advertisement looking for na-
tive speakers of English to work as English teachers (Internet Archive, 2020). The specific advertise-
ment sparked much criticism after it was circulated on social media and was thus taken down by the
website owner. Apart from its extensive derogatory comments about nonnative English speakers as
English teachers, one of the most problematic sentences in the advertisement is: “If you’re a citizen of a
country such as India, the Philippines or the Caribbean islands, English may well be your first language,
but you’re still not technically defined as a native English speaker, Sorry!” (Internet Archive, 2020).
This specific sentence invited considerable criticism and was also contested by people on the internet.
The advertisement implies two forms of Deficit Discourse: first, it normalizes the Discourse that
native-speaker English teachers are universally superior to their nonnative counterparts; second, re-
gions such as India, the Philippines, or the Caribbean have inferior versions of English. Thus, from this
job advertisement, we have identified the Deficit Discourse about nonnative speakers of English and
English speakers from certain countries. The ideology behind the native-speaker Discourse is not new,
but there are at least a few obstacles that are preventing the transformation of related discriminatory
practices, such as (a), teachers, students, and parents’ desire for colonial English (Lin & Motha, 2021);
(b) the teaching materials currently in use, which reflect very limited varieties of world Englishes
(Jenks & Lee, 2016; Kubota, 2011a); (c) the internalization of a Deficit Discourse on the part of nonna-
tive English speakers in terms of their cultural knowledge (Marshall & Lee, 2017); and (d) ineffective

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strategies to counteract a Deficit Discourse toward nonnative English speakers (Chen et al., 2021).
Since there are multiple obstacles preventing the transformation of discriminatory practices against
nonnative speakers of English, it is very difficult to expect any easy change. For example, although
the job advertisement with its blatant discriminatory Discourse against people from certain countries
(and nonnative speakers of English) went viral and was heavily criticized, the updated version of the
web page still upheld these discriminatory categorizations by diverting the blame for discrimination to
the visa policies of many countries that hire English teachers from abroad, rather than debunking the
advertisement’s native-speakerism Discourse (Teaching English Abroad and Online, 2021).
After identifying the obstacles, the analysis moves onto the next stage of Fairclough’s model, to
examine whether native/nonnative speaker Discourse is needed in the network of social practices.
Many scholars have identified the problem of discriminating against nonnative speakers of English or
English speakers from certain countries (Kubota, 2011a) and have found this distinction pedagogically
unhelpful. Lin and Motha (2021) have argued that the desire for colonial English should be subjected
to conscious examination and that an alternative desire for learning English should be created, moti-
vated, for example, by the desire to be able to communicate with all speakers of English and to be able
to better understand the varieties of English that the learner will encounter in everyday life. Thus, in
the social network of learning and teaching English as a second or additional language, discrimination
against nonnative speakers renders the native/nonnative distinction not only pedagogically meaning-
less, but harmful. By contrast, the practice of learning and teaching English as well as second language
research can be transformed by resisting various forms of Deficit Discourse and focusing more on
learners in specific contexts for their respective learning purposes, rather than pressuring all learners to
acquire certain varieties of the language, such as the (former) colonizer’s English varieties, which are
socially distant. So, second language learning and teaching is a social practice, and Discourses such as
native speakerism should be problematized and examined for their pedagogical value.

Sample studies of critical perspectives on discourse in second language research

In this section of the chapter, three samples of critical work in second language research and Dis-
course will be presented for the purpose of exemplifying how critical work can reveal hidden power
relations, disrupt domination, and counteract oppression in each context. The criticality in these stud-
ies lies in the research methods, design, theorization, and implications of the research.
One sample study of a critical perspective in second language Discourse-oriented research is
Kubota et al. (2021), which explores the lived experiences of racialized students and academic staff
in a Canadian university. The study adopted critical race theory (Delgado & Stefancic, 2017) as the
interpretative lens to examine the reported lived experiences of students and academic staff regarding
issues of language, and demonstrated how racialized individuals in the university were essentialized
into categories of race, ethnicity, and nationality due to whether they spoke “White English” or not.
The stories presented and analyzed in the study revealed how seemingly innocent practices of com-
plimenting the language proficiency of racialized nonnative speakers of Canada’s official languages
are de facto examples of Othering. The study contributes to sharing the lived experience of racialized
members of the society to help others understand how their experiences are “tightly intertwined with
white expectations,” which are related to Colonial Discourses (Kubota et al., 2021, p. 18).
Lin (2020) is another study that questions the deficit model of teaching international students and
promotes an asset model of teaching, citing evidence of the rich semiotic practices and repertoires
utilized by international and migrant students. For example, to counter the Discourse of authenticity
(the need to learn the most authentic English), concepts like world Englishes have been used to legiti-
mize the varieties of Englishes spoken by international students, diversifying public discourse about
learning English. Based on evidence from the higher education field, Lin discusses the difference

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between the binary thinking of “either or” from the pluralistic thinking of “co-existence” regarding
the different languages of teachers and students in the higher education context. These insights help
to transcend the debate about whether L1 or L2 should be used in teaching and assessment and to
establish the heteroglossic norms.
Leonet et al. (2017) is an action research project about implementing translanguaging as a peda-
gogical tool to develop language and metalinguistic awareness in three named languages, namely
Basque, Spanish, and English. While conducting their research, the researchers took into considera-
tion the relative positions of the three languages in the context, with Basque as the minority language
and the focus of language revitalization work. Due to this critical awareness of Basque as the minor-
ity language, for their pedagogical intervention, the researchers carefully planned for spaces to be
provided in which the Basque language was used and integrated these efforts into their translanguag-
ing pedagogy. The active discussion on Discourse of named languages and listening to teacher par-
ticipants’ discourse on these three languages helped craft a contextualized pedagogical intervention.

Implications of critical perspectives on discourse in second language learning,

teaching, and use
Critical perspectives on Discourse and language have significant transformative potential for teach-
ing and researching practices, pedagogy, and the learning of second languages. From a theoretical
point of view, they open up the opportunity to transform established structuralist understandings of
second language acquisition. For example, discourses in SLA research like “target language” and
“interlanguage” have been important theoretical constructs and have played a major role in theorizing
second language learning, teaching, and use. As suggested by the word “target,” the type of language
that second language learners are expected to use is indicated. However, in reality, they are all using
an “interlanguage,” because the ability to use the “target language” perfectly can almost never be
gained. Although the widely used Discourse of target language has contributed to understandings and
theorizations of second language learning, it is not without negative consequences. The Discourse
that language learners should work hard to appropriate the “target language” is less useful in actual
teaching. Many critical scholars have argued that such theoretical constructs and their related Dis-
courses categorize all second language learners as having a deficit and that this can be transformed by
means of translanguaging and heteroglossic approaches that are more inclusive of learners’ diverse
backgrounds, and of their diverse first languages (Lin, 2020).
In second language learning, questioning the Discourse of target language helps to resist the incli-
nation to inhibit the use of the first language for the benefit of learning the second. Both the first and
the second language are parts of a whole linguistic repertoire that can be expanded by meaningfully
engaging with new linguistic or semiotic resources. For second language teaching, it may be more
beneficial for students to gain experience of many different varieties and versions of the second lan-
guage, or to practise the variety of language that they will likely encounter in future study or work.
For research in second languages, with different answers to the question of what language is, more
diversified research methodology and methods will also be applied, revealing insights that are other-
wise ignored by the conventional cognitive approaches.

Further directions for critical perspectives on Discourse and second

language research
Many researchers have argued for the need to be aware of who is benefiting from research (Hashey
& Connors, 2003). This is also true for SLA research informed by a critical perspective on Discourse.
Although we as researchers can be genuinely intrigued by how we acquire another language, the

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phenomenon we are observing is a significant part of the lived experience of another human being,
and as researchers we should be aware of the impact of our work. For example, L2 researchers should
be mindful of the possibility of normalizing or legitimizing various forms of Deficit Discourse in and
through their research. We argue that second/additional language acquisition is an inseparable part
of the social experience of being human. Students/participants and teachers/researchers are all influ-
enced by Colonial and/or Neoliberalist Discourse. It is important to ensure that the research process
itself and public Discourses generated by research are reciprocal rather than oppressive. We suggest
SLA researchers should be mindful of how their research can affect the experience of research partici-
pants and put more weight on this when designing and presenting a study. We should all reflect on this
question: how can participants benefit from our research? There is a certain degree of replication in
the critical work of unveiling power relations by adopting a structure and agency framework (Song,
2021). This strand of work interprets people’s lived experiences through the interactions between the
societal structural forces that limit the choices of individuals and the ability of those individuals to
make free choices about their lives. Although such language research is insightful and useful, it still
leaves much to be desired in terms of the orientation of meaningful counteraction and transformation
of oppressive Discourses in second language teaching, learning, and research.
In terms of research design, even though we step into the field with specific research questions in
mind and get to know our participants, we should also be more open both about what matters to those
participants and their personal discourses regarding language learning, because we are involved in
their lived language learning experience. For example, even though translanguaging may be an ap-
proach that is endorsed by many scholars as transformative and beneficial, in that it provides counter-
discourses that challenge oppressive societal and institutional Discourses, this does not mean we
should be applying it mechanically in the field with little regard for contextual specificity. More work
needs to be done to find ways to tune translanguaging pedagogies to face challenges such as minority
language revitalization and multilingual approaches to assessment, so that critical work itself does
not become another dominating force.
Although critical work usually values deep engagement with research participants, such as stu-
dents and teachers, it is important to be aware that critical scholars and researchers also have their
own blind spots and are not immune to the influence of Discourses. Also, it is important to value the
Discourses, knowledge, and insights of frontline second language teachers. For example, much has
been achieved in demonstrating how a deficit model regarding second language learners is counter-
productive, yet much more work is needed on developing culturally responsive pedagogies that adopt
an assets-based model (Lin, 2020). This type of work requires researchers to go beyond being passive
observers by taking on the responsibility of exploring what changes are possible, and of challeng-
ing—and transforming—the status quo.
As Neoliberalist Discourse has affected almost every corner of our society, academic work is
not immune from it. We have witnessed an increasing number of research students and academic
members of staff striving to become recognized scholars, sometimes by piling up a sheer number of
publications to gain competitiveness, as if quality research work can be accomplished individually.
While we are all, to different degrees, under the influence of Colonial and Neoliberalist Discourses,
it is very important to have and to cultivate critical research allies to conduct collaborative research,
even when we think we have critical awareness. The embeddedness of research into these Discourses
makes it harder for individual researchers to reflect on their research practices. However, during col-
laboration, researchers can help each other to see blind spots in their research design, ontological and
epistemological orientations, data generation, and data analysis. As researchers who have engaged
with various critical theories and approaches for years, we are not immune to the invasion of colonial
and neoliberalist ideologies, because of our decades of immersion in them. This is why collaborative
research is essential.

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Transforming the practice of SLA research also requires a higher degree of intercultural aware-
ness. More critical ethnographic research is needed to portray how intercultural communication actu-
ally happens in various settings, which could potentially help raise cultural awareness among second
language teachers and also prompt changes in policy and public discourse regarding second language
education. In this regard, Discourse-oriented critical perspectives become important tools to exam-
ine, challenge, and transform the problematic practices in second language learning, teaching, and
research. To achieve that purpose, we need to revisit research methods, researcher positionality, and
relationships between researchers and participants.

Further reading
Lin, A. M. Y. (2014). Critical discourse analysis in applied linguistics: A methodological review. Annual Review
of Applied Linguistics, 34, 213–232.
This article offers a synthesis of the definition, application, and implications of critical discourse analysis in
the field of applied linguistics. It provides a description of various types of critical discourse analysis and how
they serve as a methodological toolbox for conducting CDA.
Motha, S., & Lin, A. (2013). “Non-coercive Rearrangements”: Theorizing desire in TESOL. TESOL Quarterly,
48(2), 331–359.
This article explores how Colonial Discourse affects the learning and teaching of English today and suggests
possible ways to critically analyze and transcend the desire for an English driven by Colonial Discourse.
Shin, H., & Park, J. S.-Y. (2015). Researching language and neoliberalism. Journal of Multilingual and Multi-
cultural Development, 37(5), 443–452.
This article discusses the influence of Neoliberalist Discourse and how it affects language research, in terms
of its related theory, methodology, and implications.

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 9
A DISCURSIVE PSYCHOLOGICAL
APPROACH FOR SECOND
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
RESEARCH
Matthew T. Prior

Introduction
Over the past three decades, discursive psychology has established itself as an influential approach
to the study of discourse and psychological concerns in talk and text across a range of academic
disciplines, including psychology, sociology, education, and the health sciences. It shares with many
other discourse-analytic approaches the assumption that human language and communication must
be studied as social (inter)action rather than simply the transmission of thoughts and words. Like
conversation analysis (Hasegawa, Chapter 2 in this volume), discursive psychology examines the
sequential and situated nature of those social actions, their relevance, and their procedural conse-
quentiality in real time. And, like other approaches to discourse and interaction, discursive psychol-
ogy seeks to make visible speakers’ (and writers’) various communicative resources, repertoires,
goals, and accomplishments. However, what distinguishes discursive psychology from other forms
of discourse analysis, and from cognitive psychology, is its central concern with psychological topics
such as cognition,1 emotion, memory, perception, and attribution and how they are locally produced
and oriented to as inter-individual (i.e., publicly available, relational) rather than intra-individual
(i.e., internal) phenomena.
The aim of this chapter is to show how discursive psychology offers a bridge between discourse
analysis and second language acquisition (SLA) research—radical in its approach to psychology and
meaning and rich in its potential to inform other discourse-analytic approaches and research methods.
I begin by outlining the origins of discursive psychology, highlighting its aims, analytic features, and
unique contributions to social psychological research. I then examine how discursive psychology,
specifically its analytic orientation, can inform SLA research and how its constructionist perspective
and project of respecification—the discursive reworking of traditional or cognitive psychology and
its objects of study—offer powerful tools to redefine and recontextualize SLA topics. The chapter
concludes with potential applications of discursive psychology in SLA research and suggestions for
further reading.

An overview of discursive psychology

Compared with other approaches to the study of interaction, talk, and text, such as conversation
analysis and critical discourse analysis, discursive psychology is a relative newcomer. Its founders,
Derek Edwards and Jonathan Potter (1992), first coined the “discursive psychology” (or DP) program

102 DOI: 10.4324/9781003177579-10

 A discursive psychological approach for SLA research

and laid out its framework with their Discourse Action Model; however, its interdisciplinary origins
can be traced to various developments in social psychology (e.g., Potter & Wetherell, 1987), fueled
in large part by a growing dissatisfaction with prevailing cognitivist perspectives and an interest in
recording and analyzing naturalistic interaction.
Early discursive psychology scholarship drew on an eclectic mix that included poststructuralist
thought, Wittgensteinian language philosophy (Potter, 2001), speech act theory (Austin, 1962), and
the sociology of scientific knowledge (Gilbert & Mulkay, 1984). (For detailed discussions of the
origins of discursive psychology, see Prior, 2016a; Tileaga & Stokoe, 2016; Wiggins, 2017; Wooffitt,
2005). From sociology, discursive psychology incorporated the tools and perspectives of ethnometh-
odology and conversation analysis, especially in its sequential approach to naturally occurring talk,
close analysis of turn design, and interest in intersubjective understandings between participants in
an interaction. Discursive psychology emphasized language and discourse as social actions and in-
teractional accomplishments. It therefore led with the imperative to understand language in the social
and practical contexts of its use. Contemporaneous developments in discursive rhetoric (e.g., Billig
et al., 1988) and constructionist scholarship (e.g., Harré & Stearns, 1995) informed and resonated
with discursive psychology’s dissatisfaction with traditional psychology and cognitivist perspectives
more broadly. Among these critiques included

a failure to explore the relationship between ordinary communication and psychological analy-
sis; the use of methodologies which ignore the sequential organisation of natural discourse;
and a failure to recognise how descriptions and versions of events are constructed to perform
social actions.
(Wooffitt, 2005, pp. 69–70)

As discursive psychology evolved, multiple strands emerged to investigate an array of topics (e.g.,
gender, sexuality, race, emotion) and to apply their theoretical and analytic perspectives across the
“micro-macro” continuum—from sequential conversation analysis to Foucauldian discourse analy-
sis. For the sake of space, I will focus here on the most influential strand, what is sometimes labeled
contemporary discursive psychology.

Contemporary discursive psychology

Of the various streams of discursive psychological work over the past 30 years, most prominent
has been that associated with its founders, Edwards and Potter, and their colleagues (e.g., Tileaga &
Stokoe, 2016; Wiggins, 2017). Contemporary discursive psychology applies both an ethnomethodo-
logical sensibility (i.e., an interest in interactional orderliness achieved through people’s everyday
common sense and competences) and the sequential analytic repertoires of conversation analysis and,
to some extent, membership categorization analysis (Fitzgerald & Housley, 2015), to the study of
commonplace “psychological” topics or phenomena. There is sometimes confusion about discursive
psychology as a program, because some practitioners generically refer to it as “discourse analysis” or
describe it as conversation analysis applied to psychology (e.g., Potter, 2021). Like conversation analy-
sis, with which it shares many meta-theoretical assumptions and analytic tools, discursive psychology
has been accused of focusing on the “micro” or overly “technical” concerns (e.g., turn-taking, repair,
transcription) at the expense of the “macro” (i.e., society, culture) and the “meso” (i.e., institutions,
communities). However, discursive psychology’s stance is that labels such as micro-meso-macro are
arbitrary rather than natural distinctions, and that they are, in fact, formulations—descriptions, heuris-
tics, or ways of talking about the world (i.e., epistemological matters rather than objective, ontological
facts)—and therefore the very sort of fuel that drives discursive psychology’s analytic engine.

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Discourse
Because of its interdisciplinary origins and interests, discursive psychology has many points of con-
tact with other discourse-analytic approaches. Therefore, to appreciate the distinctiveness of dis-
cursive psychology and its exciting potential and practical utility for SLA research, it is essential to
understand how it conceptualizes discourse. Discursive psychology operates from a tripartite view of
discourse (Wiggins & Potter, 2017): (a) discourse as constructed and constructive, (b) discourse as
action-oriented, and (c) discourse as situated. I will address each of these features in turn.

Discourse as constructed and constructive

Discursive psychology can be understood as a form of (discursive) constructionist inquiry (Potter
& Hepburn, 2008; Prior & Talmy, 2019, 2021). Discourse in discursive psychology is constructed
through a range of lexical choices, grammatical structures, phrases, metaphors, idioms, rhetorical
devices, prosodic resources (e.g., pitch, stress), language varieties, and nonvocal factors such as
temporal cues, sequencing, proxemics, gaze, gesture, sign, space, text, emojis, and objects. Together,
these linguistic utterances and other multi-semiotic and multimodal resources allow social members
to organize their talk to construct, perform, and stabilize particular actions, mental states, meanings,
accounts, or versions of the world within the context of the local (and translocal) interaction (cf. Pot-
ter & Hepburn, 2008). Discursive psychology recognizes that discourse always consists of a selection
from alternatives (e.g., “uncomfortable” versus “angry”), with various selections (or formulations)
supporting different rhetorical purposes, meanings, and outcomes. Thus, in discursive psychology,
motivation, cognition, emotion, and other “cognitive” phenomena are not treated as inherent qualities
of human discourse or as reflective of internal psychologies but as matters that are made relevant and
worked out in interaction. Considering recent developments in SLA, especially in translanguaging,
translingualism, and raciolinguistic research, which explicitly reject deficit ideologies and monolin-
gual or native-speaker norms by recognizing multilinguals’ or second/additional (L2/Lx) language
users’ various semiotic repertoires and capabilities, we can see the power of discursive psychology
to attend to those repertoires and to recognize and explicate language users’ agentive, goal-directed
activities and accomplishments.

Discourse as action-oriented
Discourse is the object and mode of focus because it is the “primary arena for action” (Wiggins &
Potter, 2017, p. 94). That is, everyday human life operates in and through discourse, which encom-
passes language and various other communicative resources, social relationships, and interactional
environments. As Wiggins and Potter describe,

in speaking we blame, justify, invite, compliment and so on. Hence to separate talk and action
as psychologists commonly do (for example in distinctions such as attitudes vs. behaviour) is
to set up a false dichotomy, and to overlook the ways in which talk achieves things in itself.
(p. 99)

This is not to say that discourse is all there is, but that it is how we, as humans, organize, make
sense of, and participate in the world with those around us. Applied to SLA research, we can see how
a discursive psychological approach can help decenter and destabilize deficit views of L2 users by
shifting the focus from what they presumably lack or are unable to do to one that makes visible their
active work to achieve specific goals in both shared and creative ways.

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Discourse as situated
Discourse, like all human action, is always made locally relevant and consequential. This is not to deny
intertextuality, or the shared histories, meanings, and associations of particular words and discourses
that coalesce around their repeated use; rather, this is a recognition that discourse is always embedded
in the here and now in which it emerges—and for the purposes at hand. We can conceptualize the situ-
ated nature of discourse in at least two ways. First, discourse is always situated in specific spatiotem-
poral, interpersonal, institutional, or other contexts, among specific interactants and/or for specific
recipients—and from their perspectives and through their available communicative and interpretive
resources. Second, discourse is always situated prospectively and retrospectively “within a specific se-
quential environment; words are understood according to what precedes and follows them” (Wiggins
& Potter, 2017, p. 99). Discourse here is not conceived as something extraordinary but extra-ordinary:
the mundane terrain of human activity where meaning and understanding are collaboratively made,
unmade, and remade. This is another reminder of discursive psychology’s self-reflexive approach to
the production and analysis of discourse: “For both participants and analysts, the primary issue is the
social actions, or interactional work, being done in the discourse” (Edwards & Potter, 1992, p. 2).

Psychology
To appreciate the truly radical potential of discursive psychology, especially for SLA research, re-
quires an understanding of its approach to psychology. From their respective beginnings, SLA and
discursive psychology have each been shaped by their relationship with the fields and topics of psy-
chology. Whereas mainstream SLA embraced cognitive psychology and the cognitive sciences as
its theoretical and methodological “home,” discursive psychology is nothing less than a thorough
challenge to and respecification of traditional or cognitive psychology and its objects of study (e.g.,
memory, attribution, perception, belief, emotion). In psychology and other cognitive perspectives,
including much of the field of SLA, discourse has often been understood as a means of tapping into
mental processes (at least indirectly). In discursive psychology, the relationship between discourse
and psychology is reversed. Psychology is not the mode or tool of analysis but “an object in and for
interaction” (Potter, 2005, p. 739, emphasis in original) and therefore itself an object for analysis. In
discursive psychology, psychological objects and processes are reframed as “ways of talking” and
matters of concern for social members themselves: that is, how people make psychology relevant and
how they make things “psychological” as they go about the business of everyday life. This does not
require us to assume that individuals do not have minds, brains, or psychologies; nor does it advocate
“anything goes” relativism (cf. Edwards et al., 1995). This is a radically epistemological stance rather
than ontological. Whatever else cognitions, beliefs, emotions, attitudes, intentions, and so on may
be (and here, discursive psychology is content to let the language philosophers, neuroscientists, be-
havioral psychologists, and others offer their own theories), they are at least, within the realm of the
everyday modes by which ordinary people interact and work to understand one another, empirically
analyzable as ways of talking, interacting, knowing, and being known.
This action-oriented and embodied treatment of psychological concerns or “issues of mind” (Pot-
ter, 2005, p. 743) is one of discursive psychology’s most potent contributions to SLA research, as it
“rejects the cognitivist assumption that minds are revealed or expressed in what people say” (Edwards
& Potter, 2005, p. 243) and avoids speculating about intentionality or what speakers are “trying” to
do. It is also here where the differences between conversation analysis and discursive psychology
are most visible. Whereas discursive psychology’s perspective remains distinctly anti-cognitivist,
conversation analysis has in recent years sometimes been accused of embracing a form of interaction-
based cognitivism (Potter, 2005), which has generated some tension between the two approaches.

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A discursive psychological approach to research

Discursive psychology is best considered an approach or analytic orientation rather than a standalone
method or theory of discourse or psychology. In this section, I discuss some key considerations in using
discursive psychology as a research approach and offer guidance for carrying out analysis. Although
some of what I describe here holds true for conversation analysis (see Hasegawa, this volume), I will
foreground some of the salient similarities and differences between these two approaches and the unique
methodological implications and contributions of discursive psychology as regards SLA research.

Naturalistic data
Like conversation analysis, discursive psychology is interested in social life—not in the abstract, but as
it is lived and made recognizable through local, in situ activities and actions that take place among spe-
cific interactants. In this view, “psychology” is not something that people have or reflect, but something
in which they actively take part. Discursive psychology is therefore interested in naturalistic or natu-
rally occurring (i.e., nonelicited, spontaneous) data: talk, interaction, text, or multimodal communica-
tion not prompted by the researcher or written down from memory after the fact. Consequently, it has
largely eschewed interviews, focus groups, surveys, discourse completion tasks, and other methods that
function more as modes of data generation than as data collection. It is worth noting that early discur-
sive psychology did make use of interviews, but such data were increasingly criticized and subsequently
abandoned for being artificial and not reflective of everyday human interaction. Some researchers (e.g.,
Prior, 2016a; Speer, 2002) have questioned the naturalistic–artificial distinction, arguing instead that the
primary issue should not be the nature of the data but the nature of the analysis: that is, conversation
must be analyzed as conversation, classroom interaction must be analyzed as classroom interaction, and
interviews must be analyzed as interviews (e.g., Prior, 2016a; Prior & Talmy, 2021).
Regardless of the source material, of crucial importance for the researcher is that the forms and
functions of the data can never be competently analyzed without reference to the modality (e.g., spo-
ken, written, multimodal) and context (e.g., spontaneous conversation, classroom settings, research
interviews) in which they occurred or were generated. As with other interaction-based approaches,
the most common means of capturing the kinds of naturalistic data with which discursive psychol-
ogy is concerned is audio and video recording. Where possible, high-quality audio-video (rather than
audio only) is preferred to facilitate multimodal analysis that examines language, prosody, gesture,
embodiment, and other semiotic repertoires and features of the communicative activity. Fortunately,
the proliferation of mobile phones and other handheld technologies has allowed most researchers to
create high-quality recordings. Although I have emphasized discursive psychology’s attention to talk
and interactional data, its interest in discourse and rhetoric also lends itself to the analysis of various
kinds of print and digital media (see also Wiggins, 2017).

Transcription
Because discursive psychology shares with conversation analysis its stance toward discourse (i.e.,
talk-in-interaction) as the primary mode of social action and meaning-making, it relies on many of
the same tools and analytic procedures. Discursive psychology therefore employs systematic, fine-
grained Jeffersonian transcription (Jefferson, 2004), with line numbers, time measurements, marked
overlaps, nonverbal cues, and other details to represent the various linguistic (e.g., vocabulary, gram-
mar, language varieties, rhetorical devices) and paralinguistic (e.g., prosody, pauses, volume, empha-
sis) features of the interaction. This is not simply a technical exercise but a critical analytic step and
tool to make visible, accountable, and analyzable the details of what and how things get produced
(or not) and responded to (or not) within a given interaction. More recent developments in both

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discursive psychology and conversation analysis have used screen grabs, “comic book” panels, and
other innovative visual representations to make multimodal data more accessible in print and in
public presentations (for more on data transcription and representation, including considerations for
transcribing multilingual and non-English data, see Hepburn & Bolden, 2017).

Analysis
Analysis in discursive psychology is an inductive and iterative process in which researchers back-
ground their assumptions rather than engage in a priori hypothesis testing. Analytic bracketing (and
“unmotivated” looking) is a key ethnomethodological tenet of both discursive psychology and conver-
sation analysis and refers to researchers’ conscious efforts to avoid inserting their preconceptions (e.g.,
about the speakers, the context, the activity) into, or applying exogenous theories (e.g., of learning,
mind, emotion, identity; cf. Kasper, 2009) onto data analysis and instead endeavor to understand the
interaction on its own terms. Such an analytic stance is “radically emic” (Markee & Kasper, 2004) and
radically epistemic because it is explicitly participant-centered. This is not to suggest that research can
ever be motivation-free or atheoretical or that researchers do not (or should not) consciously select set-
tings, data, activities, speakers, and so on for analysis (cf. Talmy, 2009, on “motivated” analysis)—or
even that they should avoid using their own membership or ethnographic knowledge; rather, it is an
analytic stance that refuses to privilege such motivations or knowledge above the interactional data.

Displays and orientations

In discursive psychology, careful, sequential analysis of talk and interaction is the aim, with a focus
on what is publicly available, practically accessible, and demonstrably relevant to interactants them-
selves. Most importantly, this self-reflexive approach requires the analyst to refrain from engaging
in cognitive or psychological analysis—especially about matters of intentionality. Instead of mak-
ing assumptions about what interactants know or understand, it seeks to understand how interactants
display and orient to their respective sets of knowledge and understandings; it recognizes that as an
interaction unfolds turn by turn, in real time, interactants monitor, display, and modify their under-
standings, collaboratively building intersubjectivity or shared understanding. Psychology therefore
becomes analyzable as a procedural matter. Instead of treating “motivation,” for instance, as a trait/
state located in an individual’s mind or reflective of one’s personality, discursive psychology would
examine how language learners and teachers talk about, evaluate, account for, and make accountable
behaviors, activities, learning materials, learning environments, among other factors, in terms of their
motivational qualities and dimensions. This allows us to examine motivational moments or trajecto-
ries as they emerge and coalesce. We can see a discursive psychological approach to SLA topics has
much potential to reveal not just that motivation, for instance, is relevant but how, when, where, with
whom, and by whom it is made relevant and meaningful in a given context. Again, this is not to assert
that psychological or other phenomena are only discursive or matter only in interaction; rather, this is a
refusal to subordinate discourse to theories of mind and an analytic stance that foregrounds discourse
and interaction as the primary site where such matters are made relevant, meaningful, and negotiated.

Pre-analysis
Because discursive psychology is an approach rather than a method, there is no standard or “best”
way to conduct a discursive psychological study. Analysis in discursive psychology, as in conver-
sation analysis, requires repeated listening, close observation, and fine-grained transcription. It is
here, in what we might call the pre-analytic stage, that researchers familiarize themselves with the

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participants, the interactional landscape, and its various linguistic, paralinguistic, spatial, temporal,
relational, and other features. We must also recognize that transcription is analysis because it har-
nesses the analyst’s attention and requires many consequential decisions about what features of the
communicative interaction to attend to and how to represent them (N.B. it is common for researchers
to have multiple transcripts with varying levels of granularity for different representational and ana-
lytic purposes). Through careful transcription and observation, the researcher can notice and identify
phenomena of interest. Focusing on language use, communication problems (e.g., repair, misun-
derstanding, abandoned utterances, marked silence), identifiable activities or sequences (e.g., greet-
ing, classroom warm-up, pair work, closings, question–answer), and “curious” sequences is often
a good way to start; however, as the researcher becomes more familiar with the data, a discursive
psychological study will attend to psychological concerns and how they emerge. This includes how
interactants use psychological language (e.g., lexicon, metaphors, idioms), how they index emo-
tion (e.g., “angry,” “sad,” “Oh no!”) or cognition (“Oh, I see.” “Huh?”) verbally, how they produce
emotion-implicative displays (e.g., laughing, crying, smiling, frowning, averting gaze), how they
invoke emotion-resonant categories (e.g., “native–non-native”; “good student–bad student”), and the
various other ways that psychological business gets topicalized, described, implied, or otherwise
made relevant.
Extract 1, from my longitudinal narrative-based research with adult Southeast Asian immigrants
in the USA and Canada (Prior, 2011, 2016a), shows some of this psychological business and how
speakers mobilize various discursive resources in interaction. Here, as the research participant (A)
describes for the researcher (B) his ongoing personal and social struggles related to life in North
America, the psychological content and import of this talk is unmistakable.

Extract 1 (A: research participant; B: researcher)

01 A: I’m become fear see? b- right now (.) become fear?
02 B: uhuh
03 A: fearful?
04 B: uhuh
05 A: and then, (2.0) panicking? no.
06 (1.5)
07 .hh anxiety?
08 B: uhuh?
09 A: anxiety that the worse.
10 B: that’s the worst?
11 A: yeah that’s the worse. anxiety?
12 (6.0)
13 fear?
14 (2.4)
15 fear of re- rejection?
((4 lines removed))
20 b- l-language (0.4) barrier (0.7) because the- (0.6) because (0.6)
21 because the color of your skin different? because (.) you have problem
22 with English?
23 (1.4)
24 because (0.8) you don’t have any (.) degree or bachelor. you don’t
25 have MUCH to offer. you have MUCH to uh, (1.5) to uh to prove that you
26 better.
27 (1.7)
28 °you know?°

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We can recognize in Extract 1, for instance, how emotionality resonates through this speaker’s use
of emotion vocabulary (e.g., “fear,” “panicking,” “anxiety”), topicalization of experiences with rejec-
tion and discrimination (lines 15–26), and emotional intensity and scaling (e.g., line 9: “anxiety that
the worse”; lines 24–25: “you don’t have MUCH to offer”). We can note how this speaker displays
his efforts to both describe and make sense of his emotions and experiences by offering attributions
regarding the causes (e.g., language barrier, skin color, English proficiency, lack of formal education)
and inviting empathic responses and intersubjective understanding from his interactant through his
prompts (line 1: “see?”; line 28: “you know?”) and pauses (lines 6, 12, 14, 23, 27). We can also see
his efforts to invite his interlocutor to understand his personal world and the sociopolitical world
around them—as he begins by describing his unpleasant, subjective experience (lines 1–11), then
connects it via the use of the generic “you” (line 21) to the experiences of other immigrants similarly
minoritized because of skin color, language, and education.
Lest this excerpt be simply taken as a tragic example of discrimination and emotional distress,
I should point out that, together, this speaker’s psychological and contextualization work builds the
foundation in later talk for him to explain and rationalize his reasons for dropping out of his ESL
classes (due in part to discrimination from other students) and to account for the motivations that
pushed him to “fight back” and use his linguistic and other resources to challenge such discrimina-
tion and to carve out an agentive space in society as an immigrant and L2 English speaker. We can
see, then, that conducting only a thematic or impressionistic analysis of such data would likely gloss
over this speaker’s agentive, goal-oriented, and “world-building” (Prior & Talmy, 2021) discursive
work to organize and make sense of his experiences and to bring his interlocutor into a shared under-
standing of that world. Such recorded data also provide a means to examine this speaker’s linguistic
development and complexity over time, his narrative skills, affective and motivational trajectories,
and more.
Regardless of the data at hand, there will likely be many potential phenomena and patterns for
further analysis (any of those listed in the preceding two paragraphs may be starting points); repeated
listening and observation are therefore essential to narrow down the initial object of analysis. And if
one topic does not prove fruitful, we can always take up another. Once we have identified a specific
phenomenon and/or sequence for further examination, we can begin building a corpus, a collection of
multiple instances of the object of interest. When we have compiled a satisfactory corpus (depending
on the phenomenon and available data), it is time to move on to the analysis stage (again, this is an it-
erative process). I will now consider four overlapping stages of analysis (cf. Potter, 2003, pp. 83–85):

1 Search for a pattern: What pattern can we find and how regular is it? This gives us a point of
reference to follow up across our corpus. For example, when examining classroom interaction,
we may notice repeated instances in our data where students do not respond to teacher prompts
or otherwise display an apparent unwillingness to participate. This may cue us to look at the topic
of student reticence or anxiety. How frequent are these instances? Does reticence appear to be a
regular feature of this classroom culture? How is student reticence displayed and made observable
or recognizable? That is, what cues or other evidence (e.g., nonanswer, averted eye gaze, agitation,
soft voice) prompt the interactants (and the researcher) to view this as reticence?
2 Consider next turns: Examine how this phenomenon of interest is embedded in the ongoing in-
teraction. For instance, with student reticence, we will want to consider what came before (e.g.,
a question from the teacher? what kind of question? how was it produced?) and what came after
(e.g., a repeated prompt? another gap of silence?). How did interactants signal they understood
the prior turn as student reticence? For example, do we see people repeating utterances or giving
encouragement? Are those moments of reticence signaled and oriented to as marked behavior
(e.g., through laughter, visible discomfort) or something else?

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3 Attend to deviant cases: Here we attempt to identify and explain cases that do not fit the general
corpus. This may require us to start over or revise our initial hypotheses. If, for example, we found
60 instances of student reticence and five instances of student engagement or active participation,
how do we account for these divergent patterns? This may prompt us to investigate more closely
those aspects of the activities, pedagogical style, classroom setting, student grouping, and so on
that may help explain the different participation patterns.
4 Focus on other kinds of material: This allows us to compare data and to identify similarities and
differences across data types and settings. If we are examining instances of student reticence
in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) university setting, we could compare our data with
that of other kinds of classrooms that differ in terms of age group or other learner demographics,
language, language level, institution, pedagogical style, materials, and so on to see whether our
phenomenon of interest may be a generic practice or specific to the context we are studying.

Sample discursive psychological studies in second language research

Just as the conversation analysis-for-SLA program has contributed much to our understanding of the
processes and conditions of language learning, language use, and language teaching in and outside
the classroom, discursive psychology has much to offer SLA research. I will now consider some
noteworthy studies that have shown the power of discursive psychology to bridge discourse and SLA.
A handful of SLA and SLA-adjacent studies have shown the potential of discursive psychology
to respecify various traditional psychological phenomena, including learner beliefs, avoidance, and
teacher cognition. Two early applications of discursive psychology in the field of SLA include stud-
ies by Kalaja (2003) and Kramsch (2003) on student beliefs. Although attribution theory, a cognitive
perspective, has long been used to study and explain students’ beliefs about SLA, Kalaja proposed an
alternative, discursive approach. Drawing on Edwards and Potter’s (1992) Discursive Action Model
and the concept of interpretive repertoires (associated with early versions of discursive psychology),
she investigated how Finnish high-school students articulated their varying beliefs about their rea-
sons for success or failure on a high-stakes English exam. In her study, Kalaja found many learner
beliefs were complex and difficult to formulate; whereas others came easily, often reflecting authori-
tative views or cliches (e.g., “foreign language learning is important”). A significant insight from this
study is that instead of looking for cause-and-effect relationships, we can examine the construction
and function of various beliefs and individuals’ ongoing work to account for them. In the same
volume, Kramsch (2003) combined discursive psychology with cognitive semantics to explore how
students’ beliefs about language learning get constructed in and through language to become “belief
spaces,” which explain their subjective experiences and social worlds while also shaping future ac-
tion. These studies remind us that respecifying the construct of learner beliefs or examining how
students account for their success or failure is not just a “discursive” matter but has implications for
understanding related phenomena such as motivation, effort, self-efficacy, competence, and more.
Markee (2011) applied a discursive psychological approach to his learning-behavior-tracking
(LBT) methodology in his study of avoidance in an office-hour interaction between an English
learner and an instructor. In the SLA literature, avoidance has typically been represented as a commu-
nication and cognitive strategy to avoid producing errors, or an emotion-regulation strategy to deal
with anxiety-inducing situations. However, Markee sought to respecify avoidance as behavior that is
locally and collaboratively built by interactants. Focusing on oral avoidance, specifically an L2 Eng-
lish learner’s delicate work to avoid saying a problematic word (‘prerequisite’), Markee showed how
avoidance can become embedded and topicalized in an ongoing activity. Besides providing empiri-
cal evidence that avoidance and other types of behavior are “observably independent of individuals’
personalities and, indeed, of a priori psycholinguistic accounts of cognition as an underlying source

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for the surface organization of talk-in-interaction” (p. 612), this study gave much-needed attention to
how participants orient to and use pedagogical materials (e.g., PowerPoint, self-evaluation form) as
interactional and mediational resources—further underscoring the shortsightedness of research that
relies on arbitrary mind–body–environment divides or that fails to account for the diversity of com-
municative resources that L2 users employ.
Ro and Jung (2016) also drew on discursive psychology in their study of teacher cognition (what
teachers know, think, and believe), a popular area of inquiry in English language teaching and ap-
plied linguistics. Based on an analysis of video-recorded data from a focus group interaction with
experienced EAP (English for Academic Purposes) teachers, the researchers traced how these teach-
ers’ stated beliefs and claims to professional competence emerged and evolved in response to their
interactions with other participants, especially following disagreements and teasing that challenged
their professional knowledge and competence. Not only did this study respecify teacher cognition
as a collaboratively constructed phenomenon rather than just an individual’s relatively stable self-
reflection based on prior experience, but it also helped clarify the construct by distinguishing among
various kinds of beliefs (e.g., professional, instructional).
Although not focusing centrally on traditional SLA concerns, Prior (2016a, 2016b, 2017, 2019)
has used discursive psychology and related constructionist approaches for insight into transnational
identity (see also Miller, Chapter 25 in this volume), trajectories of language use, socialization, inter-
cultural adaptation, narrative development, and the discursive construction and management of emo-
tion in L2 talk and interaction. This work has helped respecify, among other things, identity, emotion,
rapport, empathy, and categorization, and how L2 users and minoritized individuals discursively and
agentively manage, challenge, and re-story their experiences of discrimination, abuse, and trauma
(see also Warriner & Pomerantz, Chapter 4 in this volume). It also offered new insights for explaining
the prevalence of talk of “negative” emotions (e.g., anger, fear, sadness, frustration) in L2 research.

Implications for SLA research

Respecifying SLA phenomena

In the simplest terms, what discursive psychology offers SLA researchers is a solution for dealing
with puzzling phenomena and analytical challenges—that of turning them into topics of study, as part
of participants’ discursive practices, that can then be examined empirically. This view resonates with
Edwards’ early comments about the use of discursive psychology in educational research:

So, if your concern is psychological, and you are interested in what it is that children [or other
learners] actually think or learn from their classroom experiences, try seeing whether and how
this arises as a practical issue for participants (who may include teachers, examiners, and even
educational psychologists), in their discourse.
(Edwards, 1997b, p. 45)

Although the studies described in the previous section vary in terms of their engagement with
discursive psychology, they attest to its power to inform our understanding of the processes and con-
ditions of L2 users’ personal experiences with a wide range of psychological phenomena. They show
how a discursive psychological approach offers a counter to the often taken-for-granted assumption
that learner beliefs, cognition, avoidance, motivation, emotions, identity, and so on are (relatively)
stable attributes or dispositions; this restores them to their primary place in everyday life as inter-
actional and observable phenomena. There are many other SLA topics ripe for discursive psycho-
logical analysis, including learning, individual differences (not just motivation but also willingness

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to communicate, attitude, personality, anxiety, reticence), self-efficacy, agency, learning strategies,

emotion regulation, resilience, coping, and emotion labor. It is not just that discursive psychology
respecifies psychological topics as discursive and embodied but that it uncovers and makes analyz-
able how ordinary people, themselves, understand, orient to, and actively manage such topics and
concerns as psychological matters.

Respecifying education
Beyond respecifying various SLA phenomena, a discursive psychological approach allows us to
respecify education. It recognizes that the contexts and conditions of SLA matter: whether language
learning, language use, and language teaching—or whether in the institutional setting of the class-
room, the workplace, or everyday casual encounters. Because contexts are always made relevant by
interactants in and through their communicative practices, this allows us to investigate how teachers,
students, and others

go about the business of education, how they hold each other accountable to whatever aims,
norms and expectations schooling involves for them, and how responsibilities and privileges
[and opportunities] may be asymmetrically distributed between participants as part of their
practices.
(Edwards, 1997b, p. 35, emphasis in original)

Considering such asymmetries, we can see that discursive psychology has equal potential to en-
gage with various critical concerns across the field, such as power and identity (e.g., gender, sexuality,
class, race, ethnicity, disability, religion; see also Miller, Chapter 25 in this volume) and differential
access to and opportunities to use language.

Discursive psychology as a theoretical, methodological, and ethical project

What I describe here is not merely a technical project, but one with broader theoretical, methodo-
logical, and ethical importance for SLA research. First, discursive psychology, although interested in
psychological phenomena, is fundamentally a person-centered approach. It extends the focus from
beliefs, for instance, to people with beliefs; from motivation to individuals who experience and talk
about motivation and demotivation. It is therefore concerned with the objects and the subjects of
SLA. Second, a discursive psychological approach affords an empirically grounded understanding of
action and agency as it attends to the everyday, goal-oriented work of L2 learners/users, teachers, and
others as they live in and make sense of their social worlds for themselves and for (and with) those
around them. Discursive psychology helps us understand language learning as a dynamic and mul-
tidimensional process, rather than predictable or linear—one that involves ongoing apprenticeship,
socialization, struggle, and decisions about one’s needs, resources, relationships, activities, invest-
ments, opportunities for participation, and self- and other-assessments of success and failure. Third,
discursive psychology is retrospective and prospective: retrospective in that it can help explain the
complexity of learner histories and experiences that give rise to particular attitudes, beliefs, compe-
tences, and participation patterns; and prospective because it helps track and make visible individuals’
discursive resources and practices (and how they come to have/not have specific resources and prac-
tices) and how their ongoing work to organize and make sense of their worlds shapes future action,
communication strategies, motivational trajectories, and so on. A fourth contribution of a discursive
psychological approach for SLA research is that it is resource oriented. Discursive psychology is
interested in actions and their consequences as well as how they get accomplished. On an objective

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or practical level, discursive psychology helps researchers account for a wide range of multimodal
resources and semiotic repertoires (not only linguistic) that individuals employ in ways that are both
generic and unique, which allows us to better understand how SLA processes and trajectories are
shaped by constraints and creativity, structure and agency, adaptation and resistance. On a sociopoliti-
cal level, one concerned with power and agency, discursive psychology challenges deficit perspec-
tives and native-speaker or monolingual norms. Although it is equipped to investigate communicative
challenges and breakdowns (see Hasegawa, Chapter 2 in this volume), discursive psychology’s start-
ing place is with interactants’ resources, activities, and accomplishments—allowing us to recognize
what L2 users have and can do, rather than attending only to what they lack or cannot accomplish.
This aligns well with ongoing efforts across the field that advocate for greater ethical accountability
and sensitivity to diversity, equity, and inclusion in relation to the objects, subjects, and methods
of our research. Fifth, as the earlier-cited studies show (see also next section), a discursive psycho-
logical approach offers important methodological insights by proving that ethnographic accounts or
retrospective/stimulated recall are not the only means of investigating psychological SLA topics. Its
micro-analytic methodology, combined with a resource- and context-sensitive approach, offers pow-
erful tools for investigating psychology in and through the language and lives of real people.
What discursive psychology offers for SLA research is a renewed perspective, not only for re-
specifying SLA phenomena and examining the conditions that shape SLA, but for respecifying the
field. What matters, to quote Ortega (2009, p. 78), “is not simply ‘what’s out there’ physically or even
socially surrounding learners [we might add, ‘or what’s in there psychologically’], but rather what
learners make of it, how they process (or not) the linguistic data and how they live and experience
that environment.” Ultimately, discursive psychology offers an approach that allows SLA researchers
a perspective for looking at that work and the various lived realities of learning, using, and teaching
second/additional languages—in real time, in and through discourse and interaction.

Future directions for discursive psychology and second language research

In this chapter, I have sought to show that discursive psychology offers a bridge between discourse
analysis and SLA research—radical in its approach to psychology and empirically grounded in its
analysis of discourse. In addition to its central project of respecification, perhaps one of the most ex-
citing applications of discursive psychology is methodological, or more accurately, methodographic
(e.g., Kasper & Ross, 2017; Prior, 2016a; Prior & Talmy, 2021). Methodography (Greiffenhagen
et al., 2011) is concerned with how scientists produce knowledge: practices and procedures that gen-
erate research findings and that represent their meanings and significance. As research on research,
methodography seeks to examine research activities that are typically glossed as pro forma researcher
positionality statements, generic descriptions of what method one used (often without considering
how or why it was used), or decontextualized summaries of what research participants (and research-
ers) said or did. Discursive psychology thus prompts us to ask:

[W]hose descriptions are they? Are they the kinds of descriptions that participants use as part of
their practices? If so, when and how do they occur? How do they vary across discursive contexts?
How do they function rhetorically and interactionally as parts of participants [sic] accountability
for their involvement, rather than as straightforward pictures of reality or perception? We are not
restricted to observing classroom interactions for all of this; we can use interviews, tests, experi-
ments, or whatever. But in each case, those alternative methods must also be seen as practical
social occasions, as speech events, which construct their own reality and outcomes just as class-
room lessons do. They are never simply methods for finding out what is already there.
(Edwards, 1997b, p. 45).

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As Prior and Talmy (2021) explain, “part of the methodographic project is to demystify and render
more transparent and accountable the research process, which too often appears as a black box through
which data are furtively, mysteriously transformed—presto!—into ‘emergent themes’ or ‘findings’” (p. 3).
Discursive psychology affords SLA researchers a means to reveal “the work that makes the methods
work.” This is, of course, a two-edged approach. Not only does it subject the observed world to an empir-
ical analysis of how various phenomena emerge and shape learning, participation, and the like, it subjects
the researcher’s own practices, analyses, and versions of those phenomena to the same critical attention.
Discursive psychology is an approach with great potential for language researchers. Time will tell
how it will be taken up by researchers in SLA, applied linguistics, and cognate fields. But consider-
ing increasing calls for epistemological diversity, transdisciplinarity, and attention to the social life
of research methods (Kasper & Ross, 2017; Li & Prior, 2022), there is little doubt that discursive
psychology is well positioned to contribute to our diverse SLA projects, to greater methodographic
inquiry, and to more transparent and accountable research practices.

Note
1 In contrast to cognition, a potential topic for discursive psychological analysis, cognitivism is a theory of
cognition that “reduces all of psychological life, including discourse and interaction … to mental processes”
(Edwards, 1997a, p. 19).

Further reading
Tileaga, C., & Stokoe, E. (Eds.). (2016). Discursive psychology: Classic and contemporary issues. Routledge.
This volume offers an in-depth treatment of significant developments in discursive psychology over the past
30 years. This is especially useful for those familiar with conversation analysis and discursive psychology.
Wiggins, S. (2017). Discursive psychology: Theory, method, and applications. Sage.
This book offers an accessible introduction to discursive psychology as a research method for students in the
social sciences and beyond.

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 10
SOCIOCULTURAL THEORY AND
L2 DISCOURSE
From descriptive to interventionist research in
second language acquisition
Amy Snyder Ohta

Introduction
This chapter provides an overview of sociocultural theory (SCT) and L2 (second/foreign language)
discourse from the perspective of second language acquisition research. Beginning with an overview
of SCT as a lens for L2 discourse and second language acquisition (SLA) research, it introduces
the basic terms and concepts of SCT that are most relevant to those interested in L2 teaching and
research. The chapter then describes how SCT L2-oriented research has developed since its begin-
nings in the United States in the 1980s, moving from descriptive research, toward praxis—a merging
of theory and research. Praxis-oriented studies include work in dynamic assessment (DA), which is
an instructional/assessment-oriented intervention building on zone-of-proximal-development (ZPD)
activity, and concept-based language instruction (CBLI), which works to teach L2 using concepts as
a unit of instruction and analysis.

Overview: Sociocultural theory and L2 discourse

Sociocultural theory is a framework grounded in neo-Vygotskian cultural-historical psychology,
which comprises an integrative understanding of human cognitive development as involving psycho-
logical, social, and historical processes (Wertsch, 1985). This Vygotskian and neo-Vygotskian theory
approach is often called sociocultural theory (SCT) or cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT).
Mind, in SCT, is formed via social mediation, not just between the infant and its caregivers, but
also, more broadly, through discourse—the discourse that constructs the broader social environment,
dialogic interaction, across the levels of individual, family, social group, society, and history. It is not
an understatement to suggest, in this view, that discourse is formative of mind. This cannot be un-
derstood in a deterministic manner because development involves both biological and social lines of
development. SCT understands a person as unique both biologically and via their interactions within
their families and societies; thus, even in the same family, no two children, even twins, develop in
the same way, as the interactions between their natural biological mind and a specific culture, via
language and social interaction, result in unique persons. The child’s mind is gradually restructured
via their native set of linguistic and cultural tools, and through this process, mind becomes mediated
by language. L2 development, thus, is a process of learning to mediate the mind with a different set
of semiotic tools.

116 DOI: 10.4324/9781003177579-11

 Sociocultural theory and L2 discourse in SLA

People use a variety of tools in their activities, and it is well known that the choice of tool impacts
the processes and results of human activity. In terms of physical tools, for example, a good metaphor
is pottery, where the choice of tool—finger, stick, wheel, brush—is a part of both process and prod-
uct. This is true for cognitive tools as well (Vygotsky, 1978). For Vygotsky and those whose work
is built on his ideas, language is a semiotic tool. The mediation by tools and signs is a foundational
cognitive process that connects persons to one another, to society, and to culture (Engeström, 1999).
Imitation, internalization, and externalization are all creative processes that build something new:
new understandings, new meanings, and new learning. Understanding language as a tool of semiotic
mediation leads researchers, thus, to have a high level of respect for discourse processes as a locus of
understanding human meaning and thinking. When we understand human cognition as a process that
incorporates tools that are both linguistic and physical in the person–environment interface, it trans-
forms our understanding of research and teaching tools as well. Language development is a process
of the whole person in their sociocultural environment; language occurs both between persons and
between persons and their artifacts.
Language, as a social and cognitive tool, both shapes social interaction and transforms its users.
Language-as-tool is a key notion of sociohistorical psychology, also called sociocultural theory. In
SCT, discourse (language-in-use), is not just language, but is part and parcel of cognition. Discourse
doesn’t reflect cognition or influence language development— discourse is these things—as part of
the person in interaction with their social and cultural environment. This understanding of discourse
is transformative for SLA scholars, as we no longer must guess at how social interaction influences
development. We can see development as it unfolds in social interaction. The purpose of this chapter
is to provide a window into this understanding of the role of discourse in L2 development and the
powerful conceptual and analytic tools it offers SLA researchers.
Vygotsky’s seminal work, translated into English as Thinking and Speech (Vygotsky, 1987),
deeply considers language (“speaking”) as mediator of human mind (“thinking”) across historical,
cultural, and individual development. The holism of SCT is rooted in a Marxian understanding of
human development and dialectical understandings of history, culture, and mind. His goal was “to
approach the study of the mind having learned the whole of Marx’s method” (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 8).
Newman and Holzman (1993) describe Vygotsky’s approach as “tool-and-results,” pointing to the
dynamic and mutually constituted relationship between persons and their interactions, relationships,
cultures, and histories. Vygotsky’s reliance on Marxian understandings is challenging for students
and scholars interested in SLA whose thinking is embedded in a Western scientific (cause-and-effect)
paradigm. While some take notions inspired by Vygotsky’s writings and use them in a cause-and-­
effect fashion (for example the idea of “scaffolding”), divorcing Vygotskian ideas from tool-and-
results thinking severely dilutes their explanatory power. SLA researchers using SCT challenge
themselves to use methodology that is both nonreductionistic and respectful of dynamic interconnec-
tions, without which understanding of human development is impossible. In talking about his own
development in applying SCT to L2 research, Lantolf (Karimi-Aghdam, 2020) stated:

I gradually began to appreciate what it means to approach a problem from a dialectical per-
spective. When one does so, one sees an array of possibilities that were not there before. For
instance, instead of worrying about teacher-centered vs. learner-centered classrooms, one re-
alizes that what matters is what happens between teachers and learners, that is, the activity
of promoting development through specific kinds of interactions … Similarly, implicit and
explicit instruction are understood as poles of a dialectic in which both forms of activity are
vital in promoting development.
(pp. 7–8)

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Vygotsky wrote little about SLA, beyond considering the impact of foreign language learning on
developing scientific concepts related to language analysis; however, there is a growing chorus of
scholars using sociocultural theory to consider L2 developmental questions, processes, and interven-
tions. In these investigations, discourse is a central component, because discourse mediates mind.
Applying SCT to SLA involves creative consideration of the various ways in which a sociocultural
understanding of mind and discourse relates to L2 development. Vygotsky’s notion is that while
development has a strong biological component, the social ecology of the teaching/learning situa-
tion can be harnessed to promote development, by targeting instruction to what learners are not yet
capable of doing without assistance or instruction but can be helped to accomplish collaboratively.
Vygotsky’s construct of the zone of proximal development (ZPD) denotes collaborative activity that
enables persons to function at a higher level than they could if working individually. What can be
done collaboratively, but not yet individually, is a person’s “proximal” development—a direction of
possible development. In SCT, developmental processes are understood as embodied and discoursal,
material and psychological. The ZPD, then, is intimately related to Vygotsky’s general genetic law
of development, which posits that higher cognition first appears between persons on the social plane
before being psychologically internalized and becoming part of individual mind; through analysis of
interaction in the ZPD we can see the unfolding of implicit learning processes as well as how learners
work to apply and internalize explicit instruction. The ZPD also relates to Vygotsky’s understand-
ing of the role of explicit instruction in development: that learning leads development. Meanwhile,
understanding language as central to human development, mediating culture, social interaction, and
mind, led Vygotsky away from Piaget’s notion of egocentric speech (unsocialized language for the
self) to the notion of private speech—social language for the self, for one’s own thinking, that is at
once both social and cognitive. Private speech occurs in both interpersonal and private settings, and
is related to internalization, which is a process of creative construction of the mind via discourse.
SCT challenges researchers to avoid reductionism and to use units of analysis that preserve the
whole being studied. Meanwhile, discourse mediates both social interaction and mind; analyzing dis-
course processes, thus, allows analysis of development-in-process. Developmental processes can be
observed, because, as mentioned in the previous section, discourse is both interpersonal and intrap-
ersonal. The language persons use with one another also has a psychological function; people speak
both to connect with others and to regulate their own thinking—with social interaction, thinking, and
mind dynamically interrelated. Discourse is a critical site of SLA: learner talk “during second lan-
guage interactive language learning tasks constitutes learning” (Ohta, 2001, p. 125); in other words,
“acquisition occurs in interaction, not as a result of interaction” (Swain, Brooks, & Tocalli-Beller,
2002, p. 172); here, we see Vygotskian tool-and-results thinking. SCT does not limit mind to dis-
course, so this is not a reductionism. Rather, discourse mediates mind. Mind is also mediated through
other psychological tools such as images and numbers/equations. SCT is nondeterministic and does
not limit mind to discourse processes and verbal thinking.
SCT researchers understand discourse as part of human activity; consequently, some consider and
use “activity” as a unit of analysis. Analysis of activity considers dynamic interrelationships between
participants, goals, artifacts, and the environment in cognitive and social processes. Activity theory
analyses expand understanding of human cognition beyond the confines of mind and language, to
consider, holistically, various dynamic interrelationships of activity structures, goals, and institutions
with cognition. Engeström (1987) displays activity systems as dynamic sets of interrelationships laid
out on triangles. Activity analyses are sometimes included as an additional layer of analysis in studies
that incorporate discourse-analytic work.
These various ideas have been fruitfully applied in SLA research—in descriptive research that
examines developmental processes between learners and between teacher/tutor and learner(s) as well
as in interventionist research (that also is, of course, descriptive) in classroom instruction, tutoring,

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and language assessment that considers what happens when SCT principles are applied in instruction.
The next section further explores discourse-analytic research approaches in SCT-for-SLA.

Discourse approaches to sociocultural L2 research

Researchers working within a sociocultural framework have long used discourse as a research tool.
We can think of this research as occurring on a dialectical continuum from descriptive to interven-
tionist work. Collecting data necessarily has an impact on processes, so it is useful to think of descrip-
tive and interventionist approaches as in a dialectical relationship, in that even research not intended
to impact interactional processes has some elements of intervention, for example, simply recording
students during their classes (see, for example, Brooks & Donato, 1994; Ohta, 2000; Ohta, 2001),
and interventionist research always includes strong descriptive elements. Earlier SCT/L2 discourse-
oriented research examined learner discourse in intact classroom and tutorial settings. Over time,
research became more interventionist, working from a perspective of praxis: a merging of scholarly
inquiry, theory, and practice (see the later subsection on “Vygotskian praxis”). Praxis-oriented re-
search aims to provoke development via assessment and instructional intervention processes. De-
scriptive research, in this way, has served as foundational work for later interventionist studies using
approaches such as DA, and, more recently, CBLI.
Whether more or less interventionist, SCT-oriented work on SLA works to understand develop-
mental processes by analyzing learning processes, which include discourse between language learn-
ers and teachers and discourse between learners. SCT researchers studying L2 classroom interaction
have particular interest in microgenesis: development-in-process in the discourse as it unfolds mo-
ment by moment—in social interaction, in discourse with the self (private speech), and in interactions
between learners and teaching materials.
Research on private speech explores the cognitive mediational functions of spoken discourse.
Gesture is also considered a part of discourse processes. Due to the inseparability of visual, verbal,
and embodied language activity, attention to gesture, body orientation, and eye gaze are included
in some L2 discourse-oriented research (e.g., Stam, 2012). Borderlines between social and private
speech, and between speech and gesture, cannot be clearly delineated. To study private speech, how-
ever, some working definitions are necessary. In social settings, private speech has been identified
by, for example, shifts in tense/aspect marking (McCafferty, 1998), or by identifying interactive be-
haviors such as reduced volume and lack of addressivity to an interlocutor (Ohta, 2001). Private
speech and gesture provide a window into thinking and internalization processes—how language is
used interpersonally (social interactive discourse) becomes a psychological tool to mediate mind. In
SCT, L2 development is understood as the development of a new set of mediational tools for not just
social interaction, but also the mind itself. Sociocultural studies of gesture and L2 (e.g., Stam & Tel-
lier, 2021) consider the role of gesture as a mediator of thought and SLA developmental processes,
illuminating relationships between L1 and L2 in discourse.

Descriptive studies
Descriptive work by SCT scholars has focused on using the analytical tools of sociocultural theory
and discourse analysis to understand developmental processes using existing approaches and cur-
ricula not informed by SCT. Researchers, thus, have audio- and video-recorded classroom interac-
tion, miking students to also capture pair/group work. Transcriptions of interactions, accompanied
by the audio or video recordings, are then analyzed using constructs from sociocultural theory and
instructed SLA. These studies have helped pioneer our understanding of units of analysis in SLA.
Vygotsky worked to combat reductionism in psychological and educational research by developing

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holistic units of analysis for research. SCT researchers today still grapple with this problem: how to
find units of analysis that are small enough to be manageable, but large enough to still contain the
whole that is being studied. For research on language learning, discourse-analytic tools that consider
turns at talk and carry out sequential analysis are very useful in that they contain what we are study-
ing: L2 development via social interaction. Vygotsky also considered word meaning as a possible unit
of development; he considered the role of everyday concepts (empirically based via ordinary experi-
ence) and scientific concepts taught in school, working to promote the development of higher cogni-
tion by organizing instruction conceptually. This work has helped fuel contemporary L2 researchers’
interest in the role of concepts in L2 development.

Vygotskian praxis
Wertsch (1985) explains how Vygotsky’s intellectual contributions were grounded in and developed
through practical work with children and adults, in a dynamic process of investigating and document-
ing higher cognitive development while also working to provoke development through intervention-
ist research. Vygotsky and his students and colleagues sought to make a difference in the lives of
schoolchildren with and without disabilities, as well as adults, to promote literacy and its impacts
on the development of human higher cognition. This merging of research, theory, and practice is
called praxis (Lantolf & Poehner, 2014). Vygotskian praxis is a growing area of L2 research, built
upon earlier descriptive studies, as researchers work to transform what Vygotsky labeled, in Russian,
obuchenie: teaching, assessment, and learning.
For example, interest in the ZPD has moved from identifying L2 developmental processes in dis-
coursal ZPD activity (such as in Ohta, 2001) to promoting ZPD activity with innovative approaches
and materials. ZPD activity brings together learner, interlocutor (or other help source), and a task,
and is the process of dynamic interaction that enables the learner to do with assistance what they are
unable to do alone. The ZPD activity, thus, is a developmentally significant activity that portends,
or shows the direction of, potential (“proximal”) development. In obuchenie, the dialectical rela-
tionship between teaching and learning, harnessing the ZPD is a developmentally sensitive process
that works to maximize students’ independent functioning while providing support when they can-
not maintain that functioning; through this process, the student’s current developmental level also
becomes evident, providing a foundation for further instruction. SCT researchers have conducted
laboratory and classroom studies to understand how teachers can support ZPD activity (Lantolf &
Poehner, 2014).
Interest in concepts as a potential unit of development has led scholars also to consider how
L2 concepts transform learner cognition. As with the ZPD, early work in this area was descriptive
(Pavlenko, 2003), with movement, over time, toward interventionist studies that work to organize L2
instruction around concepts drawn from L2 languaculture, such as sarcasm (Kim & Lantolf, 2018) or
linguistic aspect (Tsujihara, 2018). Discourse-analytic and cognitive linguistic research on the target
language has been particularly useful in providing a foundation for this research.
The next sections of this chapter focus on two areas of research in Vygotskian praxis. Dynamic
Assessment (DA) focuses on ZPD activity as tool that merges learning and assessment, and it was
the first area of research in Vygotskian praxis. Concept-based language instruction (CBLI) is a
more recent research movement, and it will be described in more detail. CBLI researchers develop
innovative concept-based instructional materials and implement them in laboratory or intact class
settings via multimodal, discourse-rich, and interactive instructional practices to promote develop-
ment. The chapter then moves to providing recent examples of SCT-oriented SLA research with a
focus on CBLI.

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Dynamic assessment
Dynamic assessment (DA) is an interventionist process that marries dialectical processes of instruc-
tion, assessment, and learning/development (Poehner, 2008). DA works simultaneously to measure
and to promote development, with researchers studying discourse to better understand the impact of
interventions on L2 development. As noted earlier, the activity that takes place in the ZPD is a critical
process of cognitive development that happens in human interaction. Vygotsky (1978) introduced the
ZPD to illustrate problems with traditional assessment tools (such as IQ tests) that only capture what
a child could do without assistance. Meanwhile, Vygotsky noted that children with the same score
had differing developmental potential, as measured by what the child could accomplish with assis-
tance. L2 researchers have also applied the ZPD as an assessment tool, both in individualized and in
standardized L2 assessment. DA as an assessment tool provides a level of support tailored to learner
needs, following guidelines or scripts, to provide prompts that move from less to more explicit.
Early work on DA in L2 development studied 1:1 processes of interaction between a learner and a
teacher/tutor, as they used mediation (prompts/assistance) tailored to the student in order to assess the
student’s present skills while providing the minimum necessary assistance. More recently, research-
ers have been considering the application of DA in whole-class contexts.

Concept-based language instruction (CBLI)

SCT researchers are developing interventionist pedagogies to teach L2, combining systemic-theoretic
instruction (Gal’perin, 1992) with usage-based approaches to linguistics (Ohta & Masuda, 2018), cre-
ating materials to promote classroom language L2 development, and studying the learning processes
that transpire using discourse analysis and other research tools. Concept-based language instruction
(CBLI1) works to develop within language students a foundation of conceptual understanding through
explicit instruction, discovery-based learning, and L2 practice and use (Lantolf & Poehner, 2014).
CBLI, as a praxis approach, integrates theory and practice and is designed both to improve and
to work toward better understanding of L2 developmental processes. The researcher-teacher learns
from students and works both to improve teaching/learning (obuchenie) and to push theory forward.
This dialectical understanding of theory and practice is at the foundation of CBLI.
In SCT, cognition is a process of human activity involving social, cultural, and historical beings.
Just as tool use transforms and shapes activity, so does human language, being part and parcel of
cognition and therefore inseparable from it. In CBLI, therefore, shaping development is a process
of shaping language, understood broadly to include how students verbally think, both externally and
internally, about what is being taught, whether alone or with others. The goal is to move students
toward the understanding and use of scientific concepts. People create everyday concepts based on
their experiences—a common example of this is children thinking that dolphins are fish, because they
swim in the sea. The goal of education is to promote higher cognition—the development of scientific
concepts. Scientific concepts are then practiced and merged with empirical experience to create em-
bodied and internalized knowledge.
CBLI promotes conceptual development by directly tackling L2 concepts that differ from the L1,
through a process of explicit instruction based on materialization of scientific concepts, whereby
teachers create visual tools for students to interact with and use for L2 tasks—including opportuni-
ties for language practice that lead to automatization of the language being taught. Vygotsky’s notion
that “learning leads development” guides these practices. In CBLI, instruction isn’t complete with
the student internalization of scientific concepts: these concepts provide a floor upon which language
skills are built. Gal’perin’s systemic-theoretic instruction (STI) follows a series of steps that are
overlapping and iterative. Instructional diagrams called SCOBAs (Schema of Complete Orienting

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Figure 10.1 Steps of concept-based language instruction. From Masuda, K., & Ohta, A. S. (2021). Teaching
subjective construal and related constructions with SCOBAs: Concept learning as a foundation for
Japanese language development. Language and Sociocultural Theory, 8(1), 35–67. (c) Equinox
Publishing Ltd 2021

Basis of Action) are high-quality materializations of the concept to be taught. Figure 10.1 represents a
materialization of Gal’perin’s STI, which I have modified and adapted for language teaching, to show
how CBLI integrates conceptual and linguistic development (Masuda & Ohta, 2021).
Figure 10.1 presents a serious of nondiscrete, iterative, and dynamic steps, some of which may
also, in practice, overlap. This is represented by the looping arrows, which show a movement forward
through this process that promotes learner internalization of concepts along with language develop-
ment. CBLI incorporates processes that promote internalization of SCOBAs, with SCOBAs serving
as cognitive tools that structure activity that moves students from more to less reliance on the SCO-
BAs as they experience internalization processes. CBLI provides rich opportunities for students to
practice language that embodies the concepts taught, moving from more controlled (and more reliant
on SCOBAs) practice, to freer and more creative practice as language is automatized. Via students’
empirical experience in applying the concepts, they become able to recreate and transform these tools
for their own purposes, developing new cognitive structures for the L2.
To implement CBLI, instructors/material developers must develop a strong scientific, usage-based
understanding of the concepts to be taught and then create materializations of these concepts that are
developmentally appropriate, and thus readily accessible to students, to promote their acquisition of
the concepts. The first instructional step in CBLI, as shown on Figure 10.1, is for the teacher to gener-
ate student awareness (Ohta, 2017). This step may be elaborated or abbreviated. Intermediate learners
may have internalized misunderstandings of L2 concepts, understand L2 based on L1 concepts, or be
operating based on inaccurate “rules of thumb,” and need a more elaborated awareness-raising step;
in teaching beginners, this step is more abbreviated. The goal of raising student awareness allows
students to see the gap between their current knowledge and the concept to be taught, increasing their
interest in the content of instruction.
The second step is an interactive lecture with SCOBAs. Because CBLI is a new approach, premade
SCOBAs are not usually available. Developing SCOBAs also involves praxis: an iterative process
merging teaching/learning and theory (see, for example, Ohta, 2017). SCOBAs do not merely visualize
textbook concepts but are representations of high-quality linguistic/cultural concepts that accurately
represent how the L2 is used. SCOBAs must also effectively communicate with students and are best
developed through a process of classroom testing. The interactive lecture is an explanation of one or
more SCOBAs to the students, while involving them in activity using the SCOBAs. The third step,
student verbalization and materialization, begins during the interactive lecture and extends beyond it.
In this step, students talk about the SCOBA, explaining it to one another, or to themselves, orally. This
may also include activities such as re-explaining a SCOBA to one another, filling in blanks in a SCOBA
presented without words, one student redrawing the SCOBA as the other student verbalizes, or students
drawing their own SCOBAs of the concept. At first, students can use the SCOBA for reference as they

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verbalize and materialize new concepts; as they gain facility, they complete tasks without referring to
the SCOBA. For example, if we consider Figure 10.1 to be a SCOBA that materializes the concept of
“Concept-based language instruction,” I could ask you, as a student, to draw your own SCOBA. You
might come up with something that better incorporates my explanation, including, for example, creat-
ing a materialization of how step 3 both coincides with and extends beyond step 2, both developing and
displaying your grasp of the concept via this process. Moving from more-supported to less-supported
task performance promotes internalization of the concept(s). Because the goal of CBLI is to promote L2
development, language practice is included in steps 4 and 5, as the student moves from more controlled
practice to freer practice; each of these may involve referring to the SCOBA as needed, but are part of
a shift toward performance without the support of the SCOBA. There is a growing number of studies
that investigate CBLI both in a laboratory setting (small group classes of volunteers—see, for example,
Zhang & Lantolf, 2015) and in intact classes (such as Tsujihara, 2022).
CBLI research often incorporates both pre-test/post-test and process-oriented research design.
Traditional quantitative pre-/post-test designs cannot explain how the scores relate to the conceptual
and linguistic development that is also occurring (Ohta & Masuda, 2018). Language performance
varies widely depending on how it is measured. We are learning from CBLI research that conceptual
development generally precedes linguistic development, with the latter depending both on concep-
tual development and on student proficiency, as well as on how linguistic development is measured.
High-proficiency learners may perform accurately because of imitation, without understanding the
concepts yet, and low-proficiency learners may perform well conceptually yet need further devel-
opment in proficiency to evidence linguistic progress (Tsujihara, 2019). A best practice in CBLI
research is to document both linguistic and conceptual development by collecting data that provides
insight into developmental processes, such as dynamic assessment, classroom interaction, collabora-
tive dialogue, and student homework (such as written explanations, recorded monologues, SCOBA
drawings, etc.), to better understand the content of their thinking and observe linguistic development-
in-process. We need to look at both linguistic and conceptual development to put together the more
complete developmental picture needed to evaluate the impact of CBLI on SLA.

Sample studies in sociocultural theory and L2 discourse

This section provides a brief look at socioculturally oriented studies that incorporate discourse analysis
as a research tool in second/foreign language learning contexts, first considering Jiyun Kim’s work on
teaching how to detect and understand sarcasm in English (for those learning English as a second lan-
guage, or ESL), and then considering my and Kyoko Masuda’s work on teaching Japanese conceptually.

Jiyun Kim’s work on teaching detection and understanding of sarcasm in English

Jiyun Kim’s work on teaching sarcasm in L2 English (Kim & Lantolf, 2018) is an excellent example
of a study that incorporates attention to the interaction between discourse and instruction. Kim and
Lantolf’s description of sarcasm in English shows the importance of the unfolding discourse in un-
derstanding and using sarcasm:

Speakers of American English use various verbal and nonverbal strategies to express sarcasm
in oral communication, including such prosodic cues as vowel lengthening, nasalization, in-
creased articulation rate, or even slurred speech. Nonverbal behaviors such as raised eyebrows,
eye-rolling, raised lip corners, and a tilted head are also used to signal sarcasm, either alone or
in combination with prosodic cues.
(p. 209)

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Discourse alone isn’t sufficient to fully understand sarcasm; these researchers also point out that
participants’ previous histories, social roles, and personalities are part of understanding sarcasm and
its forms and functions. This makes understanding L2 sarcasm particularly challenging.
Because understanding sarcasm requires the listener to understand both the unfolding discourse
(verbally and visually) and background information (individual histories, relationships, personali-
ties), it is particularly difficult, even for advanced L2 learners like Kim’s participants, who were
graduate students at an American university. Kim and Lantolf found that “prior to instruction the par-
ticipants in the present study filtered their understanding of English sarcasm through the conceptual
filter of their native Korean” (p. 211). This strategy had been unsuccessful. One of Kim’s participants
eloquently summed this up, stating that they “hate[d] this reality”—that because of their lack of un-
derstanding, they “simply become stupid” when Americans use sarcasm (p. 209).
Based on previous linguistic and discourse analyses of American sarcasm, Kim developed a set of
SCOBAs to teach the principles of identifying and interpreting it. One challenge for Korean speakers
of L2 English is that Korean sarcasm is only negative, while American sarcasm can be used for both
negative and positive effects. Kim’s first SCOBA, adapted for this chapter as Figure 10.2, works to
teach the concept that American English sarcasm can be positive or negative.
This SCOBA grounds American sarcasm on positive-to-negative continua of speaker emotions,
intent, and communicative goals. Along with this, Kim also taught the concept of verbal irony with
related rhetorical strategies. And across four additional SCOBAs, she taught visual cues for sarcasm
in American English, drawing learners’ attention to speakers’ use of eyes and lips to produce eye
rolls, fake smiles, sneers, deadpan expressions, and so on, as well as pointing out gestures associated
with sarcasm. Finally, Kim provided students with a flowchart showing the process of understanding
sarcasm. An adapted version of her figure is shown in Figure 10.3. This figure should be read from
left to right, starting with the large gray arrow.
Kim combined the teaching of concepts with skill development, using the TV situation comedy
Friends. Pre- and post-tests showed that all the learners improved in their ability to detect and un-
derstand sarcasm, though learners varied in terms of which strategies and cues they made use of.

Figure 10.2 Kim’s (2013) conceptual depiction of American sarcasm

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Figure 10.3 Kim’s (2013) flowchart on detecting American sarcasm

Discourse analysis of learners’ individual interviews, student writing, classroom discourse, and focus
group interviews was used to better understand the developmental processes students experienced,
including students’ analyses of sarcasm, application of the strategies taught, and their moment-by-
moment communicated thinking.

Amy Ohta and Kyoko Masuda’s work on teaching Japanese conceptually

Kyoko Masuda and I have been developing a series of studies of grammar and pragmatics instruction
in teaching Japanese as a foreign language, working to improve instruction and to understand the
conceptual basis of L2 development. Our work is grounded in the concept of subjective construal as a
basic underlying principle for understanding and using Japanese. Masuda and Ohta (2021) discusses
SCOBA development for some of this work, focused on the notion of subjective construal and related
concepts, including zero-subjects, motion verbs, benefactives (verbs meaning “give”), psychological
predicates, and honorifics; currently, we are also working on passive and causative constructions. Our
goal is to re-envision and recreate the teaching of Japanese pragmalinguistics, applying usage-based
linguistics (including discourse analysis) to focus instruction on Japanese-centric concepts, rather
than the current practice of basing instruction of Japanese on how English is structured. Figure 10.4
displays a SCOBA we designed to teach the concept of subjective construal, in contrast to objective
construal.
Because we designed this figure for beginning learners of Japanese, in it we show how each con-
strual pattern is realized in English, along with teaching them that subjective construal is the default
mode of expression in Japanese. Figure 10.4 illustrates expressions that demonstrate objective and
subjective construal, with drawings that include (objective) and exclude (subjective) the subject; the
third column depicts the relationship of the subject to the scene. For objective construal, the subject
observes the scene, mentioning all elements. In contrast, in subjective construal, the subject is merged
with the scene and, thus, is not mentioned. We repeat the use of these two figures when introducing
various structures, to remind students that this construal pattern governs how they are used.

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Figure 10.4 Masuda & Ohta’s (2021) SCOBA 1.2 to teach subjective construal

We have also worked to include Japanese discourse in our instructional diagrams. Figure 10.5 de-
picts a SCOBA designed to teach nonuse of “I,” featuring discourse from a popular Japanese reality
TV show that is familiar to many of our students.
While our SCOBA for teaching Japanese uses Japanese scripts, in Figure 10.5, we used romaniza-
tion, to make this material accessible to those who do not read Japanese.
In our classroom study on teaching the Japanese passive conceptually (Masuda & Ohta, 2022;
Ohta et al., 2023), discourse analysis is central to both our materials design and instruction. Japanese
organizes discourse around a fixed subject (Minami, 2021), which both carries out (active predi-
cates) and undergoes (passive predicates) the action. Our work in progress focuses on the concept of
“undergoing” to express how Japanese passives are used. Figure 10.6, representing the concept of
“undergoing,” merges the subjective-construal face within the scene, which is now depicted as a heart

Figure 10.5 Masuda & Ohta’s (2021) SCOBA 2.1, displaying discourse impacts of subjective construal

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 Sociocultural theory and L2 discourse in SLA

Figure 10.6 Teaching the passive, as empathy toward and focus on the subject

instead of as a rectangle. The heart shows how “undergoing” has emotional impacts, evidencing how
the Japanese passive shows empathy for (and thus focus on) the merged subject, who governs the
discourse. The arrow shows an action that the subject undergoes.
Teaching the passive is particularly complex, because Japanese usage within a discourse involves
connected text or a broader conversational context, and the beginners learning the passive lack the
proficiency to produce fluent, extended stories or to clearly connect conversational utterances to that
developing context. We had students write stories to help us assess their progress in learning passives
(Masuda & Ohta, 2022), and we noted some improvement. In the lesson, the teacher told a personal
story to illustrate the passives. In the future, adding a written version of the teacher’s story for stu-
dents to use for discourse-analysis tasks, including languaging (verbally talking through the passives
they find and their function in the discourse), would be another helpful step to move students toward
understanding passive usage; this should provide a stronger foundation for students to create their
own stories and conversations that include both doing (active) and undergoing (passive) to focus
on the protagonist. Our materials development is ongoing as we work to create materials that are
grounded in L2 concepts.

Implications of SCT for L2 learning, teaching, and use

The implications of sociocultural theory for SLA research and for language learning, teaching, and
use are profound. The holism of the perspective avoids reductionisms, and thus works to account for
diverse languages, learners, cultures, and contexts without shirking complexity. Sociocultural theory
guides an understanding of SLA not as tied to particular outcomes, but as always in process, always
moving, always developing. Unlike product-oriented SLA research, SCT provides a strong process
orientation that works to understand development. Discourse analysis provides SCT researchers with
an important set of tools for understanding the target language (which is essential as a prerequisite for
teaching it), for understanding L2 use, and for exploring how language mediates and constructs L2
developmental processes that are, due to the dialectical relationship between thought and language,
discoursal in their nature.
SCT embraces wholes, which are understood dialectically. Following Vygotsky’s call to avoid
reductionism, SCT replaces discrete decomposition of L2 learning processes with holistic under-
standings that are more helpful because they better represent our complex and interconnected world.
Table 10.1 displays some of these.

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 Amy Snyder Ohta

Table 10.1 Some examples of dialectical transformation of SLA terminological thought

Dialectical terms used in SCT What is in dynamic interrelationship?

praxis • theory, research, and practice

obuchenie • teaching and learning
• implicit and explicit instruction
zone of proximal development (ZPD) • instruction and assessment
• teachers, learners, and peers
• developmentally sensitive support and withdrawal of support
• learning and development
languaging • thinking and speaking, including thought, inner speech (elaborated
verbal thought), private speech, and social speech
• developed and developing language, learning and development
speech, inner speech, private speech • language for interaction with others and with the self
tool-and-results • process and product, cause and effect
perezhivanie (experience as processed • positive and negative emotions, behavior, cognition, development
through emotion)

Thinking dialectically doesn’t just mean using different terms, but requires understanding human
developmental processes as dynamic interrelationships that cannot be readily teased apart. Think-
ing dialectically frees researchers to think more creatively and to embrace complexity; for example,
Lantolf mentioned in the quotation earlier in this chapter (p. 5*) how dialectical thinking frees us
from thinking in oppositional terms (like teacher-fronted versus student centered, or explicit versus
implicit) to instead thinking about how to make developmentally significant use of different types
of instruction, as part of a dynamic continuum. Dialectical thinking guides us to embrace learner
and instructional diversity and consider what various practices accomplish by analyzing discourse
processes and continually learning about language development, using what we learn to refine our
theoretical understandings.
Obuchenie, for example, does not just see teachers as teaching and learners as learning, but
sees teaching/learning as integrated processes involving transformation for all participants. The
ZPD is not a mechanical space where scaffolding causes learning, but rather a dynamic discoursal
relationship between learners, peers, teachers, and materials where learners are empowered in a
creative space as learning leads development—and where, instead of scaffolding, we consider how
to provide developmentally sensitive support that is strategically withdrawn over a period of time to
promote learner development. Human higher development is a dynamic discoursal process involv-
ing languaging; languaging includes social speech, which also has private speech (language for the
self) functions. Meanwhile, private speech and inner speech are language for the self—a process
of speaking-and-thinking, where language and cognition merge—because using language, practic-
ing language, and learning about language transform the human mind via these developmentally
dynamic processes. Discourse is not just “language” or “utterance” for SCT. For SCT, discourse is
also thinking and cognizing. Thus, the term “languaging” (Swain & Watanabe, 2019) emerged from
sociocultural theoretic thinking: language is not thought, but language mediates thinking, constitut-
ing a unity of process and product as, to use Newman and Holzman’s (1993) revolutionary term,
“tool-and-results.”
Tool-and-results is a way of thinking dialectically about the interrelationships and dynamic trans-
formations of process/product. Tool-and-results is not a cause-and-effect relationship; rather, the tool
both shapes results and, itself, is subject to transformation. For example, tool-and-results considers

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the transformations that occur during L2 practice, with the final product both bearing the fingerprints
of practice and not actually being a “final” result; however, a result is never final, but is always an
ongoing part of the dynamic process of development through which L2 practice and use itself also
undergo transformation.
The final term I’ll introduce here is the Russian word perezhivanie (plural is perezhivaniya), which
refers to dynamically processing or processed experience(s). Unlike the English terms “emotion” or
“experience,” a perezhivanie (singular) refers to an experience that is in a dialectical relationship with
cognition and emotion, and with the processing of the experience. Not every experience is a perezhi-
vanie. The English term “peak experience” is a good example of a perezhivanie, but it’s important
to note that a perezhivanie can be positive, negative, or mixed. Because of their strong impact on
learners’ development, perezhivaniya (plural) are of growing interest to SCT-oriented SLA research-
ers (Ng, 2021).

Future directions for discourse in SCT-oriented SLA research

This chapter has been organized chronologically, showing the flow from an initial focus on descrip-
tive research to the increasing amount of research that is praxis-oriented and interventional, includ-
ing in the areas of dynamic assessment and concept-based language instruction. This historical flow
is also a dialectical one, because the present includes the past; more recent interventional research
retains the discoursal process orientation of earlier descriptive studies. I expect further innovation to
be made in praxis-oriented research, in an increasing range of contexts, with discourse and discourse
analysis remaining critical components of this approach, from materials design through instructional
and research processes.

Note
1 The acronym CBI has also been used in the research on concept-based language instruction. More recently,
scholars use C-BLI, or, most recently, CBLI to avoid misunderstanding, since the acronym CBI is also used
for content-based instruction.

Further reading on discourse in SCT-oriented SLA research

Swain, M., Kinnear, P., & Steinman, S. (2015). Sociocultural theory in second language education: An introduc-
tion through narratives. Multilingual Matters.
This introductory textbook covers key concepts of sociocultural theory, with a strong discourse orientation
and practical guidance for research.
For more on SCT and SLA research, see recent articles in the journal Language and Sociocultural Theory:
https://journal.equinoxpub.com/LST/about. See, for example:
White, B. J., Gánem-Gutiérrez, G. A., & Schulze, M. (Eds.). (2021). SCOBAs [Special Issue]. Language and
Sociocultural Theory, 8(1).

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 11
SOCIOCOGNITIVE PERSPECTIVES
ON SECOND LANGUAGE
ACQUISITION, TEACHING,
AND USE
Dwight Atkinson, Anamaría Sagre Barboza, and Elif Burhan-Horasanlı

Introduction
Theoretically speaking, the sociocognitive approach to second language acquisition and teaching
(SLA/T) is an ecological theory—it traces the complex, co-constitutive nature of people, places, things,
and processes, the first law of ecology being “everything is connected to everything else” (Commoner,
1971, p. 29). It is likewise a social theory—or, more accurately, a sociocognitive theory—since it
treats social world and individual mind as fundamentally integrated (see also Kecskes, Chapter 24,
this volume). Combining these two perspectives, the sociocognitive approach is also an ecosocial
theory, because the primary ecology humans inhabit is a human ecology, consisting of and/or radically
engineered by other human beings. How this multifaceted theory impacts SLA/T is described below.
Methodologically speaking, the sociocognitive approach is exploratory and eclectic, although it has
so far used multimodal interaction analysis as its main research tool. The work of Goffman, Erickson,
Kendon, and Goodwin has been especially influential in this regard, treating language as one—but just
one—of our world-constructing, sense-making tools. Findings have likewise been exploratory and ec-
lectic: Instead of presenting a causal theory, the sociocognitive approach investigates the co-constitutive
relationality of people, language, cognition, and environment in language learning/teaching/use.
This chapter provides a substantive overview of the sociocognitive approach, including: (1) its
history and theory; (2) discourse-analytic methodology; (3) two sample studies; (4) implications for
SLA/T research and practice; and (5) future directions.

Overview of the sociocognitive approach to SLA/T

History
The sociocognitive approach to SLA/T was initiated by Dwight Atkinson (2002) based on ideas from
two of his teachers. Elinor Ochs, co-founder of the interdisciplinary field of language socialization
studies (Duff & Yamamoto, Chapter 16 in this volume), frequently used the term “sociocognitive” in
her teaching but only rarely in her writing (e.g., Ochs, 1991). Inspired by neo-Vygotskian theory (see
also Ohta, Chapter 10 in this volume) and research on socially situated cognition, the term signified
a broad desire to integrate the social and cognitive in understanding language development and use.
The polymath linguist James Paul Gee, for his part, didn’t use the term sociocognitive at all; but he
published a book entitled The Social Mind (1992) which tried to show how the social and cognitive

132 DOI: 10.4324/9781003177579-12

 Sociocognitive perspectives on second language acquisition

domains could be integrated in studying human behavior, inspired by environmentally tuned (“con-
nectionist”) models of cognition.
Neither Ochs nor Gee studied SLA specifically, but their work was highly suggestive, in part due
to the discourse-analytic methods they employed. As evidenced in this handbook, “discourse” means
somewhat different things to different scholars; for Ochs and Gee it meant, most generally, “lan-
guage-in-action”—how humans use language to actively construct their lived worlds, for example,
by performing identities, socializing children, persuading audiences, teaching and learning, inculcat-
ing ideologies, or talking over dinner. More specifically, however, Ochs’ and Gee’s discourse-analytic
methods differed, as described next.
In wide-ranging research, Ochs integrated elements of a powerful form of discourse analysis—eth-
nomethodological conversation analysis (CA)—into her work. As described by Hasegawa (Chapter 2,
this volume), CA provides specialized tools for analyzing interactional data at the micro level, on the
principle that this is where social action fundamentally occurs (see also Prior, Chapter 9, this volume).
Consider, for instance, response time between “turns at talk,” a turn being a contribution one speaker
makes to a conversation (e.g., “How are you?”) that another speaker conventionally responds to with
their own turn/contribution (e.g., “Good, and you?”). Inter-turn response times are minimized across
widely different languages (Stivers et al., 2009), with longer-than-conventional gaps treated as signaling
interactional difficulty. In English conversation,1 for instance, average between-turn response times are
around 0.2 seconds, and those exceeding around 0.7 seconds are treated as problematic. Thus, if I ask on
meeting an acquaintance, “How are you?” but receive no answer within around 0.7 seconds, I am likely
to infer some kind of communication problem (e.g., they didn’t hear me) or interpersonal issue (e.g.,
they’re unhappy with me). Different languages have different inter-turn pausing conventions, but the
longer the response time, the more likely an interactional problem will be inferred (Roberts et al., 2015).
“Pure” CA-ists take the radical position that all analytical claims must be directly evidenced in
their data. Appeal to contextual factors beyond the interaction itself is therefore unwarranted, plac-
ing CA at odds with context-based research approaches like ethnography (Okada, Chapter 14 in this
volume). Ochs and her language socialization studies co-founder, Bambi Schieffelin, however, took
a different view, as described by Schieffelin (Tadic et al., 2020):

Language socialization … is really a hybrid. … We need the psychological to understand the

developmental change in an individual over time; … the ethnographic to understand the lay-
ers of cultural beliefs, values, preferences, and choices that we’re socialized into; and … eth-
nomethodological, turn-by-turn attention to detail in trying to understand language and culture
from the participants’ perspective. We … use these different perspectives to try to really under-
stand the language-society-mind connection.
(p. 24)

CA is now frequently used to study SLA/T, and the sociocognitive approach follows Ochs, Schief-
felin, and others (O’Connell & Kowal, 2009) in using CA tools to represent and sometimes analyze
data, but without committing to strict CA principles like the analytical primacy of turn-taking or next-
turn proof procedure (Goodwin & Salomon, 2019).
Gee, for his part, took a rather different discourse-analytic approach, showing how grammar and
other social conventions function in constructing social meaning, identity, and action. Thus,

Being a who (identity) engaged in a what (activity) is a performance …, visible in the world and
situated within ongoing, but changing social conventions. If there are no conventions (social
agreements and alignments) there is no understanding to be had, no matter what is in your head.
(2015, p. 302)

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Gee’s approach to discourse analysis revolves around his idea of Discourse(s):

Ways of enacting and recognizing socially significant identities based on how a person uses all
the “stuff” required to be recognized as having that identity. So, [a doctor] must speak, interact,
and get recognized in certain ways; use tools and technologies in certain ways; display certain
sorts of knowledge, beliefs, and values; and inhabit certain … places in certain ways to get
recognized as a doctor … speaking to a patient.
(2018, p. 78)

Important to note here is that Discourse-based identities are produced in interaction, in this case
“as a doctor … speaking to a patient.” “Student” and “teacher” are other interactionally produced
identities, based on conventional forms of enactment and recognition provided by teaching/learning
Discourses. A second important point is that Discourses are norm-based and norm-enacting. Thus,
intersubjectivity, interaffectivity, and the social cooperation they enable are impossible without the
normative role played by Discourses. Interactionally produced identities are further discussed in the
next section.
Other early influences on the sociocognitive approach include SLA perspectives based on com-
plexity theory (Larsen-Freeman, 1997), connectionism (N. Ellis, 1998), and neo-Vygotskian socio-
cultural theory (SCT; see Ohta, Chapter 10, this volume). After Atkinson’s (2002) initial theorization,
Eton Churchill, Takako Nishino, and Hanako Okada joined him in developing an empirical research
program (e.g., Atkinson et al., 2007, 2018; Churchill et al., 2010; Nishino & Atkinson, 2015). Atkin-
son currently works with the Happy Cactus Group (2023a) at the University of Arizona.

Basic theory underlying the sociocognitive approach

Classical approaches to SLA theory view learning as building mind-internal linguistic systems, or
competence, through information processing. Sociocognitive theory opposes this cognitivist perspec-
tive, instead viewing cognition—what happens in the head—as ecological—what happens in the
world (Anderson & Chemero, 2017; Gibson, 1979). Thus, animals have nervous systems to dy-
namically sense and adapt to their ecosocial environments, thereby staying functional in those en-
vironments—that is, alive. Sociocognitive theory therefore treats cognitive, social, embodied, and
environmental phenomena integratively: “organism-plus-environment” (Bateson, 1972, p. 455) or
mindbodyworld (Atkinson, 2014). More specifically, sociocognitive theory highlights: (1) ecosocial
alignment processes—adaptive engagement with the lived environment which changes the organ-
ism–environment relationship; (2) learning as public/relational “we-processes” over private/nonre-
lational “I-processes”; and (3) the presentation and development of viable interactional identities/
selves.

Alignment processes
Central to sociocognitive theory is the concept of alignment. Language learning, teaching, and use
involve processes whereby individuals dynamically change/update/improve—that is, align—their re-
lationship with their ecosocial environments in moment-to-moment interaction. Thus viewed, learn-
ing is not extracting knowledge from the world and re-presenting it in the head, as metaphors like
acquisition, appropriation, or internalization suggest, but increasing one’s environmental functional-
ity and therefore viability. Regarding language learning specifically: “Speech is performed always in
a context of adjustment to others. … Children do not seem to learn sentences, but … to adapt their
behavior to increasingly complex surroundings. It is an enterprise that … continues throughout a

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lifetime” (Hopper, 1998, pp. 161–162). Evidence for learning-as-alignment is found in what learners
do in interaction rather than what they know according to tests. Two examples of alignment in SLA/T
are provided in the “Sample studies” section below.

Learning as public/relational “we-processes”

There is no doubt that individuals learn, but is learning therefore an individual process? The cognitiv-
ist answer is “yes,” leaving key SLA/T concepts underdeveloped. Feedback, for instance, is viewed
in cognitivist SLA as: (1) what triggers extra linguistic processing by the cognitive computer—neg-
ative evidence, recasts, languaging, and so on; and (2) exceptional—what artificial activities like
information-gap provide versus mundane interaction (Long, 2015). Yet feedback is everywhere:
Everything we do, say, and feel is an environmental response. Without responsiveness there is no
adaptivity, and without progressive adaptivity there is no productive survival. Learning is therefore
a fundamental human condition, based on organism–environment responsivity; and, as noted above,
human environments are full of other humans.
Learning is thus a we-process—of co-adaptivity, coordination, and communication—giving con-
cepts like feedback, communication, and language their due. Two examples follow, both based on
Goodwin’s (e.g., 2018) work. First, learning often occurs through “co-operative action”2—the mun-
dane means whereby individuals co-construct social action. A recorded argument between children
provides an introductory illustration, although not one highlighting learning per se:

A: Why don’t you get out my yard.

B: Why don’t you make me get out the yard. (p. 3)

Speech-act-wise, B takes A’s command and reconstructs it as a challenge; he does so by adopting

A’s lexicogrammar, appending “make me,” and changing the determiner. This example indicates how
discourse/language, as with other forms of mundane social action, is built co-adaptively from envi-
ronmental material, rather than emerging willy-nilly from heads. Sample Study 2 shows how an ESL
class acted as an ecological unit in cooperatively producing an answer to their teacher’s question.
Our second example of learning as we-process involves the richly organized ecosocial settings
wherein learners see, hear, and feel what needs to be learned. Goodwin (2007) labeled these “em-
bodied participation frameworks”—conventionalized combinations of human-made physical entities
(e.g., dining rooms—this and following parenthesized examples come from Atkinson et al., 2007),
sociophysical arrangements (e.g., sitting side by side at dining table), sociocognitive actors (e.g.,
niece, aunt), routine practices (e.g., completing homework assignments), and expressive actions (e.g.,
gestures, posture, facial expressions, language use). Embodied participation frameworks are thus the
often highly designed habitats or microniches which afford cooperative action. These “public … con-
figurations of semiotic heterogeneity [act] as sites of transformation … Participants not only attend
to … but actively use [them] to build in concert … subsequent meaning and action” (Goodwin, 2013,
p. 11). Goodwin’s concept substantially expands the notion of multimodality, because it embraces
whole ecologies and their organization rather than predetermined sets of modes. Studies of multimo-
dality in SLA/T have nonetheless contributed signally to its understanding.

Presentation and development of interactional identities/selves

Sociocognitive theory joins SCT (Ohta, Chapter 10, this volume) in viewing selves as originally
social: Immersing small “hyperprosocial” (Marean, 2015) creatures in rich human environments
produces human beings. Sociocognitive theory, however, views human development as continuous,

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lifelong alignment to ever-changing and complexifying ecosocial worlds.3 Social selves are therefore
continuously (re)created in cooperative interaction, and are essential to our survival.
For this same reason, cooperative interaction is fragile: “A person with whom others will not play
[coordination] games … is a biological entity with a low fitness coefficient. … Coordination games
are the basic ecological tasks facing people” (Ross, 2007, p. 725). Individuals therefore actively pre-
sent themselves as cooperative interactors, through what Goffman (1959) called presentation of self.
That is, willingness to cooperate, trustworthiness, commitment, mental and social competence—in
short, alignability—are agentively performed in our mundane actions. Interactional selves are in
some sense ideal—one can pretend to be what one isn’t—but given interaction’s key role in human
viability our interactional reputations, so to speak, are highly consequential.
According to Goffman (1967), self is presented whenever we interact. Thus, face-to-face interac-
tion employs:

the glances, gestures, positionings, and verbal statements that people continuously feed into
the situation, whether intended or not. These are the external signs of orientation and involve-
ment—states of mind and body … beginning with the littlest, for example the fleeting facial
move an individual can make in the game of expressing … alignment to what is happening.
(p. 1)

Self-presentation obviously varies culturally/situationally, but, like the inter-turn response con-
ventions described above, within a universal infrastructure of interaction (Hall, 2019). It thus in-
volves both norms that are primarily social—for example, Goffman’s “verbal statements” (see block
quotation just above)—and those that are substantially universal—for example, body positioning/
proximity and facial expression.
Presentation of self has multiple implications for SLA/T. First, it uses universal tools of expres-
sion which broadly support language learning—this overlaps with the claim that language learning is
multimodal, but it also entails more. Thus, any form of social action, including language learning, is
not just a case of doing but also of being—a performance of self. Language classrooms, for instance,
often critiqued as socially unreal, are deeply social/cooperative situations, and therefore deeply in-
volve presentations of self: Both students and teachers perform willingness to participate, commit-
ment, intelligence, and accurate learning and teaching, and in that class and classroom, at least, their
performances amount substantially to who they are. Classroom learning is thus considerably more
high-stakes than commonly portrayed, which explains the anxiety and embarrassment it often engen-
ders. Yet students also enter classrooms with preexisting learning tools, including the universal tools
of expression underlying social interaction/self-presentation.
Ultimately, Goffman (1981) viewed linguistic interaction as less about transmitting messages en-
coded in a mental lexicon/grammar than about presenting and continuously negotiating interactional
selves. Language is therefore a crucial tool for being “a person-in-the world” (Lave & Wenger, 1991)
both in its learning and skilled use.

Research methods and approaches in a sociocognitive approach to SLA/T

The main empirical research method used to date in sociocognitive SLA/T research is multimodal
interaction analysis (MMIA). MMIA is a form of discourse analysis inasmuch as it analyzes lan-
guage, but it treats language as one of a broad suite of expressive tools and capacities for social
interaction, none of which it automatically privileges. There is no dominant version of MMIA, but
the methods of Goffman, Erickson and Kendon, and Goodwin have particularly influenced the so-
ciocognitive approach.

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Goffman is widely credited with making face-to-face interaction a serious research topic. He
began by suggesting that “the study of every unit of social organization must … lead to an analysis
of the interaction of its elements” (1961, p. 7); in face-to-face interaction, these elements include
gaze, language, body orientation, facial expression, and so on (see block quotation from Goffman in
previous section). These tiny, insignificant-seeming details of embodied interaction are its essential
building blocks: They signal the all-important alignment among interactors, as expressed in presenta-
tions of self.
Goffman has frequently been criticized, especially by conversation analysts (e.g., Schegloff, 1988),
for not analyzing interaction in the detailed, systematic way he advocated. His work is nonetheless
highly generative and has inspired recent sociocognitive research (Happy Cactus Group, 2023a).
Erickson and Kendon’s MMIA approach (e.g., Kendon, 1990) develops pioneering work by an
interdisciplinary group of anthropologists, psychiatrists, and linguists in the 1950s–1960s, sometimes
labeled context analysis. Erickson (2011) described the main tenets of this approach, which overlaps
with Goffman’s in important ways:4

“Interaction” might profitably be conceived as … an ecosystem of mutual influence that is contin-

uously maintained by all activity of all the participants in a given occasion of face to face contact,
throughout the entire course of the conduct of that activity—and as organized both sequentially—
involving connections of influence among participants across successive acts in time—and …
simultaneously—involving connections of influence among participants at the same moment ….
From this perspective the study of interaction should not privilege talk over nonverbal behavior,
nor … speaking activity over listening activity—all is of potential interest …. Participants …
can see each other as well as hear each other …. Thus their interactional context is not only
“embodied,” … but the visual availability of interactional conduct to all participants affords si-
multaneous monitoring of … each others’ verbal and nonverbal actions …. Meanings are often
communicated in clusters of multi-modally redundant signals … made up of combinations of
verbal and nonverbal behavior, as performed both by persons who are speaking … and by those
who are listening …. These “meaning packages” often are communicated as allusive hints rather
than as signals of specific, denotative meaning.
(pp. 390–391)

Erickson (2011) connected this approach directly to learning and teaching, wherein learning
is viewed as trajectories of involvement and participation in communities of practice (Lave &
Wenger, 1991):

Usually learning does not happen in discrete “Aha” moments of breakthrough to new under-
standing …. Most learning [instead] involves relatively continuous movement from more
peripheral to more central participation in a community of practice … and so “microgenetic”
studies of learning require repeated observation and/or audiovisual recording of the actions
of individuals and groups …. If [this is the case], and if social interaction is the ecosystemic
medium of local practices within which such increasingly complete participation … is taking
place, it … stand[s] to reason that close documentation and analytic observation of the prac-
tices [of] social interaction hold potential for helping us get smarter about how teaching and
learning take place.
(p. 400)

The late anthropologist Charles Goodwin adopted CA methodology while taking it in new direc-
tions (e.g., Goodwin & Salomon, 2019). These include a focus on multimodality, and the balanced

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treatment of sequential (e.g., turn-taking) and simultaneous (e.g., co-speech gesturing) interactional
behavior. Goodwin’s concepts of co-operative action and embodied participation frameworks, intro-
duced above, are especially important for studying SLA/T sociocognitively. Thus, the Happy Cac-
tus Group (2023a) used the latter to analyze the natural learning/teaching affordances provided in
one ESL classroom: (1) students’ semicircular linear arrangement afforded all participants maximal
co-monitoring of embodied expression; (2) students’ standing rather than sitting afforded greater
interactional mobility and therefore greater embodied engagement; (3) students and teacher both
standing minimized height-related power differences; (4) the teacher’s patterned movement up/down
the student semicircle/line significantly reduced the sociocognitive complexity of students’ problem-
solving—they could predict when their turn was coming and how to respond based on preceding
students’ answers and teacher’s responses; and (5) the teacher’s concluding a teaching sequence by
returning to the same location at which he began the sequence, thus spatially marking the lesson’s
discourse structure. Embodied participation frameworks thus provide rich multimodal platforms sup-
porting learning.
Based on the methodological influences described in this section, the sociocognitive approach
adopts the following principles and tools for MMIA of learning, teaching, and language use, pre-
sented here as heuristics rather than absolutes:

1 Interaction Principle — Learning and teaching take place in and through moment-to-moment
interaction, so it is necessary to analyze such interaction in order to study learning and teaching
processes.
2 Multimodality Principle — Language occurs integratively with other expressive actions, includ-
ing gaze, facial expression, body movement, gesture, object use, spatial arrangements, and multi-
media; it must therefore be studied as part of such “action packages” (Goodwin, 2013).
3 Alignment Principle — As a core learning/teaching process, alignment—how social actors adap-
tively relate to their ecosocial environment—must be analyzed.
4 Learning/Teaching Principle — When learning is viewed as ecological adaptation, teaching be-
comes an intrinsic part of it. That is, adaptive learning is a response to ecosocial feedback; this
feedback, its sources, and actions must therefore be included in the learning frame.
5 Cooperative Action Principle — Social action, including learning/teaching, proceeds substantially
through cooperative action. That is, new social action is produced on the basis of past social ac-
tion, so learning is a form of old-to-new social action (van Lier, 1996).
6 Embodied Participation Framework Principle — Social action, including learning/teaching ac-
tion, is enabled by embodied participation frameworks in which physical entities, sociocognitive
actors, routine practices, spatial and temporal frames, and expressive actions (including but not
limited to language) function integratively. Goodwin (2007) described the nature of this action:
“Multimodal action is efficacious … because it occurs within an embodied participation frame-
work that creates a visible, public locus for attention and action …. This is especially important
in situations of apprenticeship and education” (p. 59).
7 Presentation of Self/Identity Principle — Self/identity is expressed in social interaction, as par-
ticipants seek to present themselves as cooperative interactors. Learning is fundamentally tied to
identity because learning involves developing more productive ecosocial relations. Language is
centrally involved in this process.
8 CA and MMIA Tools — Up to this point, sociocognitive research has relied largely on the tools of
CA and MMIA to investigate learning and teaching. Like all tools, however, they are to be used
when useful, and to be set aside when not, and for setting aside when not. Toolkits, in other words,
are open-ended sets of heuristics.

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Sample studies illustrating a sociocognitive approach to SLA/T

Study 1: Affective affiliation in SLA/T

Study 1 was conducted by Amador and Adams (2013) under the broad umbrella of Schumann and
colleagues’ (Joaquin & Schumann, 2013; Lee et al., 2009) interactional instinct approach to language
acquisition. This approach hypothesizes basic attachment/bonding instincts underlying humans’ dis-
tinctive prosociality, which thereby support first and (sometimes) second language learning. Amador
and Adams examined two more-or-less formal learning situations—an education-oriented daycare
environment and a beginning-level university Spanish-as-a-foreign-language class—to see how af-
fective affiliation might function. We focus on the Spanish class here.
The teacher, “Chachi,” was a master at making language learning engaging while giving grammatical
feedback and promoting language use. Thus, when Chachi asked the class what children do on Hallow-
een, a student, “Dahlia.” hesitantly answered “¿Comes-uh muchos dulces?” (“You eat lots of sweets?”),
where the third-person plural-marked verb form “comen” was the expected grammatical target. Instead
of correcting Dahlia, however, Chachi playfully responded by reframing her answer as a comment on his
own candy-eating, pointing to himself, grinning, and saying “¿Yo↑ como muchos dulces?” (“I eat lots of
sweets?”, where up-arrow marks a distinct pitch rise). When Dahlia didn’t respond, Chachi moved closer
and leaned forward; Dahlia then laughed and answered, “Todos los días” (“Everyday”), to which Chachi
quickly responded, “Sí todos los días” (“Yes, everyday!”) while miming “frenetic” (p. 148) candy-eating,
as the class laughed along. Dahlia then attempted to self-correct: “Co-um: come muchos dulces?” (where
underlining marks vocal emphasis), which Chachi immediately recast as “Los niños comen muchos
dulces uh huh?” (“Kids eat lots of sweets, uh huh?”), in response to which Dahlia nodded.
This study illustrates central features of a sociocognitive approach: (1) the complex multimodal align-
ment in Chachi and Dahlia’s interaction, including complex linguistic co-adaptivity (in grammar, into-
nation, speech-act variation, etc.), facial expression, gesture, movement, and humor; (2) we-processes,
including cooperative action built around “todos los días” and “como/e/en muchos dulces,” as well as
engagement marked by class laughter; and (3) Dahlia’s projection of an alignable interactional identity/
self, which Chachi skillfully respects and promotes in responding to, thereby promoting learning.
Above all, however, this study suggests the central role of affect in language learning, something
which fundamentally all SLA/T approaches have struggled to understand (Prior, 2019; Chapter 9,
this volume). This is doubtless due partly to the enduring cognitivism of the field, wherein learning is
viewed as private knowledge acquisition via cognitive processing rather than the developing integra-
tive life experience of human beings (Atkinson, 2019a). Even SLA/T approaches nominally studying
affect, like language learning motivation studies, seem uninformative here: Thus, leading motiva-
tion researcher Peter MacIntyre et al. (2019) recently commented in an authoritative handbook that
“Given their ubiquity and importance, it is surprising that emotions have not … enjoyed … greater
prominence in the literature on motivation for language learning” (p. 183).
From a sociocognitive perspective, cognition and emotion are integrated—valuing (needing, desiring,
believing, identifying with, sensing what/whom to approach/avoid, etc.; see van Lier, 1996, for SLA) is the
basis of human adaptivity and survival, as well as the “natural attitude” in everyday life; rational problem-
solving is the exception (Kahneman, 2011). Thus, humans learn language—or anything else—because it
contributes to their adaptivity and survival, not because they are unmotivated cognitive processors.

Study 2: We-processes in SLA/T

The second sample study is our own in-progress investigation of learning as a we-process in an
Australian ESL classroom (Happy Cactus Group, 2023b; see also Happy Cactus Group, 2023a).

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The data were collected in 2014 by John Bartik, then the coordinator of a church-based ESL program,
and are publicly available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0aP7EarQ_s. 5 Bartik is the teacher
(hereafter T) in the video; the students (S1, S2, etc.) were 10 beginning-level learners. The follow-
ing analysis departs from CA methodology in not featuring a printed transcript—readers can refer
directly to the video—but it does use CA transcription conventions to capture linguistic details.6 We
focus on approximately 15 seconds of the one-minute-and-nine-second video.
At 0:05 in the video, T gazes at S1 (taller student in black) and asks, “Does she like my beard?”
while pointing at S2 (student in purple, temporarily offscreen). S1 responds “No:.” as someone else
(probably S2) responds “◦She◦”. S1 pauses momentarily, then continues “She::?” and shifts gaze to
S2, still offscreen. In near unison, S2 and S3 (shorter student in black) say “doesn’t”, which S1 over-
laps with her own “doesn’t” and then continues with “your” while pointing at and shifting gaze to T,
as S2 overlaps with “like” while extending hand. S1 then raises right index finger to chin as S3 and
S4, again in near unison, utter “like”, which S1 repeats as “liked” while drawing finger across chin.
S2 simultaneously says “◦b/ei/◦”—an apparent approximation of “beard”—with a slight downward
beat gesture, and someone (possibly S3) says “◦your b/i/◦.” T nods slightly, S1 shrugs, and T gestures
for S1 to continue. S1 utters “your,” S3 shifts gaze briefly to S1 and says “Your b/i/,” S1 shifts gaze to
S3, S3 repeats “◦b/i/◦” and draws finger across chin, whereupon S1 pauses and responds “Yeah your
b/i/”, which T overlaps with “b/i/” while touching his own chin.
If this interaction seems difficult to follow, this is because it is a thoroughgoing we-process. Thus,
it is difficult and sometimes impossible to identify who is speaking, yet the event comes off as a
skilled performance. Concepts like turn-taking, repair, feedback, and zone of proximal development,
all of which involve sequential rather than simultaneous action, approach their limits here. Thus, at
the one-minute point in the video, the whole answer, “She doesn’t like your beard,” has been pro-
duced, but we cannot say who produced it, at least in terms of individuals. Yet we can say how it was
produced: through a densely textured and organized we-process.

Implications for SLA, teaching, and use

The sociocognitive approach is a theory of SLA/T, so its implications are substantially theoretical.
As language teachers, teacher educators, and researchers, however, our goal is to use the theory to
test, view, and hopefully improve our practice, conversely improving the theory. A first implication:
The sociocognitive approach began as a critique of cognitivism in SLA studies (Atkinson, 2002); this
project continues. This may seem surprising given the widespread belief that SLA studies has tran-
scended its cognitivist roots. Yet counter-evidence abounds: (1) the continuing importance in the field
of explicitly cognitivist concepts like input, processing, representation, and output; (2) major efforts
to unite the field under a usage-based theory of “language learning and cognition” (N. Ellis, 2019,
p. 39, and other focus articles in Duff & Byrnes, 2019); and (3) the field’s ongoing obsession with
conscious, explicit learning (Atkinson, 2019a, b). Additional evidence includes the continuing cen-
trality of competence, originating in Chomsky’s enshrinement of language as cognitive knowledge
and banishment as human behavior. Mistaking language for linguistic knowledge is like mistaking
tennis for knowing how to play it, or a symphony for its score (Geertz, 1973): Its distinctive nature
as human action disappears. As knowledge, competence’s place is the human mind, which, like other
repositories of valued commodities, “acquires,” “appropriates,” “internalizes”—that is, comes to pri-
vately own it. And like other commodities competence/knowledge can be transferred—in this case
from mind to mind, that is, teaching and learning as cognitively conceived.
A first and extremely pressing implication of the sociocognitive approach is therefore the need
to help reorient SLA/T views of language from knowledge-based to action-based, that is, from the
property of a (computational) head to action in the ecosocial world. Unfortunately, there are few if

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any well-developed theories of language-as-action; in SLA studies the closest may be the theory of
interactional competence, as developed by CA-SLA researchers, which is itself now under debate
(e.g., Hall, 2019; Markee, 2019). In our opinion, competence cannot transcend its roots in knowl-
edge/knowing/cognition; the sociocognitive alternative is to conceptualize language and language
learning as mindbodyworld action.
A second implication of our approach is that learning and teaching are integrated phenomena.
A founding act of SLA studies (Corder, 1967) was to sever learning from teaching—what learners
learned and teachers taught had no necessary connection. Partly as a result, SLA studies has had an
on-again-off-again relationship with teaching, both sides of which are conveniently represented in
Gass et al.’s (2020) authoritative and deeply ambiguous statement: “One way to define the field of
SLA is to state what it is not …. SLA is not about pedagogy, unless that pedagogy affects the course
of acquisition (this topic will be explored in Chapter 14)” (pp. 3–4). Yet strong supporters of the
teaching–learning connection include highly influential SLA/T scholars, e.g., Lantolf and Poehner
(2014) and R. Ellis (2021).
Our own view is that learning is a form of ecological responsivity—dynamic alignment/adaptivity
to the environment: We learn as we live in order to survive and hopefully prosper. In this sense teach-
ing is everywhere, in anything providing environmental feedback. Thus, humans definitely teach, but
so can thunderstorms, roads, books, and video games—basically anything that can guide adaptive
alignment with the environment (Gee, n.d.). Human teaching is nonetheless distinctive: A major
claim across disciplines is that it is a specific evolutionary development, which co-evolved with spe-
cific capacities for teaching-based learning. This claim, and the evidence supporting it, is reviewed by
Atkinson and Shvidko (2019) vis-à-vis SLA/T. A second implication of the sociocognitive approach,
then, is that learning and teaching go hand in hand; we should therefore reconceptualize them based
on this understanding (Atkinson, 2017), including how we enact them as well as how we educate
future teachers (Happy Cactus Group, 2023a). Sample Study 2, described in the previous section,
clearly illustrates how teaching and learning function together.
A third implication of the sociocognitive approach concerns multimodality. From an ecological
perspective, multimodality is a narrow lens for viewing humans’ environmental immersion and re-
lationality, on which our lives depend. Certainly, we speak, gesture, gaze, have facial expressions,
touch, move, and move objects around us—the standard menu of multimodal semiosis. Yet objects,
spaces, environments, physical forces, and ecosocial others move us as well, as we interact with our
environment. This was part of Gibson’s (1979) point in developing his theory of affordances—we are
creatures of rich and complex environments. It was also part of Goodwin’s inspiration, following his
teacher Goffman, in developing the embodied participation framework concept. But if all this seems
too much for an epistemologically conservative field like SLA studies, simply consider the effects
of face masks and physical distancing (not to mention remote learning) on language learning in the
COVID era. One great advantage of concepts like affordances or embodied participation frameworks
is that they are environmentally open-ended: No matter how revolutionary multimodality may be in
a field long dominated by cognocentrism and linguocentrism, it takes us only so far in understanding
the rich interactive environmentality of language learning, teaching, and use.

Future directions for a sociocognitive approach

Four future directions will briefly be mentioned. First, a future direction for substantially all SLA/T
research and theory should be a fuller, more focused understanding of the role of emotion in learning/
teaching processes (Prior, 2019). As noted previously, we seem to know rather little in this regard,
possibly due to continuing cognitivist influence in the field. A sociocognitive approach seems well
positioned to contribute to this effort, but not without deepening its own understanding.

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A second future direction for the sociocognitive approach would be to further develop its under-
standing of identity/self, as described in this chapter. In fact, this is a new direction for us, inspired by
Goffman. Goffman (1967) connected self/identity to affect through the concept of social attachment,
which may also be a promising way to pursue the sociocognitive understanding of affect in SLA/T,
thereby combining our first two future directions.
A third future direction would be to expand our approach into non-face-to-face environments—
to study, for instance, how mindbodyworld ecologies function in language learning/teaching/use in
multimodal synchronous online environments. The latter are often represented as deficient versions
of “real” face-to-face environments, but this seems one-sided: They are their own forms of com-
munication, with their own ecological habitats and affordances. The sociocognitive approach can
contribute to understanding these habitats vis-à-vis how language learning/teaching/use functions
within them.
A fourth and final future direction is to continue to develop tools for understanding SLA/T as a
mindbodyworld phenomenon. This includes both conceptual and analytic tools/methods, which of
course are intimately related. Goodwin’s concepts of embodied participation framework and co-
operative action are excellent examples of tools which combines elements of mind, body, and world,
and in doing so enrich the study of multimodality—we need both to learn how to use them better and
to develop other tools like them.

Conclusion
Humans and human language learning/teaching/use are fundamentally embedded in rich, dynamic
environments, not locked away in cognitivist heads. To stay viable in such environments, we must
co-adapt and coordinate our actions. Language often plays a major role in coordinating social action,
making its learning virtually essential. Humans therefore usually learn at least one language, but in
many cases must also learn others: It is not for nothing that most of the world is multilingual.
To say that we’re not locked in cognitivist heads is by no means to say that we don’t have brains,
or that they aren’t vital to our survival. But brains are in bodies, bodies are in worlds, and brains
have evolved to keep bodies viable in worldly environments. Our minds therefore exist first and
foremost for acting; that is, thinking is a subset of acting, not the other way around (Anderson &
Chemero, 2017).
The sociocognitive approach to SLA/T frames language within the (co-)processes whereby we
(co-)exist. Cognition is one of these co-processes, as its multilingual etymology suggests: Co- =
Latin “with, together” + gnoscere, an early form of Latin noscere, derived from Greek gnosis—
“knowledge”—and γιγνώσκειν—“to know” (see Chaney, 2013). Yet, as with all human co-processes,
it is part and parcel of a larger ecological whole.

Notes
1 There are of course many varieties of “English conversation”; Stivers et al. (2009) studied one.
2 Goodwin (2018) hyphenated “co-operative” to denote the possibility that speakers may disagree while still
building on each other’s actions. We give an example immediately below.
3 SCT, in contrast, sees human development as radically discontinuous once “culture” enters the scene, espe-
cially regarding the development of cognitive tools like language.
4 Kendon (1990) explores many of these overlaps.
5 Permission was granted by both Bartik and the University of Arizona’s Human Subjects Protection Program
to use these data for research purposes.
6 We use the following CA transcription conventions: ? = Rising intonation;. = Falling intonation; Do = Un-
derlining marks “special” voice quality/intonation; : = Vowel lengthening; °b/ei/° = Degree marks enclose
notably quieter speech; /ei/ = Slash marks enclose phonetically transcribed speech.

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Further reading
Goodwin, C. (2018). Co-operative action. Cambridge University Press.
Goodwin frames social interaction, including language use, within an integrative theory of “co-operative
action”—the complex, multimodal operations whereby we effect ecosocial action. According to Goodwin, non-
formal learning and teaching are natural and pervasive features of cooperative action.
Happy Cactus Group (2023a). Beyond learning opportunities: Focused encounters in second language acquisi-
tion and teaching.
This paper uses Goffman’s notion of “focused encounters” to develop sociocognitive theory and empirically in-
vestigate classroom SLA/T from a sociocognitive perspective. The main claim is that learning and teaching are adap-
tive ecosocial actions occurring in complex mindbodyworld ecologies, including second/additional language worlds.

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 12
COMPLEX DYNAMIC SYSTEMS
THEORY, INTERACTIONAL
DISCOURSE, AND SECOND
LANGUAGE RESEARCH
Aki Siegel and Paul Seedhouse

Introduction
The current chapter provides an overview of the conceptual framework of complex dynamic systems
theory (CDST) and of how this might be applied to the study of L2 development through interaction.
The chapter begins by defining CDST and discusses its relevance to second language acquisition
(SLA). It then considers how it might work with a Conversation Analysis (CA) methodology for the
study of L2 learning through interaction. This is exemplified by relating CDST principles to interac-
tional data, following which implications are drawn.

Overview of CDST and its relation to L2 research

CDST refers to systems that are “dynamic, complex, nonlinear, chaotic, unpredictable, sensitive to
initial conditions, open, self-organizing, feedback sensitive, and adaptive” (Larsen-Freeman, 1997,
p. 142). In the social world, the relationship between cause and effect is often complex, since effects
or outcomes derive from multiple causes and vary depending on the context. CDST is the study of
these nonlinear dynamic phenomena, and it attempts to analyze them from a holistic perspective.
CDST has its focus on the human and physical systems of the world and is a study of the mecha-
nisms of the common principles or information of real-world systems. Gell-Mann (1994b) explains:

[A] complex adaptive system acquires information about its environment and its own inter-
action with that environment, identifying regularities in that information, condensing those
regularities into a kind of “schema” or model, and acting in the real world on the basis of that
schema. In each case, there are various competing schemata, and the results of that action in the
real world feed back to influence the competition among those schemata.
(p. 17)

CDST attempts to understand, predict, and influence emergent phenomena, such as market crashes,
traffic jams, epidemics, human conflicts, and environmental change (N. F. Johnson, 2007). Other
terms besides CDST are also used to refer to similar phenomena, including: Complexity Theory,
Chaos Theory, and Dynamic Systems Theory. CDST (de Bot, 2017) is used in this chapter to refer to
these dynamic nonlinear phenomena, a usage which is becoming more accepted in the field of SLA.

146 DOI: 10.4324/9781003177579-13

 Complex dynamic systems theory and second language research

Larsen-Freeman (1997) was one of the first to investigate SLA from a CDST perspective. From
this perspective, language learning is “the constant adaptation of [the learners’] linguistic resources
in the service of meaning-making in response to the affordances that emerge in the communica-
tive situation, which is, in turn, affected by learners’ adaptivity” (Larsen-Freeman, 2010, p. 67).
An individual’s linguistic system is thus continuously changed by the ongoing interaction. From
this viewpoint, “learning” refers to the individual learner not only taking in linguistic knowledge,
but also adapting and making changes to the communicative situation (Larsen-Freeman, 2010).
Therefore, “development” as the result of “learning” can be understood as the changes to the indi-
vidual linguistic system and the communicative situation that manifest themselves in the ongoing
interaction.
This CDST view of L2 learning is neither an isolated nor a new perspective in the field of SLA,
as others have also acknowledged both the cognitive aspect and the social aspects of language
learning, and that the two are inseparable. The ecological perspective (Kramsch, 2003, 2008; van
Lier, 1996, 2000, 2004) captures the organic, emergent, and adaptive features of the agents in
language learning and development. Van Lier (2000) explains that from an ecological perspective,
“the learner is immersed in an environment full of potential meanings. These meanings become
available gradually as the learner acts and interacts within and with this environment” (p. 246). He
argues that language learning is the verbal and nonverbal interaction in which the learner engages,
not just a facilitative activity for learning. Similarly, the sociocognitive perspective (Batstone,
2010; Ellis, 2010) argues that all forms of language use have both a social and cognitive dimension
and the two are interdependent. In other words, performance (a social phenomenon) and compe-
tence (a cognitive phenomenon) of language use are continually related through co-constructed
interaction (Batstone, 2010; see Atkinson et al. [Chapter 11 in this volume] regarding sociocogni-
tive perspectives). Finally, the usage-based perspective (Eskildsen, 2012; Tomasello, 2000) under-
stands language as a set of semiotic resources to be acquired, and language use as the foundation
and core aspect of language learning (Eskildsen & Cadierno, 2015). This perspective has increas-
ingly been adopted in understanding language development as nonlinear (e.g., Roehr-Brackin,
2014; Tomasello, 2009; Verspoor, Schmid, & Xu, 2012), particularly by conversation analysts try-
ing to understand the language change of individuals in interaction (Cadierno & Eskildsen, 2015;
Eskildsen, 2012; Van Compernolle, 2019).
These perspectives overlap in their conceptualization of language development as a dynamic pro-
cess, but differ in their origins and their focus. The ecological perspective comes from the institu-
tional setting of a language classroom, and compared to CDST, has a stronger focus on the agent
(van Lier, 2000). The sociocognitive perspective was created while moving away from the socio- and
cognitive dichotomy in the field (Batstone, 2010; Ellis, 2010), and the usage-based perspective origi-
nated from the field of linguistics in analyses of the emergent patterns of grammar (Hopper, 1987;
Hopper & Traugott, 2003). The latter two perspectives, when applied to SLA, also have an emphasis
on the agent, with studies often focusing only on an individual learner.
In contrast, CDST is a “meta-theory” (Larsen-Freeman, 2013), which is “a set of coherent princi-
ples of reality (i.e., ontological ideas) and principles of knowing (i.e., epistemological ideas)” (Hiver
& Al-Hoorie, 2020, p. 20). CDST has no connections to preconceptualized language learning theo-
ries, and it considers the individual learners together with the larger community of language users. As
Larsen-Freeman (2010) explains:

As two language users interact, they adapt to each other. This co-adaptation process results in a
transformation of the language resources of each participant, and ultimately, on a longer time-
scale and at another level, across a speech community.
(p. 58)

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Moreover, there are certain criteria or “principles” (N. F. Johnson, 2007) that need to be met in or-
der for a phenomenon to be considered a CDST. There is no single list of principles that is employed
across the field (see Hiver & Al-Hoorie, 2016, 2020; Larsen-Freeman & Cameron, 2008a; The Five
Graces Group, 2009), and the choice of which principles to employ would be determined depending
on the research questions and the phenomena that are being observed (Hiver & Al-Hoorie, 2020).
However, for CDST-informed SLA using CA, Seedhouse (2010) has proposed nine principles that
can be employed to analyze interaction. What these principles entail and how they can be used along
with CA in analyzing interaction will be discussed in the next section.

Sample studies in CDST and L2 discourse research

A growing number of SLA studies have adopted CDST to analyze language development. CDST-
informed SLA studies have tended to focus on written texts (see Hiver et al., 2022 for a scoping
review of CDST-informed SLA studies), but more recently, a growing number of studies have ana-
lyzed spoken texts (e.g., Chan et al., 2015; Larsen-Freeman, 2006; Lesonen et al., 2017; Yu & Lowie,
2019). These studies on L2 speaking, similar to studies on L2 reading and writing (e.g., Gui et al.,
2021; Spoelman & Verspoor, 2010; Verspoor et al., 2008), have identified CDST developmental pat-
terns, for instance: variability within and between learners; nonlinear development; and development
entailing non-target-like features (Chan et al., 2015; Lesonen et al., 2017; Yu & Lowie, 2019). For in-
stance, Lesonen et al. (2017) found a high variability of the use of verb constructions at the beginning
of the data collection, but over time the variability narrowed, and they found the participant settling
on a simple verb construction that they found most effective. As a result, the longitudinal change did
not necessarily demonstrate an increase in complexity at the surface level.
Similar findings have been reported by studies using CA. For instance, studies analyzing the
use of L2 negation, Eskildsen (2012), Hauser (2013), and Van Compernolle (2019), have reported
CDST-related features of development of L2 negation, for example, a high variability in the use of
the negation early in data collection, a gradual narrowing of variability over time, and the use of
negation stabilizing to non-target-like features. However, few studies that employ CA have focused
on multiple speakers and their interactional patterns, and how these aspects behave as “systems” and
change over time from a CDST perspective.

Research approaches to CDST and L2 interactional discourse research

In this section we exemplify how empirical research may be undertaken in this area of CA and CDST.
When analyzing discourse from a CDST perspective, CA is known to be a compatible approach
(Larsen-Freeman & Cameron, 2008a; Seedhouse, 2010). However, there is yet to be a consensus
on methodological approaches for conducting analysis of L2 interaction and language development
using the principles of CDST by means of CA (see Siegel and Seedhouse,2024, for a discussion on
compatibility and a comprehensive CA-CDST approach).
Considerations need to be made regarding the type of data collected and method of analysis. Lon-
gitudinal data that track the changes of the individual and/or group would be necessary. Moreover,
data about individuals, the group, the individual as a member of a group, and the individual working
alone should be collected (Larsen-Freeman & Cameron, 2008b). Researchers should also keep in
mind that interlocutors are also “attractors,” thus speakers will display different language-use pat-
terns depending on their interlocutors.
In terms of analysis, we suggest a two-step CA/CDST approach here. The first step is to analyze
interactional data using CA, observing how certain interactional or linguistic features are used to

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perform social actions, and also observing their sequential organization and position in the interac-
tion. The second step will be to compare those instances in terms of timeline and the principles of
CDST in order to track change.
CDST “principles” describe the characteristic features of a Complex Adaptive System (CAS) and
compare these to the observable behaviors of the phenomenon (N. F. Johnson, 2007). CAS is an area
within CDST that focuses on the functional side of complex systems that display nonlinear dynamic
emergent phenomena. In the area of classroom interaction and CA, Seedhouse (2010) presented the
following list of principles of CDST and applied them to naturally occurring classroom interaction:

1 Self-organization and adaptation of many interacting agents.

2 Nonlinearity.
3 Surface complexity arising out of deep simplicity.
4 Sensitivity to initial conditions.
5 Complex systems adapting feedback from the environment and from themselves.
6 CAS arise from the interaction of their parts, and function as a whole which is more than the sum
of its parts.
7 CAS display both homogeneity and heterogeneity.
8 CAS display self-similarity on various scales and levels.
9 There are universal properties of nonlinear systems: different systems behave in the same ways.

These nine principles subsume the principles proposed by researchers previously mentioned
(e.g., Gell-Mann, 1994a; Hiver & Al-Hoorie, 2016; Holland, 1992, 1995; Larsen-Freeman & Cam-
eron, 2008a; The Five Graces Group, 2009). Moreover, Seedhouse (2010) has demonstrated that
these principles and CA can be used together in observing CDST phenomena in classroom interac-
tion. Therefore, we explain what these principles entail and demonstrate ways in which they can
be applied to longitudinal L2 interactional data. We use data from Siegel (2016) on longitudinal
changes in patterns of word-search sequences across one academic year by four L1 Japanese us-
ers of L2 English: Ami, Maya, Tomoko, and Yoko. The term word-search sequences is used here
to refer to repair sequences that are initiated through the display of hesitancy in formulating an
utterance and the speaker displays they are having difficulty in locating the appropriate linguistic
item or form.

Self-organization and adaptation of many interacting agents

Complex systems consist of many components, and connections among such components undergo
continuous change through interacting, reacting, and adapting to each other (Larsen-Freeman &
Cameron, 2008a). In other words, in CDST there is no one central controller or organizer of systems,
only independent agents. As a result, changes are based on locally available resources. Therefore,
when seeing language as a CAS it can be said that the individual humans are the agents and that “Lan-
guage is emergent from ongoing human social interactions” (The Five Graces Group, 2009, p. 17).
In Siegel (2016), when seeing the individual participants as agents, adaptations to partners (i.e.,
the interactional environment) were observed. For instance, Yoko had been using pauses, both Eng-
lish (e.g., how do you say), and Japanese (nanda, what is it) to indicate an ongoing word search
(Excerpt 1). However, five months after the initial recording with Jacy, a Thai speaker, Yoko started
using Thai (arai na, what’s that again) to indicate an ongoing word search (Excerpt 2). This emergent
use of arai na by Yoko can be attributed to her adapting to Jacy’s linguistic resource (i.e., Thai). Other
participants in the study also demonstrated changes to their word-search sequence, such as adding an

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additional turn after the self-repair secure intersubjectivity. Thus, different adaptations were observed
among the participants over time. In other words, the changes to the participants’ word-search se-
quences were self-organized and emerged through the interactions rather than being centrally organ-
ized, such as being instructed by a teacher.

Excerpt 1. Yoko Jacy, November

1 → Yoko: I couldn’ (0.8) find,=
2 Jacy: =find
3 (1.0)
4 Yoko: where (1.0) but (0.4) they say
5 → (1.2) >yu- (1.2) nanda (2.3)
                                    “what is it”
6 mm:(0.8) you can find

Excerpt 2. Yoko Jacy, December

1 Yoko: Naba:n is good (0.5) shoppin’
2 → (0.8) good. (.) °arai na:°,
                                 “what’s that again”
3 (1.3)((Yoko looks away))
4 Jacy: shopper
5 Yoko: (0.6) good shopper hh

Nonlinearity
CAS are nonlinear and do not progress in a straight line. As such, it is not always possible to
predict what will happen next. Holland (1995) states, “A function is linear if the value of the
function, for any set of value assigned to its arguments, is simply a weighted sum of those values”
(p. 15). Put differently, in linear systems the relations of cause and effect are clear, small causes
result in small effects, and large effects are the results of the adding up of those small causes (Lee
et al., 2009). In linear equations, results can be predicted, generalized, and applied to other situa-
tions. In contrast, in nonlinear systems such as CAS, small causes do not always add up to create a
proportionate effect, nor are the changes always smooth and incremental. Rather, changes can be
disproportionate and “occur with spurts, plateaus, and even regressions” (Thelen & Smith, 1994,
p. 84). As a result, nonlinear systems are almost always more complicated than linear systems
(Holland, 1995).
Figure 12.1 displays the frequency of word-search sequences by the four participants in Siegel
(2016), divided by the length of the recordings. Although there are some differences in frequency
between the months, there seems to be a fairly consistent use across time, with a slight decrease in
frequency toward the end (i.e., linear pattern). However, observing the individual participants in
detail, wide variations were observed. Figure 12.2 displays the normalized frequency of the use of
word-search sequences per minute by the individual participants; it is difficult to identify any linear
pattern here.
Although all four Japanese participants were first-year university students with similar educa-
tional backgrounds and living in a similar interactional environment (i.e., international university

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Figure 12.1 Normalized frequency of word-search sequences

Figure 12.2 Normalized frequency of word-search sequences by participant

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 Aki Siegel and Paul Seedhouse

dormitory), the nonlinear nature of word-search sequences suggests a wide range of adaptations and
changes among the participants.

Surface complexity arising out of deep simplicity

Related to the feature of nonlinearity, in CDST, surface complexity arises out of deep simplicity. Hol-
land (1998) notes that in CDST, “the behavior of the whole is much more complex than the behavior
of the parts” (p. 2). The principle refers to the phenomenon of simple changes bringing about large
and complex effects (Gribbin, 2004). This is due to the system’s nature of reaction, where “systems
interact with their environment, react to feedback from their environment and feed back on them-
selves” (Seedhouse, 2010, p. 6).
Initiations of word searches have relatively simple and rudimentary patterns such as the use of
pauses, hesitation markers, and gaze (Kurhila, 2006). Yet, this can lead to large differences in (a) the
sequential patterns, (b) the variation in candidate solutions among the participants, and (c) complex
changes over time in and through the interactions.
Excerpt 3 demonstrates this typical pattern. This is one of the first recordings made between Maya
and Kei. Maya initiates a word search through elongated sounds, pauses, and then presents a candi-
date solution with a slight rising intonation (lines 1–3). Kei immediately presents a candidate solution
(or a correction) in line 4, which is accepted through repetition by Maya in line 5. Here, we can see
Maya accepting Kei’s correction, although her word choice “underground train” is acceptable.
In contrast, Excerpt 4, from a recording three months later, shows Maya initiating a word search
of the word “carp” using a similar pattern with pauses and rising intonation after the candidate word
(line 1). However, rather than having the word-search sequence complete with Maya accepting Kei’s
correction (line 4) as in Excerpt 3, Maya questions this correction (line 5, 13). The sequence moves
on to a more complex negotiation of the accuracy of the word choice and pronunciation, leading
Maya to use her dictionary to defend her word choice (line 36–44). The examples thus demonstrate
that complex word-search negotiation sequences and changes can arise from a similar and simple
word-search-initiation pattern. Moreover, the change in the pattern of the word-search sequence
could also suggest an increase in Maya’s confidence in her word choice.

Excerpt 3. Maya Kei, April

1 Maya: (0.8) bus a:nd (0.2) train,(.) a:nd
2 (1.2)
3 Maya: <underground> (.) °train°,=
4 Kei: =↑subway=
5 Maya: =↑subway,=
6 Kei: =↑uuhhh

Excerpt 4. Maya Kei, July

1→ Maya: the (.) >↑ca:p ca:p< (.)○n? ○
(.) ca:pu?
2 (0.7)
3 Maya: fish (.) |○d○.
|((M gaze at K +fish gesture))
4 Kei: <co:d.>

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5 Maya: ka- kard?

6 Kei: cod.
7 (0.6)
8 Maya: ah::.
9 (1.2)
10 Kei: [see oh dee? ((C-O-D))
11 Kei: [cod
12 (1.6)
13 Maya: ma:ybe::.
lines 14–34 omitted
35 (0.4)
36 Maya: |$plea:se hhh my(h) di(h)ctionary::$. hhh
|((M reaches out her arms))
37 (2.4) ((K passing dictionary to M))
38 Maya: ca:p.(.) >do you: know Hiroshima ca:p<? (.)
39 ○
in○ (.) Japanese (.) baseball (.) cheam,
40 (1.2) ((K shakes head))
41 Maya: ○
eh:○
42 (9.2) ((M searching dictionary))
43 Dict: ○
carp○
44 (1.8) ((M shows dictionary to K))
45 Kei: ○
carp○ ( )
*Dict: Electronic dictionary

Sensitivity to initial conditions

CAS are sensitive to initial conditions; thus initial differences may lead to extremely different re-
sults. Small differences in one or more components of the system “can lead to reorganization and to
large differences in behaviour” (Smith & Thelen, 2003, p. 347). This principle is connected to the
nonlinear feature of CAS, where simple initial conditions can lead to unexpected complex structural
patterns.
Initial conditions with language development in discourse could be understood as the context in
which the conversation took place or the interlocutor. As shown earlier, in Siegel (2016), the par-
ticipants displayed different interactional sequences and orientations depending on whom they were
talking to. For instance, Yoko started to use Thai with Jacy (Excerpt 2), but no case of Thai use was
identified with other non-Thai-speaking interlocutors of Yoko. None of the other participants used
Thai in their word searches either.

Complex systems adapting feedback from the environment and from themselves
S. Johnson (2001) states that feedback is a principle of CAS and “all decentralized systems rely ex-
tensively on feedback for both growth and self-regulation” (p. 133). Thus, CAS are “open systems”
(Brown, 1994); that is, they are sensitive to the environment and are not fixed and always stable.

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 Aki Siegel and Paul Seedhouse

Lee et al. (2009) demonstrate that the feedback system can be seen in language as well; the more
people use a certain word or form, the more it will be accepted and used by others.
In terms of discourse and L2 learning, we find speakers responding sensitively to their interlocu-
tor’s reactions (i.e., the interactional environment). Excerpt 5 exemplifies a case where there is mu-
tual adaptation to each other’s utterances in order to solve the word search. Ami initiates the word
search from line 5, and then explicitly invites Hang into the word search from line 7 through a “how
do you say” and mutual gaze. They both repeatedly provide candidate words in the attempt to locate
the word (lines 9–20). When Ami provides a semantic contiguity, “like a lemon” (line 20), Hang pro-
vides a candidate word in Japanese (suppai sour, line 21), which then is accepted by Ami (line 22).
Although the two speakers eventually figure out the English word ‘sour’ (line 23–26), Ami responds
with a display accepting the Japanese suppai as their shared resource (line 31). At the same time, Ami
notices Hang’s Japanese ability, which possibly leads to Ami’s increase in using Japanese to resolve
word searches in later recordings. Adaptation to feedback was observed in one segment of the talk, as
well as over time through several interactions.

Excerpt 5. Ami Hang, June

1 Ami: =BUT (.) Koreas kimuchi is:
2 Hang: ↑hehe
3 Ami: <↓spi[cy::>
4 Hang: [very spicy:?=
5 Ami: =↑AND (.) SO:: (.). sss (.)↑hmm
6 (0.9)
7 Ami: .ss |°how do you say°| ↓ah::
|((mutual gaze)) |
8 Hang: hah:
9 → Ami: hmm:: (.). ss sa (.)|sappa:?
| ((mutual gaze))
10 (0.6)
11 Hang: ◦sappa◦
12 Ami: sappa?=
13 Hang: =<↑sup(.)↓per> (.) ↑sup↓per
14 Ami: |↑sup↓per? it’s
| ((A tilts head))
15 (1.3) ((A holds her mouth))
16 Hang: wo?
17 (0.6)
18 Ami: ah: supper?
19 (1.2)
20 → Ami: °sssup° (0.6) like a lehmohn? (.) lemon=
21 Hang: =suppai? =
“sour”
22 Ami: =↑SUPPAI
“sour”

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 Complex dynamic systems theory and second language research

23 Hang: (0.4) ↑ah:: so:r

24 Ami: (0.4) so[:r?
25 Hang: [so:r
26 Ami: (0.4) [so:r: ohohoho $do you$ (.) $do you:$
27 Hang: [↑hmm
28 Ami: (.) $do you kno:w (.) ss <suppai?>$
“sour”
29 [hahahaha
30 Hang: [un ya hehehe
31 Ami: $okay suppai$ ehehehe=
32 Hang: =hehehehehe

CAS arise from the interaction of their parts, and function as a whole which is
more than the sum of its parts
Holland (1998) refers to this principle as “emergence—much coming from little” (p. 1). This is
due to the nature of nonlinear systems whereby direct inspection of individual parts of the system
cannot reveal or explain the system’s behavior as a whole. Therefore, “subsequent activities can be
determined only by extended examination and experiment” (Holland, 1998, p. 225). In other words,
CAS “cannot, in general, be successfully analysed by isolating properties or variables that are studied
separately and then combining those partial approaches” (Seedhouse, 2010, p. 8). For example, word-
search sequences hold a general pattern, as shown below (Koshik & Seo, 2012):

A: initiation

A: candidate solution

B: confirm/correct
The majority of the time, the participants in Siegel (2016) followed this pattern during their inter-
actions, as exemplified in Excerpt 6. Maya displays hesitation and pauses (line 1–2), then presents a
candidate solution (“water clothes,” line 3). This is then confirmed by Yanti (line 4).

Excerpt 6. Maya Yanti, November

1 Maya: they (0.5) take (0.8) nh,
2 (0.4) wo (.) <water> (0.3)
3 → °water° (0.2) clothes?
4 → Yanti: ↑MH::::: °yeah°

However, the sequence that occurs after this initial three-part sequence differs, and could not be
predetermined. Excerpt 7 shows the continuation of Excerpt 6. In line 5, although Yanti exhibited
mutual understanding and agreement in line 4, Maya overlaps and asks Yanti, “how do you say” (line
6) to create a “learning opportunity” (Brouwer, 2003). In other words, Maya puts the progressivity of
the interaction on hold to do a language-learning activity.

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 Aki Siegel and Paul Seedhouse

Excerpt 7. Maya Yanti, November

1 Maya: they (0.5) take (0.8) nh,
2 (0.4) wo (.) <water> (0.3)
3 °water° (0.2) clothes?
4 Yanti: ↑MH::::: [°yeah°
5 → Maya: [wha wha
6 >how do you say<=
7 Yanti: =ss swim swim
8 → Maya: ah SWIM? (0.5) swim °suit°?
9 Yanti: swim swimsuits
10 Maya: swimsuits [mh::
11 Yanti: [yes

However, in the recording made the following month, a new pattern was identified, as shown in Ex-
cerpt 8. In line 4, Maya initiates a word search and presents a candidate solution (“traffic pay”), referring
to transportation fee/bus fee, and Yanti displays agreement with Maya’s comment (line 5). Maya, rather
than initiating a side sequence, retries with nani (what) and adds “bus” (line 6), which is again confirmed
by Yanti (line 7). Here, we find Maya not orienting to language learning by pursuing the conventional
English expression; instead, she progresses the talk while attempting to secure Yanti’s understanding.
This feature was found only from November (eight months into the data collection) in Maya’s talk.

Excerpt 8. Maya Yanti, December

1 Yanti: Kyoto is so::: expensi::ve [everything like
2 Maya: [ah::::
3 Yanti: da foods en (.)°mm°
4 → Maya: (0.5) nara nani (.) traffic (0.5) pay
“then what”
5 Yanti: [yah:::::
6 → Maya: [>nani< (.) bus
“what”
7 Yanti: yeah (.) that’s too

In this case, the initial three-turn sequence of word-search initiations and candidate solutions lead
to different sequential patterns, and to the emergence of a new strategy of progressing the talk while
securing intersubjectivity. These examples coincide with the CDST’s principles of embedded levels
and timescales, and sensitivity to initial conditions, where slight differences lead to very different
outcomes.

CAS display both homogeneity and heterogeneity

Systems can seem very similar at one level, but different at another; this is the principle of CAS
displaying both homogeneity and heterogeneity. This phenomenon is connected to the fact that it is
in the nature of CAS that it displays fractal features which are homogeneous, but it is also connected
to adaptations and emergence that result in heterogeneity. Miller and Page (2007) state, “in adap-
tive social systems we find that the agents’ rules often respond to the phenomena that they generate,
creating multiple layers of feedback that result in a diverse set of emergent behaviors, both for the
agents and the system at large” (p. 107). For instance, snowflakes may be identical at the time they

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are formed as they have the same amount of moisture and temperature, but with the influence of the
wind and other environmental feedback, the snowflakes that come down from the sky will never be
identical (Gleick, 1987; Seedhouse, 2010).
As discussed in principle 5 from Seedhouse (2010), Complex systems adapting feedback from the
environment and from themselves, there were similarities in the word-search initiation patterns, as
seen in Excerpt 6. There were also similarities in terms of the ways in which attempts were made to
resolve word searches, such as the use of candidate words, code-switching, using semantic contigu-
ity, and gestures. Nevertheless, the frequency and ways in which the participants incorporated these
features into their talk differed by interlocutor and over time.

CAS display self-similarity on various scales and levels

CAS are associated with fractal structures, where patterns are repeated, and the patterns are self-
similar at different scales. Coastlines are often raised as examples of fractals where the same shape is
repeated to form a shape of a larger scale. Holland (1995) explains that an agent at one level serves
as a building block for agents at a higher level, which then serves as a building block for agents at the
next level. Furthermore, the agents of a higher level can be more complex than those of a lower level,
so there is a hierarchical structure. N. F. Johnson (2007) notes that fractals are not always observable,
but that “they can be” (p. 50).
Excerpt 9 demonstrates this fractal feature in word-search sequences. Lines 1 and 2 and lines 3 and
4 can be understood as adjacency pairs of question and answer. These two adjacency pairs together
can then be understood as an initiation of a word search (question) and repair (answer). These se-
quential structures can be identified throughout the recording and across time in different recordings.
Therefore, word-search sequences display cohesive patterns through self-organization and displaying
self-similarity on different scales and levels.
Moreover, when considering “development” of the use of word-search sequences, we see Yoko
developing a new way of initiating a word search using Thai (Excerpt 2), but the way Yoko uses
arai na is the same as her use of the initiation of a word search in Japanese (Excerpt 1) and English
(Siegel, 2016), thus it can be seen as displaying fractal features.

Excerpt 9. Maya, Kei July

1 Maya: represent- (0.4) n, present?=
2 Kei: =>yeah yeah yeah.<=
3 Maya: =>°↑present repre↓sent,°<
4 Kei: represent.
5 Maya like (1.8) in Korea:(0.4) Kim Yona,

There are universal properties of nonlinear systems: Different systems

behave in the same ways
We have explained that CAS adapt and emerge into various different systems, and that these systems
can show self-similarities. In addition to this, different systems can also display universal features, as
with the snowflake example in principle 7. N. F. Johnson (2007) notes, “patterns which emerge from
such Complex Systems can be so similar—or in techno-speak, the emergent phenomena have some
universal properties” (p. 70). He then uses people as an example and explains, “even though there
are many differences between all our different personality types, these differences may cancel out to
some extent when we are in a large enough group—and hence the group as a whole behaves in such a

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way that these individual differences don’t matter so much” (N. F. Johnson, 2007, p. 68). As a result,
overall behaviors of different groups or systems can be quite similar.
Siegel (2016) found that feedback and adaptation generated a wide range of individual differ-
ences by the end of the one-year data collection period, despite the participants’ similar word-search-
sequence patterns and orientation to the interaction at the beginning. Yet, common features among
the different participants were also identified, for example the change in the orientation of the inter-
actional partners and the preference toward self-repair. As time passed, many of the partners used less
other-repair during the word-search sequences and as a result, encouraged the use of more self-repair
sequences by the Japanese participants. Therefore, although the participants’ partners were all differ-
ent and the dyads’ interactions were organized independently, the partners displayed similar changes
over time, displaying some universal properties of nonlinear systems.
This section has exemplified a CA/CDST approach to analyzing L2 interaction by applying the
principles of CDST to data collected from naturally occurring conversations and analyzed using CA.

Implications for second language learning, teaching and use

The CDST approach to interactional discourse opens a window into why L2 speakers may respond in
certain ways, and why they may not be displaying “learning” in a linear manner. The perspective al-
lows researchers to make connections between the moment-by-moment microanalytic features of the
interaction across timescales and the speech community. Based on this perspective, we present two
recommendations for developmental studies of discourse and SLA: (a) the need to incorporate the
interactional environment including the interlocutor into the data analysis, and (b) the need to accept
that language development is an individualistic and dynamic process.
First, the interlocutors’ utterances and orientations to the interaction demonstrated a large effect on
the participants’ speech and orientation in the sequences. Although language development is meas-
ured and understood by observing the individual, speakers adapt to the surrounding environment
(e.g., interlocutor). Second, when analyzing development of features of discourse, one must take
into account the complexity of the feature itself and its individualistic and nonlinear developmental
patterns. In other words, development does not occur in stage-like progression; rather, changes occur
over different timescales (Smith & Thelen, 2003).
Consequently, measuring language development from a CDST perspective becomes a complicated
process. Lowie and Verspoor (2015) explain, “cognition cannot only be accounted for by maturation
of the brain but is formed by multiple causes” (p. 71). It is difficult to determine the exact variable
that has caused any changes. Interactions and changes in interactional competence are greatly influ-
enced by small actions of the interlocutors, and changes do not necessarily occur in a linear manner.
The linear progressive model of L2 speakers becoming closer to L1-speaker norms may not be the
standard developmental pattern (e.g., Lee et al., 2009). Instead, by accepting that language develop-
ment is multicausal, has nested timescales, and is a self-organizing process (Smith & Thelen, 2003),
we may gain a deeper understanding of language development and its process.

Future directions for Complexity Theory and L2 interactional

discourse research
Few studies have analyzed interaction at the individual and community levels to understand the con-
nections of interactional change at the individual and community levels over time, and many more
are needed. Moreover, studies in this area have been limited to “describing” the found phenomena
and using CDST as a conceptual framework or “a meta-theory” (Larsen-Freeman, 2013) in making
sense of it. The challenge now is to consider the implications of the findings in terms of future L2

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learning research and language teaching. From a CDST perspective where there is “no single homog-
enised language competence” (Larsen-Freeman, 2010, p. 66), what are the target language and dis-
course features for learners? What does “development” entail in such contexts? Can developmental
trajectories be determined? How can the findings from CDST-CA studies inform language teaching?
In other words, future studies need to go beyond using CDST as a set of metaphors for conceptual-
izing L2 development (Hiver et al., 2022) and begin utilizing CDST to investigate how and to what
degree the different aspects of language use and context affect each other to facilitate language de-
velopment and discuss the implications of this for L2 instruction.

Further reading
Hiver, P., & Al-Hoorie, A. H. (2020). Research methods for complexity theory in applied linguistics. Multilingual
Matters.
This book presents a comprehensive overview of CDST in SLA, and demonstrates how various existing
qualitative and quantitative research methodologies can be used in the field of applied linguistics in analyzing
complex systems. The chapter on method integration is an area that is especially worth considering for future L2
discourse studies using CDST.
Larsen-Freeman, D., & Cameron, L. (2008). Complex systems and applied linguistics. Oxford University Press.
This was the first book-length publication that discussed CDST and language learning and teaching. The
chapter on complex systems in discourse provides a clear description of how one can conceptualize the relation-
ship between the turn-by-turn interaction, the larger social context, and interacting timescales.
Lowie, W., & Verspoor, M. (2022). A complex dynamic systems theory perspective on speaking in second lan-
guage development. In T. M. Derwing, M. J. Munro, & R. I. Thomson (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of
second language acquisition and speaking (pp. 39–53). Routledge.
This chapter presents an overview of CDST and detailed summaries of recent work in the area of SLA and
quantitative analysis of spoken texts.
Ortega, L., Han, Z., & Larsen-Freeman, D. (2017). Complexity theory and language development: In celebration
of Diane Larsen-Freeman. John Benjamins.
This edited book showcases how the various areas within applied linguistics can be understood as a complex
system using a wide range of existing research methods. De Bot’s chapter on the process of developing the new
term “Complex Dynamic Systems Theory” is a key reading.
Seedhouse, P. (2015). L2 classroom interaction as a complex adaptive system. In N. Markee (Ed.), The handbook
of classroom discourse and interaction (pp. 373–389). Wiley-Blackwell.
This chapter summarizes how L2 classroom interaction can be understood as a CAS. The final sections of
the chapter are particularly useful in terms of understanding ways in which L2 classroom interaction can be
conceptualized using CDST when conducting a multimodal CA analysis of a task-based interaction that uses a
digital learning tool.
Siegel, A., & Seedhouse, P. (2024). Human spoken interaction as a complex adaptive system: A longitudinal
study of L2 interaction. Edinburgh University Press.
The book demonstrates the compatibility of CA and CDST through analyses of longitudinal interactional
data. The book also discusses how CA as a method can be seen as a complex adaptive system.

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 13
CORPUS APPROACHES TO
DISCOURSE AND SECOND
LANGUAGE RESEARCH
Sheena Gardner

Introduction
The growth of the use of corpus approaches in the analysis of many different types of language and
languages is exponential, and the nature and variety of corpora to explore is vast. See for example
the hundreds of corpora available on the Brigham Young University site (https://guides.lib.byu.edu/
linguistics/corpora) or in SketchEngine (User Guide | Sketch Engine).
It is therefore not surprising that corpora are increasingly being used to provide evidence in second
language acquisition (SLA) studies (see LeBruyn & Paquot, 2021; Tracy-Ventura & Paquot, 2021)
and that in these studies corpora have been specifically designed to capture learner output. Neverthe-
less, Granger argues that second language acquisition (SLA) theory (which tends to focus on devel-
opmental processes) and learner corpus research (which tends to focus on texts as learner output)
rarely meet, and are two distinct fields that could be mutually beneficial (Granger, 2021).
It is also not surprising that corpora are used increasingly in discourse analysis, and approaches
such as corpus-assisted discourse analysis (CADS) have become widespread (see Baker, 2006; Jour-
nal of Corpora and Discourse Studies (JCDS)). While this approach could be applied to corpora of
L2 texts, it is more often applied to L1 texts (only one article in all volumes to date of JCDS consid-
ers L2 texts). In JCDS, the focus tends to be on the social role of language, such as media discourse,
political discourse, and health discourse.
Thus, although there is much corpus-assisted discourse-analysis research that could be done to
inform SLA theory, this chapter focuses instead on what has been done. It focuses on how corpus
linguistics has informed language teaching, and most specifically English language teaching. It first
describes the impact of corpus linguistics on English language teaching materials. It then introduces
the field of corpus-based contrastive linguistic analysis, which informs foreign language teaching
in that much of this work is conducted on learner corpora. In the main methods section (‘Main re-
search methods in corpus approaches to discourse and second language research’), corpus studies
are presented that aim to capture discourse features of L2 texts, as well as those that aim to explore
SLA concepts. In the sample studies (‘Sample studies in corpus approaches to discourse and second
language research’), a different perspective is taken, where a cross-sectional and longitudinal design
study are presented. The fifth section (‘Implications for second language learning, teaching, and use’)
considers the impact of corpus analysis of L2 texts, particularly on teaching. One popular approach
is ‘data-driven learning’ (DDL), which typically uses findings from corpus analysis of L2 texts to

162 DOI: 10.4324/9781003177579-14

 Corpus approaches to discourse and second language research

promote noticing of specific linguistic features. The final section (‘Future directions for corpus ap-
proaches to discourse and second language research’) points to future directions. This is followed by
suggestions for further reading, references, and a list of acronyms.

Historical overview of corpus approaches to discourse and second

language acquisition
Following a brief introduction to corpora and corpus research, this section focuses on two areas
where corpus approaches inform language teaching, most notably English language teaching. First is
a focus on how corpus research has transformed English language teaching materials; this is followed
by an account of the prolific field of learner corpus research.
Corpora are generally understood to be ‘collections of naturally-occurring language data, stored in
electronic form, designed to be representative of particular types of text and analysed with the aid of
computer software tools’ (Nesi, 2016, p. 206). Corpora include texts (data) and metadata, or informa-
tion about the texts. Corpus approaches to SLA and discourse analysis have the benefit of being able
to search large quantities of text to look for patterns that might be difficult to observe in single texts
or small collections of data. This can be done either by starting with a discourse or SLA concept and
searching for it, or by comparing sets of texts of two different discourse/SLA types and interpreting
the findings. In what follows we illustrate studies that start with concepts—for example, Lam and
Crosthwaite (2018) sets out to explore the discourse concept of ‘appraisal’, while Tracy-Ventura et al.
(2021) set out to explore the SLA concept of ‘attrition’. As we shall see, this involves not only con-
structing corpora so that the concepts can be investigated, but also typically requires manual annota-
tion of the concepts to be investigated in the corpus. This means that the research is typically more
time-consuming, and that manual analysis can be more subjective, but the analysis is purposeful and
the results should be focused and meaningful. Most research described in this chapter is presented as
starting from a particular discourse or SLA concept. It is also possible to interpret the findings of au-
tomated studies that compare and contrast the contents of two data sets with no specific preconceived
concepts. For example, word frequencies can be easily computed, as can ‘key word’ searches, that is,
searches for terms that are relatively more frequent in one data set than another. Findings resulting
from such studies can then be interpreted by the discourse or SLA researcher.
The influence of corpus linguistics on English language teaching materials began in the early
1980s and continues to this day. Corpus investigations of large quantities of naturally occurring lan-
guage have informed teaching materials, providing evidence of descriptive rather than prescriptive
language use. So corpus-informed dictionaries now use attested ‘real’ examples to illustrate words
in context, and grammar books aim to describe the grammatical patterns actually (frequently) used,
often with an indication of appropriate social contexts, rather than presenting prescriptive gram-
mars of how grammarians think people ought to use language. This has now become usual for ELT
(English language teaching, particularly to second language learners), with a series of dictionaries
and grammar books breaking new ground. For example, the Collins COBUILD series was the first to
be informed by corpus research (see blog ‘The history of Cobuild’, Collins Language Lovers Blog,
n.d., which traces the development of these materials from paper dictionary of English in the 1980s
under John Sinclair at the University of Birmingham to the multiple online resources for learners of
many languages available today). Corpus research at Birmingham also led to novel approaches to
teaching, such as the lexical approach and data-driven learning. The Cambridge English Grammar
by Carter and McCarthy includes corpus-derived information about spoken grammar (as described
in Carter & McCarthy, 1995) which was used inter alia to inform schoolteachers about the nature of
spoken grammar. The Pearson International Corpus of Academic English (PICAE) produced a useful
list of frequent academic collocations (that is, terms that frequently co-occur, such as continued use

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 Sheena Gardner

or disclose information). The list, as well as related teaching materials, can be downloaded from the
Pearson website (Pearson PTE, n.d.). The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (Lea, 2014) in-
cludes information about genres and disciplines, while the Biber et al. Longman Grammar of Spoken
and Written English (2000) includes information about the use of grammatical structures across four
registers (academic, media, conversation, and literature). A more detailed account of these develop-
ments can be found in Gardner and Moreton (2020). These developments suggest that corpora can
and should be designed to enable different types of analysis to inform the teaching of English to
speakers of other languages. These design features can be encoded in the metadata of corpora, and
suggest to users what the corpus has been designed to investigate.
Although the influence of corpus linguistics on ELT began with a focus on ‘native speaker’ texts,
more recently learner corpora have been used. For example, today’s Cambridge Learner Corpus con-
sists of exam scripts from learners of English internationally and informs the ‘common mistakes’ that
are noted in the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (McIntosh, 2013).
The second main strand of corpus research involves contrastive analyses, notably in the learner
corpus research tradition, most of which is based on contrastive interlanguage analysis (Granger,
2009, 2015). This assumes that differences between learner production and ‘native speaker’ produc-
tion suggest an interlanguage developmental trajectory and that the differences noticed can inform
foreign language teaching. Studies have compared and contrasted texts produced by learners with
different proficiency levels, often against ‘native speaker’ proficiency. Although the label ‘native
speaker’ is discouraged for many reasons that need not be rehearsed here (see Granger, 2009), an
idealised native-speaker goal persists.
Learner corpus research has become well established and includes the development of corpora
designed to enable contrastive analyses of learner texts. There has been research on morphology,
vocabulary, grammar, discourse, and phraseology (Granger, 2009). Since its beginnings in 2015, the
International Journal of Learner Corpus Research has included special issues on the Trinity Lancas-
ter Corpus (in 2019) and tense and aspect in SLA and LCR (in 2018). Two studies are now presented
in more detail. These both involve several corpora, but simpler LCR can be conducted on smaller data
sets and by classroom teachers (e.g., see Le Foll, 2021).
One study by Rankin and Schiftner (2011) compares preposition use in four proficiency levels
of the Vienna Database of English Learner Texts (DELT) and the German component of the Inter-
national Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) to preposition use by native speakers of English in the
British National Corpus (British National Corpus, 2005) to better understand the differences, which
then inform English teaching materials for German speakers. The study was sparked by the obser-
vation that learners at the University of Vienna use marginal prepositions in a non-target way. The
study adopted a contrastive interlanguage approach (Granger, 2009). They found an overuse of con-
cerning and regarding at all levels. A colligational1 analysis shows that concerning is particularly
overused as a topic-fronting device, as in Concerning the death penalty, I ask myself if people like
this cruel kind of punishment (ICLE-GE). This evidence is then explored to better understand how
concerning is used by native speakers, and to suggest implications for teaching in Vienna (which
could also be useful for other German learners, and indeed for others, such as Chinese learners who
use ‘concerning’ in a similar topic-fronting manner). This is just one of many examples of learner
corpus research, but it shows the importance of contrastive analysis as well as how the investiga-
tion of a grammatical feature can inform notions such as topic fronting, which are of importance in
discourse analysis.
A second example of the methods used to compare learner and ‘native speaker’ data is Lars-
son et al. (2020), which involves a large international team and five different corpora, including
three native speaker corpora (LOCRA, LOCNEC, and BAWE) and two learner corpora (VESPA and
LINDSEI). VESPA is a corpus of third-year university student academic writing by EFL writers,

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while LINDSEI consists of spoken English interlanguage. By exploring spoken and written data in
English from speakers of six different L1s, and focusing on a specific linguistic feature (placement of
14 epistemic adverbs, including probably, amazingly, and frankly), the authors were able to show the
influence of mode (placement errors were more frequent in the spoken data) and that very limited L1
influence was found in the written data.
Data from L2 English language exams has been a widespread and productive source of learner
corpora, such as the Cambridge Learner Corpus, which includes L2 texts from the many different
Cambridge English exams (e.g., FCE, CPE). Other influential corpora include the TOEFL iBT corpus,
the T2K-SWAL (which includes a balance of spoken and written university language, relying heavily
on textbooks), and the Trinity Lancaster Corpus, described in the section ‘Sample studies in corpus
approaches to discourse and second language research’. Over time, these corpora have become more
widely available (e.g., part of the Cambridge Learner Corpus is available on open SketchEngine) and
thus more amenable to numerous investigations. In addition to informing teaching materials, corpus
investigations of assessed language have also been able to inform SLA.

Main research methods in corpus approaches to discourse and second

language research
In this section, research is described that takes discourse concepts as its starting point and then moves
on to SLA concepts. I have already discussed learner corpus research, most of which is based on
contrastive interlanguage analysis, so in this section I will introduce other SLA theories.
A number of studies have investigated the systemic functional notions of theme, of cohesion, and
of appraisal, while many others have drawn categories in on Hyland’s (2005) or Ädel’s (2006) work
on metadiscourse. The systemic functional linguistic (SFL) analyses tend to require some degree of
manual coding of discourse features or functions, and so they are generally conducted on relatively
small corpora. The UAM corpus tool (O’Donnell, 2014) is particularly useful for this, as it allows
coding of overlapping functions. In contrast, Hyland’s approach is generally to operationalise the
discourse features in formal terms, and so this analysis can be more easily automated and applied to
larger corpora. The findings mainly inform our understanding of how language works in context, but
implications for language development and for teaching are also drawn.
Searches that are targeted on specific items can be readily conducted and the findings can be
interpreted as styles of discourse. To make such searches more replicable, lists of search terms can
be provided. For example, Hyland (2005) lists useful items for each of his metadiscourse categories.
Some, such as first-person pronouns (to indicate self-mentions), constitute a fairly restricted set that
can nevertheless reveal properties of the discourses they occur in. Other more open-ended categories,
such as transitions, provide an excellent starting place for the study of transitions, though the list can
be enhanced either through manual analysis of transitions in single texts, or by using corpus query
searches followed by manual inspection to enhance the lists (as in Han & Gardner, 2021).
A good example of the SFL approach to appraisal analysis is that of Lam and Crosthwaite (2018),
who investigate the use of appraisal resources in a corpus of 20 L1 and 40 L2 short (200-word) ar-
gumentative essays. They started from the appraisal framework (Martin & White, 2005) and applied
it to their data of L1 and L2 texts (i.e., manually tagged them using UAM corpus tools (O’Donnell,
2014)) and compared the findings. They found, for instance, that L1 English writers used more en-
gagement resources, where L2 writers in English used more negative attitude. These differences sug-
gest that L1 and L2 writers generally take a different evaluative stance in their writing, a point which
teachers can take into account in their teaching of evaluation in writing.
A similar approach is taken in Chen and Gardner (2021), which takes SFL theme systems and ap-
plies them to a corpus of L2 texts, also using the UAM corpus tool (O’Donnell, 2014) to tag and then

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analyse theme. Although theme can reach across clauses, it is essentially observed within clauses, so
is relatively easy to identify in English, compared to appraisal and transitions.
An example of a study that uses a more automated approach to analyse Hyland’s metadiscourse cat-
egory of transitions is Han and Gardner (2021). They used a closely matched subcorpus of the BAWE
corpus, including L1 and L2 texts, which were matched for level, discipline, and genre (e.g., where
a second-year business case study by a Chinese writer was included, there would be a second-year
business case study by an L1 English writer). They searched for all transitions listed in Hyland (2005)
and checked that they functioned as transitions (so however can occur as a transition or as a modifying
adverb, as in however great); then they used CQL (corpus query language) to identify more transitions.
This was followed by frequency counts (to compare normalised frequencies) which revealed where L1
and L2 writers use similar transition markers in a similar way, and where they differ. Interpretation of
these findings entailed analysis of the discourse across clauses and longer stretches of text. This led to
suggestions for how teaching could develop both L2 writing and L1 writing.
Studies can also examine specific features that occur across texts. For example, Gao et al. (2021)
focus on citation practices in 74 first-year-undergraduate L2 texts and explore form and function.
They are able to compare the use of integral vs. non-integral citation across literature reviews and
research reports; through corpus searches they also ‘uncover’ a new hybrid type of citation, and sug-
gest implications for L2 writing teachers.
So these studies start with a discourse notion that can be identified linguistically, and apply it to
contrast subcorpora, including second language texts, to develop understandings of second language
development. The SFL notions of appraisal, theme, and cohesion lend themselves particularly well
to this approach, as do Hyland’s categories of metadiscourse, and features that can be easily searched
for, such as citation practices.
While some studies focus on specific linguistic features and comparisons designed to identify
overuse and underuse in learner data in comparisons with native speaker data, others start with an
SLA concept. For example, Murakami and Alexopoulou (2016) start with the SLA theory that mor-
pheme acquisition follows a universal order, and examine exam scripts from the Cambridge Learner
Corpus from seven L1 groups across five proficiency levels. ‘The study establishes clear L1 influence
on the absolute accuracy of morphemes and their acquisition order, therefore challenging the widely
held view that there is a universal order of acquisition of L2 morphemes’ (2016, p. 365). This study
is possible because the corpus can be investigated to compare texts by proficiency level and by the
first language of the writer. The subcorpus used for this study included 11,893 texts and 4 million
words. Moreover, errors were manually tagged in the texts selected, which made an investigation of
morpheme errors when compared with the same POS (part of speech) tagged texts manageable. They
were thus able to compare morpheme errors with expected morpheme occurrences to determine the
rate of morpheme acquisition for six morphemes. This is an example of using a corpus approach to
investigate an SLA problem. Another smaller study with a similar focus manually analyses Turkish
learner scripts using the UAM tools (O’Donnell, 2014) to investigate the order of acquisition of nine
English morphemes (Akbaş & Ölçü-Dinçer, 2021).
A third study investigating an SLA concept is the longitudinal study designed to explore attrition,
specifically to investigate language fluency before and after study abroad (Tracy-Ventura, Huensch,
& Mitchell, 2021). The researchers developed a study abroad corpus (available at talkbank.org) that
has the significant advantage that it was based on data collection over five years from the same 33
university learners of French and Spanish, spanning the time from when they were studying abroad to
three years after graduation. The corpus includes detailed metadata on the participants and the tasks.
This is potentially very rich data, though there are two limitations to be aware of: First, it uses short
texts of elicited data—while this ensures comparability and makes observation of developmental
changes easier, it is possible that elicited data are qualitatively different from naturally occurring data.

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Second, the corpus includes tasks that are repeated, which increases the experimental nature of the
design, but also suggests that there might be task-repetition effects. The three data collection tasks
are a short oral interview, a picture retell text, and a short written argumentative essay. The data were
transcribed using conventions for use with CLAN (MacWhinney, 2000); these provided the measures
of lexical diversity used, which are based on type-token ratios (TTR). TTR is a common measure
in corpus studies, which compares individual words (or types) with the number of times each word
occurs (tokens). The project uncovered several trends, including some that were unexpected. For ex-
ample, ‘the group as a whole showed continued improvement … three years after formal instruction
had ended … in the oral tasks’ (Tracy-Ventura et al., 2021, p. 166).
A number of studies have explored complexity in academic writing, and have found corpus evi-
dence to support hypotheses around the development and importance of noun phrase complexity. For
example, Parkinson and Musgrave (2014) draw on studies (Biber et al., 2011) that infer a develop-
mental order for the acquisition of noun phrase complexity in L2 writing. The logic used by Biber
et al. has been criticised for making claims about the development of syntactic complexity in L2
writing based on a comparison of L1 spoken and written registers (e.g., Yang, 2013). The role of L1
data in generating SLA hypotheses remains contentious. However, Parkinson and Musgrave are able
to use corpus analysis to investigate the hypotheses empirically, and are generally supportive of the
claims made. Parkinson and Musgrave adopted a cross-sectional design, and compared the complex-
ity of noun phrases used by L2 pre-university EAP students and L2 MA students. They found general
support for the developmental hypothesis in that the EAP group relied heavily on attributive adjec-
tives, whereas the higher-proficiency MA group relied more on noun premodifiers and prepositional
phrase postmodifiers.

Sample studies in corpus approaches to discourse and second language research

In this section are two sample studies. The first involves a corpus designed to be investigated for SLA
and discourse features, the Trinity Lancaster Corpus (McEnery et al., 2019). It is large and is intended
to be used for cross-sectional analysis. In contrast, the second study involves a much smaller corpus,
but one that is longitudinal and where findings can inform a very specific teaching context. We have
already seen cross-sectional and longitudinal studies in earlier sections where the focus was on learner
corpora, or studies that started with a specific discourse analysis agenda, so the aim here is to show that
an additional consideration is the research design (cross-sectional vs. longitudinal). This section also
presents two studies that aim to integrate discourse analysis and SLA with corpus analysis.
The first study (Gablasova et al., 2017) illustrates several layers of cross-sectional analysis. The
data are from the Trinity Lancaster Corpus of spoken test data, which has extensive metadata. This
allows the authors to examine features such as epistemic stance not only across proficiency levels, but
also across four tasks and a number of first-language and cultural-background variables. The results
are significant for our understanding of the importance of the nature of the task used to collect data
for SLA research. The corpus is large (more than 4 million transcribed spoken words) and includes
data from more than 2,000 learners across four speaking tasks and three language-proficiency levels
from 12 different first-language backgrounds. Information is also included about the gender and
age of speakers (from 8 to 72). One line of findings shows that the nature of the task is a significant
variable—most notably monologic vs. dialogic, but also within dialogic tasks the variation seems to
relate to differences in interactional demand. In addition to this study on epistemic stance, there has
been research on phrasal verbs as well as more discoursal features such as backchannelling, filled
pauses, and speaker roles in the Trinity Lancaster Corpus, and much more is possible.
Longitudinal SLA studies often follow the language development of a small number of learners
over many years. In contrast, many longitudinal SLA studies that use corpus approaches are relatively

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short, often spanning a particular course. For example, Crosthwaite and Jiang (2017) explored fea-
tures of stance in a corpus of students who followed university EAP courses for one semester. The
study concluded that stance expressions should be explicitly taught. Gray et al. (2019) considered
the spoken and written responses of Chinese learners on the TOEFL iBT test before and after a nine-
month programme of English study. They started with a theory of complexity development (Biber
et al., 2011), tagged the corpus accordingly, and then conducted multidimensional analysis using an
existing MDA model for spoken and written iBT texts so that changes in, for instance, abstraction
or information density could be separately assessed. The detailed analysis is worth reading. One
finding is that ‘Learners … exhibited increased task type differentiation. That is, over time, the test
takers … began to produce more specialized language for specific modes and task types’ (Gray et al.,
2019, p. 20). This is not surprising, and echoes the findings from the Trinity Lancaster Corpus study
above, but is certainly worth noting for future studies. It confirms what previous studies have shown,
that spoken language develops differently from written language, and that there is a task effect on
language production. These are two important points that SLA research can take from these studies.

Implications for second language learning, teaching, and use

In addition to the many resources that are informed by SLA, discourse, and corpus research, Römer,
in her 2011 paper, gives examples of how different corpora can be used in teaching, as well as exam-
ples of data-driven learning, which can also help raise awareness.
Data-driven learning is said to have begun with the work of Johns (1986), in which he investigated
learner errors and encouraged learners to examine native-speaker use of related forms. Since those
early days there has been a body of research on data-driven learning (DDL), much of which has been
enthusiastic and positive. For example, Boulton and Cobb (2017) in a meta-analysis of empirical
studies find overwhelming support for DDL in a wide range of contexts. DDL often cites noticing
(Schmidt, 1990) and the idea that if students examine data sets they will work at noticing and cor-
recting errors, which will become salient through the effort taken. O’Keeffe (2021) suggests that
DDL should look beyond noticing to other SLA approaches. Crosthwaite (2017) points to the experi-
ences of teachers and learners in a class using DDL and finds that it is generally perceived to work
better in practice for some language features than others. In their study of appraisal resources, Lam
and Crosthwaite (2018) spell out a sequence of ways in which findings can inform second language
teaching: contrastive studies can inform teachers about the range of resources. This enables them to
explore differences with students, then explicitly teach areas of underuse, followed by feedback to
reinforce effective use. These two studies suggest that while DDL may work well for some learners,
its implementation requires particular attention, as one approach is unlikely to work for all contexts.
Many studies of L2 discourse focus on linguistic descriptions, and it can be left to teachers to
figure out how to use the findings. Sometimes, however, this is spelled out in a partner paper. For ex-
ample, Parkinson and Musgrave’s (2014) study has a partner paper, Musgrave and Parkinson (2014),
which spells out for teachers of English exactly how they can implement the findings of their study
in teaching materials for EAP learners. Similarly, the Trinity Lancaster Corpus project is unusual in
actually developing awareness-raising teaching materials (Gablasova et al., 2019), though these tend
to be for L1 students and teachers of English language.
A notable innovation is ColloCaid, a useful tool being developed to integrate corpus data and a
writing editor that will be particularly useful for second language learners (Frankenberg-Garcia et al.,
2019). The authors have developed a database of academic English collocations that can be accessed
via a text editor while students are writing. A prototype can be tried here: ColloCaid – Find the words
you need (https://www.collocaid.uk). This reflects a growing trend of making corpus resources avail-
able online to learners in user-friendly ways, as noted in the next section.

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Future directions for corpus approaches to discourse and second

language research
As this chapter has shown, most activity in this area has been on corpus analyses of learner corpora,
or contrastive studies of written L1 and L2 texts. This suggests that there are four major areas where
developments are anticipated.
First, there is scope for better discourse analyses, particularly of whole texts, engaging with mul-
timodal resources that can inform the teaching of writing and speaking in a range of longer, authentic
contexts. These could focus more on longer professional contexts such as being interviewed for a job,
pitching a new product/idea supported by visuals or realia, or writing personal statements or reports.
There has been discourse analysis in all of these areas, but much more is possible.
Second, we have seen the focus shift from written to spoken language, and it should be possible to
replicate many of the studies conducted on written language as contrastive spoken vs. written studies,
or where appropriate as multimodal studies.
Third, we have seen that SLA, discourse analysis, and corpus research are three developing fields,
but that they seldom fully interact. There is more to do in the integration of SLA and corpora (see
LeBruyn & Paquot, 2021; Tracy-Ventura & Paquot, 2021) and although there have been many cor-
pus-assisted discourse studies, most of these focus on L1 and social science themes. Most impor-
tantly, from the perspective of this chapter, there are very few studies that successfully integrate SLA,
discourse analysis, and corpus research.
Finally, the results of studies conducted should not be left there, but should be carried through to
teaching materials for second language learners. It is easy enough to say that the findings should be
used to raise awareness in teaching, but it takes skill to translate findings into classroom activities.

Note
1 Colligation refers to grammatical patterns, where collocation refers to lexical patterns.

Further reading
Aijmer, K. (Ed.), (2009). Corpora and language teaching. John Benjamins.
This edited volume can be seen as a follow-up publication to Sinclair’s (2004) collection in that it provides
an account of developments in pedagogical corpus applications five years on. It contains 12 chapters, offering
mainly European scholars’ perspectives on topics such as the relationship between corpus analysis and L2 lan-
guage acquisition, applications of learner corpora in language teaching, DDL, and the compilation and use of
new types of pedagogical corpora (consisting of textbook materials and spoken learner language). Although it is
now quite dated, many of the insights still apply today.
LeBruyn, B., & Paquot, M. (Eds.). (2021). Learner corpus research meets second language acquisition. Cam-
bridge University Press.
This volume, with contributions from more than 20 international researchers from the fields of SLA and
from corpus linguistics, addresses three overarching questions, which are paraphrased here: to what extent does
learner language follow a universal path or a path determined by the L1? How can changes in learner proficiency
be measured? How can corpus design and analysis better serve SLA? This is one of a number of volumes with
a similar focus. This volume focuses on what SLA theory can bring to learner corpus research and vice versa.
The topics tend to focus on words and phrases rather than discourse, but there are points of contact, such as the
evolution of lexical diversity in a longitudinal corpus.
McEnery, T., Brezina, V., Gablasova, D., & Banerjee, J. (2019). Corpus linguistics, learner corpora and SLA:
Employing technology to analyze language use. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 39, 74–92. https://doi.
org/10.1017/S0267190519000096.
This review argues that, as of 2019, there was minimal interaction between CL and SLA. It suggests reasons for
this and ways forward. Reasons include the typically small size of learner corpora (which inhibits many statistical

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analyses), the limited tagging, and the lack of engagement with SLA concepts. Even where there are large corpora,
some of which include data from users of many different L1 backgrounds, ‘A large corpus does not guarantee a
bounty of evidence for any research question that might be put to that corpus’ (McEnery et al., 2019, p. 80).
Römer, U. (2011). Corpus research applications in second language teaching. Annual Review of Applied Linguis-
tics, 31, 205–225. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0267190511000055
Römer provides a useful historical overview of the direct and indirect influences of corpus research on
(mostly English) language teaching, with particular reference to the perspectives of teachers and materials writ-
ers. This shows how corpus research has informed ELT materials, how it is used in DDL, and how it can inform
contrastive analyses with learner corpora.

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Acronyms used in the chapter

BAWE British Academic Written English (corpus)
BNC British National Corpus (also BNC Baby—a subset of the BNC)
CADS corpus-assisted discourse analysis
CEC Cambridge English Corpus
CLAN Computerized Language ANalysis
COBUILD Collins Birmingham University International Language Database (corpus)
CPE Cambridge Proficiency in English (exam)
CQL Corpus Query Language
DDL data-driven learning
DELT Database of English Learner Texts (corpus)
EAP English for academic purposes
ELT English language teaching
FCE First Certificate in English (exam)
ICLE International Corpus of Learner English
JCDS Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies
L1 first language, mother tongue, native language
L2 second language, additional language
LCR learner corpus research
LINDSEI Louvain InterNational Database of Spoken English Interlanguage
LOCNEC LOuvain Corpus of Native English Conversation
LOCRA LOuvain Corpus of Research Articles
MA Master of Arts (degree course)
MDA Multi-Dimensional Analysis (developed by Biber)
PICAE Pearson International Corpus of Academic English
POS parts of speech (tagger)
SFL systemic functional linguistics
SLA second language acquisition
T2K-SWAL TOEFL 2000 Spoken and Written Academic Language (corpus)
TLC Trinity Lancaster Corpus
TOEFL Test of English as a Foreign Language
TTR type-token ratio
UAM Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (corpus tool)
VESPA Varieties of English for Specific Purposes dAtabase corpus

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 14
ETHNOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVES
ON DISCOURSE AND SECOND
LANGUAGE RESEARCH
Hanako Okada

Introduction
Ethnographic perspectives on discourse have found a growing place in second language research,
especially as the “social turn” (Block, 2003) called for a more social, contextual, holistic, and eco-
logical orientation rather than a predominantly cognitive one. When combined appropriately, the
social and contextual factors drawn from ethnography and linguistic data from discourse analysis
supplement each other and allow researchers to explore second language learning in situ.
However, such an application is not problem-free. Both ethnography and discourse analysis are
umbrella terms that refer to a wide range of contrasting perspectives and approaches, and these terms
can be elusive and loosely used. This chapter, therefore, begins by outlining their history and essen-
tial characteristics, foregrounding ethnography because discourse analysis is discussed throughout
this volume. Second, their relationship is discussed, addressing their tensions and how they may be
compatibly combined into hybrid approaches. Third, it locates ethnographic perspectives on dis-
course in the historical contexts of the field of second language acquisition (SLA). Fourth, two sam-
ple studies showcasing the hybrid approaches in action are given. Fifth and finally, the implications
of ethnographic perspectives on discourse and second language research and their future directions
are addressed.

Overview: Ethnography and discourse analysis

What is ethnography?
The word ethnography is derived from the Greek words “ethnos” (people, tribe) and “graphia”
(writing)—literally translated as “writing about people” (Scott Jones, 2010). The term ethnography
originated in Germany from the field of history in the 1700s (Vermeulen, 2015), and early so-called
ethnographies were simply descriptive accounts of other cultures. Although positivism dominated
French and British social sciences for most of the nineteenth century, an antipositivistic orientation
focusing on subjectivity and interpretation developed in Germany through philosophers Kant and He-
gel, followed by the theoretical work of social scientists Dilthey and Max Weber. This orientation led
to a new approach to “thinking through cultures” (Scott Jones, 2010, p. 17). By the early 1900s, West-
ern social anthropology practiced fieldwork and adopted ethnography as its central methodological
approach to study non-Western societies in an up-close, long-term, intensive, and holistic manner.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003177579-15 173

 Hanako Okada

The concept of ethnography as a formalized methodological approach was established by

Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942), one of the founding fathers of ethnographic research, whose
longitudinal fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands became the template of later ethnographic practice.
Alongside key aspects such as living in the field, learning the language of the participants, collecting
artifacts, and keeping detailed field notes as well as a field diary, Malinowski stressed the importance
of participant observation through taking part in field activities to comprehend the participants’ lives
as understood by themselves.
In the first half of the twentieth century, sociologists adopted this approach to study settings closer
to home—Western urban settings. While the early ethnographers sought to study distant societies
through “making the strange familiar,” the sociologists sought to “make the familiar strange” through
detaching themselves from assumptions and biases about the communities they studied. For exam-
ple, the Chicago School of sociology became well known for studying North American urban com-
munities and subcultures that were considered disadvantaged or “deviant.” By the mid-twentieth
century, ethnographers had begun studying language and education, often focusing on effectiveness
and equity (and lack thereof) in education (e.g., Cazden, 1988; Erickson, 1977; Heath, 1983). Due
to the intensiveness of ethnographic work, such research often focused on small-scaled sites such as
classrooms and specific educational settings.
Watson-Gegeo (1997) defined contemporary ethnography as “the long-term, holistic, intensive study
of people’s behavior in ongoing settings … [in order] to understand the social organization and cultur-
ally-based perspectives and interpretations that underlie knowledge and guide behavior in a given social
group” (p. 136). As a process (method), ethnography is characterized by intensive and extensive par-
ticipant observation and interviews and by triangulation—the application of multiple methods of data
collection to study the same phenomenon. As a product (a genre of writing in the social sciences, espe-
cially anthropology), ethnography refers to “a detailed description and analysis of a social setting and
the interaction that goes on within it” (Watson-Gegeo, 1988, p. 582). It is important to note that in addi-
tion to being a process and a product, it is also a viewpoint (a perspective), as argued by Geertz (1973)
through the concept of thick description. Through it, Geertz emphasized the following three points of
ethnography: (1) the complexity and the particularity of the social scene studied; (2) understanding the
scene from an emic approach, valuing culture and belief systems as perceived and understood by the
participants themselves (as opposed to an etic approach based on categorization, generalization, and
universality); and (3) the awareness that the researchers are a constitutive part of the scene.
The third point above overlaps with the researcher’s reflexivity—an essential characteristic of con-
temporary ethnography. It refers to a “process of critical self-reflection on one’s biases, theoretical
predispositions, preferences, and so forth … [that] points to the fact the inquirer is part of the setting,
context, and social phenomenon, he or she seeks to understand” (Schwandt, 2015, p. 268). In line
with Geertz, ethnography has more recently been also conceptualized as a philosophy, theory, and
epistemology (e.g., Lillis, 2008; Nader, 2011).
The term ethnography is contested and has been abused and overused, often used to refer broadly to
longitudinal qualitative research. However, as Watson-Gegeo (1988) pointed out, “[e]thnography dif-
fers from other forms of qualitative research in its concerns with holism and in the way it treats culture
as integral to the analysis (not just as one of many factors to take into consideration)” (p. 577). Thus, it
is important to differentiate ethnography with related terms such as ethnographic study, ethnographic
perspective, and ethnographic tools. An ethnographic study is a focused, topic-oriented approach that is
less comprehensive (in scope and length) than an ethnography. Ethnographic perspective refers to the
application of the above-mentioned cultural and emic viewpoint guiding ethnography to other research
approaches such as discourse analysis (Gee & Green, 1998). Using ethnographic tools refers to employ-
ing participant observation, taking field notes, and interviewing. Therefore, if a study uses ethnographic
tools this does not necessarily mean it is an ethnography or an ethnographic study (Heath, 1982).

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What is discourse analysis?

The term discourse analysis was coined by Zellig Harris (1952), an American structuralist, to refer
to a formal method of analyzing “connected speech (or writing)” (p. 1), as an attempt to go beyond
the limits of descriptive linguistics examining a single sentence at a time. The modern-day concept
of discourse analysis developed in the 1960s within the field of linguistics to study language beyond
the level of phonemes, morphemes, syntax, words, clauses, and sentences, viewing discourse as the
highest level of linguistic organization. While early discourse analysis focused on structural analysis
of language as a text, it has moved on to study language as a part of social contexts, that is, language
as a social tool, focusing on its use. This approach to discourse analysis in the broader social sense
became an interdisciplinary field of inquiry, extending from the boundaries of linguistics to fields
such as sociology, anthropology, psychology, and communication.
Taylor (2001) defines discourse analysis as “the close study of language in use” (p. 5). While
cautioning that it should not be understood as a single practice, she provides a simple, introductory
categorization of discourse analysis into four approaches: the first approach focuses primarily on
language itself. The second is more interested in language use than language itself, thus focusing on
interaction. The third treats language as a “discourse” or an “interpretive repertoire” and examines
patterns in language associated with a particular topic, activity, or circumstance. Extending from the
third, the fourth approach is interested in how patterns of language and related practices constitute
aspects of society and culture and its members (cf. Foucault, 1972). Due to the complexity and diver-
sity of human discourse, discourse analysis is, by nature, multifaceted, as reflected in the wide scope
of this volume despite its specific focus on second language research.

Relationship between ethnography and discourse analysis

Similarities, tensions, and compatibility

Both ethnography and discourse analysis are umbrella terms covering a wide range of work in different
disciplines. They share a broad common interest in the empirical analysis of social phenomena. However,
they draw on fundamentally different epistemologies: while ethnography “attempts to describe social and
organizational contexts from the participants’ perspective,” discourse analysis, in its most general sense,
focuses primarily on “the structure and content of naturally occurring conversations” (Spencer, 1994,
pp. 267–268). Methodologically, ethnography is best known for observations and interviews, while dis-
course analysis relies on textual or audio-/video-recorded interactions, usually represented in transcripts.
In defining data, ethnographers take an open-ended approach and do not distinguish between data and its
context (or background information). In other words, everything that the researcher observes is consid-
ered data. On the contrary, discourse analysts must distinguish between data and its context. While some
forms of discourse analysis (Taylor’s (2001) third and fourth approaches) collect background informa-
tion to inform their analysis, others (first and second approaches) solely analyze language and interaction.
On a related note, another difference is in their analysis. Ethnographers use multiple data sources such
as observations and interviews and conduct an inductive analysis to find recurrent themes. Whereas such
inductive analysis is used to find macro patterns of what is being examined, discourse analysis is typi-
cally used to find micro patterns in interaction (Kamberelis & Dimitriadis, 2005).
The tension between ethnography and discourse analysis is most salient in the critique against
ethnography by conversation analysts. Conversation analysis (CA) is a powerful form of discourse
analysis (second approach) that developed in the late 1960s by a group of sociologists led by Harvey
Sacks (Sacks et al., 1974). With its influences from ethnomethodology,1 CA seeks to unravel prin-
ciples of social organization through meticulous, close analysis of transcriptions of audio-recorded
everyday conversations (Hasegawa, Chapter 2 in this volume).

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Conversation analysts criticized ethnography for the following reasons: first, despite its claim to
adopt the participants’ point of view, it depended on a priori categories and assumed contextual influ-
ences such as social norms to explain social behavior. Second, as they were mainly obtained from
observations and interviews, ethnographic data were retrospective, secondary, and mediated (by the
researcher), hence questionable (e.g., Maynard, 1989; Schegloff, 1992). In other words, ethnography
was criticized as being subjective and more anecdotal than analytical and descriptive, at best.
In response, ethnographers criticized CA for limiting its focus on structural/interactional analysis.
Specifically, they argued that: (1) its data were partial and provided little or no contextual background
information; (2) its emphasis on interactional structure patterns privileged form and rules over mean-
ing; and (3) its focus was limited to short, momentary interactions.
Much of the tension has been resolved as a substantial number of studies that effectively combine
ethnography and CA have emerged (e.g., Goodwin, 1990; Moerman, 1988). Ethnography and CA,
particularly its applied type (e.g., Antaki, 2011), and discourse analysis, in general, are treated as
complementary as the different characteristics supplement each other despite their fundamental differ-
ences. For example, ethnographers can benefit from the fine interactional details of naturally occurring
conversations as they: (1) provide windows onto topics and concerns salient to the members of a com-
munity; (2) highlight the common discourse practices of a group or community, enabling researchers
to analyze observational and interview data in light of these practices; and (3) strengthen triangulation
and help researchers confirm their interpretations, enabling a systematic verification of whether the
conclusions drawn from participant and immersive observations correspond with what actors say and
do (Spencer, 1994). To discourse analysis, ethnography can provide (1) rich, longitudinal descriptions
of social life and language use and (2) immediate contextual details such as background knowledge
and personal relationships. Such contextual details are important, as “[e]ven the study of micro fea-
tures of interaction as interruptions, pauses, and intonation requires at least an implicit interest in con-
text if the analyst is interested in understanding their sociological relevance” (Spencer, 1994, p. 273).
In short, ethnography provides context to structural and analytical discourse analysis, and dis-
course analysis provides structure and empirical grounding to illustrative and descriptive ethnog-
raphy (Spencer, 1994). The combination enhances the effectiveness of sociocultural description, as
reflected in the hybrid approaches discussed in the next subsection.

Hybrid approaches
This section presents, roughly in their birth order, four examples of language research traditions that
integrate ethnography and discourse analysis, focusing on their development.2

Ethnography of communication
Ethnography of communication (EC) is a conceptual framework that seeks to describe and under-
stand communicative behavior within social and cultural contexts using speech events as its unit
of analysis. It was originally founded in the 1960s by the linguistic anthropologist Dell Hymes. In
part a reaction to the then-dominant perspectives of Chomskyan generative grammar, Hymes (1964)
claimed that language could not be studied in isolation:

[EC] cannot take linguistic form, a given code, or speech itself as frame of reference. It must
take as context a community, investigating its communicative habits as a whole, so that any
given use of channel and code takes its place as but part of the resources upon which the mem-
bers of the community draw.
(p. 3)

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Hence EC has a dual focus of linguistic form and social and cultural components, bringing together etic
and emic analyses of communication. It aims to unravel how the participants develop and demonstrate their
communicative competence—the ability to communicate not only grammatically but appropriately accord-
ing to the norms, values, and expectations of a specific community. It is also known as the ethnography of
speaking, as its initial focus was on spoken communication. It has since broadened to include other forms
of communication such as written language and nonverbal forms such as silence, laughter, and gestures.
In the 1970s and 1980s, as the linguistic development of linguistic and ethnic minorities became
a growing concern in the United States, EC was applied to the educational arena. These studies, such
as Shirley Brice Heath’s (1983) groundbreaking nine-year study, Ways with Words, focused on the
dissonances in discourse practices between communities and schools and identified how such dis-
sonances adversely affected minority children’s school performance. These studies addressed the im-
portance of connecting micro-processes of the classroom to macro-social processes to study language
development and its impact on individuals and communities.

Microethnography
Microethnography, also known as the ethnographic microanalysis of interaction, focuses on de-
scribing and interpreting how face-to-face interactions are organized socially and culturally through
intense, repetitive, fine-grained analysis of video recordings. It is an interdisciplinary approach in-
fluenced by context analysis, EC, interactional sociolinguistics, ethnomethodology, and CA (Garcez,
1997). It was developed in the late 1970s by the educational anthropologist Frederick Erickson and
his colleagues to study language in educational contexts such as classrooms. According to Erickson
(1992), microethnography is not an alternative to traditional ethnography but its complement: its
purposes are to document educational processes more precisely than participant observation and
interviews can; test the claims of ethnographic research; and identify how interactions are organized,
as opposed to describing the interactions themselves (p. 204).
Contrary to the EC’s longitudinal and holistic approach using both macro and micro analysis, mi-
croethnography has a narrower focus, often focusing on a single instance of one type of event, such as
interactions within a single classroom. However, macro issues such as problems caused by cultural dif-
ferences and social influences are also addressed as they emanate from the intense micro analysis of inter-
action. For example, in their seminal study, Erickson and Shultz (1982) examined interethnic counseling
interviews in junior colleges by analyzing participation structure, interactional rhythm, and listening
behavior. They found that differences in ethnicity affected interaction, and such differences influenced
institutional gatekeeping decisions that were consequential to the students’ access to social opportunities.

Critical ethnography
Critical ethnography is a form of ethnography with theoretical influences from Marxism, neo-Marx-
ism, and the Frankfurt School of critical theory (May, 1997). As with the above two approaches, it
developed in the late 1960s and ‘70s as part of a movement whereby ethnographers began studying
language and education. A notable example is the British social scientist Paul Willis’s (1977) work on
how schools reproduced the vicious circle of working-class students ending up in working-class jobs.
Because its primary aim is to disclose inequalities and change societies for the better, critical
ethnography differs from the previous approaches and ethnography in general as it has a direct and
explicit emancipatory intent. According to Talmy (2012), critical ethnography commits to:

• describing discrimination, social inequality, marginalization, and oppression in the everyday life
of institutional (e.g., school) cultures, subcultural groups or both;

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• working to transform the conditions that allow these and other forms of injustice to persist; and
• maintaining a critically reflexive stance toward the relationships between researcher, the re-
searched, and knowledge production, representation, and dissemination (p. 1).

Like other ethnographers, critical ethnographers use methods such as prolonged participant obser-
vation, interviewing, and collection of artifacts. However, unlike in general ethnography, where ideas
are developed inductively through open-ended data collection, critical ethnographers enter the field
with a theoretical position. In fact, critical ethnography developed in part as a response to general
ethnography’s “abrogation of a theoretical perspective,” arguing that “all research is theory laden”
and researchers “must begin from a theoretical position” (May, 1997, p. 198).
As they do with other forms of ethnography, discourse data and analysis add substance, rigor,
and care into critical ethnography, as they enable ethnographers to generate, elaborate, and warrant
critical claims. The most common discourse analytic approach used in critical ethnography is criti-
cal discourse analysis (CDA), which views language as a social practice that enacts, reproduces, and
naturalizes inequality (see Chen, Zheng, & Lin, Chapter 8 in this volume).

Linguistic ethnography
Linguistic ethnography refers to a broad interdisciplinary approach combining linguistic and ethno-
graphic approaches that developed among socially oriented British applied linguists in the 1990s.
Heavily influenced by the work of Hymes, Gumperz, and Erickson, and particularly EC, it “holds
that … language and social life are mutually shaping, and that close analysis of situated language use
can provide both fundamental and distinctive insights into the mechanisms and dynamics of social
and cultural production in everyday activity” (Rampton et al., 2004, p. 2).
Although it is a broad approach, it shares the consensus that “the contexts for communication should
be investigated rather than assumed,” and the “analysis of the internal organisation of verbal (and other
kinds of semiotic) data is essential to understanding its significance and position in the world” (Ramp-
ton et al., 2015, p. 18). In addition, Rampton, Maybin, and Roberts (2015) point out three major charac-
teristics: (1) it is heavily influenced by poststructuralism; (2) due to such influences, it views concepts
such as “society,” “nation,” “community,” “gender,” and “ethnicity” as received social constructions
produced in discourse and ideology; and (3) it studies “the material, real-world changes associated with
globalization, with massively increased population mobility and rapid development in communication
technology” (p. 20). Finally, linguistic ethnography includes New Literacy Studies (e.g., Gee, 2015),
and is invested in educational processes, much like the above-mentioned approaches.
Examples of linguistic ethnography include Rampton’s (2006) extensive study of an inner-city
high school in England, focusing on students’ classroom interaction and the relationship between
student discourse and social class.

Ethnography and ethnographic perspectives on discourse in second

language research
This section locates ethnography and ethnographic perspectives on discourse within the field of sec-
ond language acquisition (SLA).
SLA is a relatively young subfield of applied linguistics that emerged approximately 50 years
ago, not long after the cognitive revolution in the 1950s in fields such as psychology, linguistics, and
computer science. SLA developed from first language acquisition psycholinguistic research and from
Chomsky’s (1965) cognitive-based language acquisition theories, which include universal grammar
and the notion of linguistic competence. Due to such roots, SLA initially focused mainly on issues of

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cognitive development as well as biological factors such as the “critical period” of language acquisi-
tion. Through much of the 1980s, SLA researchers predominantly adopted psychological models and
examined language acquisition from a mentalist or a cognitivist perspective—that is, that language
acquisition takes place in the mind. Partly because of that perspective, by the early 1980s, SLA gener-
ally took on a logical-positivistic perspective using controlled and structured research approaches to
gain hard data and replicable findings.
It was not much before the emergence of SLA that Hymes (1964), in direct opposition with Chom-
sky’s language acquisition theories, argued to include social and cultural considerations in the study
of language and developed EC. Since then, ethnography and related approaches such as EC and mi-
croethnography have been employed by linguistic anthropologists who study language socialization
(e.g., Heath, 1983; Ochs & Shieffelin, 1984) and educational anthropologists (e.g., Erickson, 1977)
to study issues of language use within educational settings. Sociolinguists also employed ethnogra-
phy and EC, alongside other theoretical and methodological approaches drawn from fields such as
anthropology, sociology, and psychology, to study social aspects of language use. Since the 1980s, a
myriad of ethnographic studies focusing on first (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition and use
within homes, schools and classrooms, and communities have been published within fields such as
anthropology, education, and sociology of language, but not in early SLA (Davis, 1995).3
Although Hymes’s notion of communicative competence was adopted in SLA by Canale and
Swain (1980) and later elaborated as interactional competence by Kramsch (1986) and others, EC
and ethnography, in general, did not find a place in early SLA. Although emerging at approximately
the same time and sharing the concern for language acquisition, SLA and these ethnographic stud-
ies did not merge due to their fundamental differences: (1) They began from opposing reactions to
Chomsky’s cognitive-based language acquisition theories, that is, they viewed language from differ-
ent perspectives—one cognitive and the other social; (2) they employed opposite types of research
approaches—one controlled and structured and the other holistic and taking place in the “natural”
setting of the environment being examined.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, influenced by the cultural turn4 in the social sciences, SLA research-
ers found increasing interest in the social and cultural aspects of language acquisition (e.g., Atkinson
& Ramanathan, 1995; Toohey, 1996). These researchers saw language learning not only as an indi-
vidualistic cognitive process but also embedded in sociocultural contexts. Some of these researchers
turned to postmodernism and poststructuralism as an epistemological and theoretical orientation.
Davis (2012) describes postmodernism in relation to language and literacy studies as follows:

Postmodernism considers the nature of knowledge as multifaceted, locally situated, and time
and context bound. … Poststructuralism specifically refutes the notion that language can be
understood in structuralist terms as a network of systematically linked propositions and coher-
ent organized units.
(p. 3)

With such influences, SLA researchers interested in the sociocultural aspects of language acquisi-
tions critiqued the dominant cognitive view of mainstream SLA and argued for a reconceptualization
of SLA theory. The best-known critique of mainstream SLA was that by conversation analysts Firth
and Wagner (1997), problematizing the predominant view of discourse and communication in SLA
and calling for: “(a) a significantly enhanced awareness of the contextual and interactional dimen-
sions of language use, (b) an increased emic (i.e., participant-relevant) sensitivity toward fundamen-
tal concepts, and (c) the broadening of the traditional SLA data base” (p. 286). Firth and Wagner’s
(1997) call stirred a lively debate within SLA, and although met with resistance by mainstream SLA
researchers, it was instrumental for the “social turn” in SLA (Block, 2003) to take place.

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 Hanako Okada

At the same time, as with other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, SLA took a
critical turn in the 1990s. Much like the social turn where sociocultural aspects were considered, the
critical turn recognized language as ideological, involving social, cultural, and political dynamics,
impacting the lives of the learners and teachers (Kumaravadivelu, 2006). With the influences of the
critical turn, SLA was no longer solely about the learners’ development of L2 linguistic competence.
Rather, it was also about the development of learners’ (as well as teachers’) identities, sociocultural
relationships, and ideologies, and how such development was constrained by sociopolitical posi-
tionings, such as race, class, gender, and unequal power relations (e.g., Canagarajah, 1993; Norton
Peirce, 1995).
The social and critical turns were significant not only in terms of theory but also in methodol-
ogy. In viewing L2 learning as a phenomenon embedded in context and L2 learners as agentive
individuals in their own right, qualitative research methods with an emic perspective such as eth-
nography were used increasingly within SLA research. Examples such as Watson-Gegeo’s (1988)
“Ethnography in ESL: Defining the essentials”; TESOL Quarterly’s special issue on qualitative
research (Davis & Lazaraton, 1995) which included ethnographic studies; and a chapter on lan-
guage socialization (Watson-Gegeo & Nielsen, 2003) in the predominantly cognitively oriented
Handbook of SLA (Doughty & Long, 2003) are symbolic of that increase and the influences of
linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics on SLA. Another area where such influences were
seen was in L2 classroom research. Researchers such as van Lier (1988) viewed the L2 classroom
as a complex culture and not an isolated vacuum, and the analysis of classroom discourse shifted
from those with an etic perspective focusing on observable linguistic behaviors to an emic one
where ethnographic data obtained in and out of the classroom, and wider sociocultural and politi-
cal contexts, were used to interpret discourse data. Such emic perspectives were also increasingly
applied to L2 discourse studies as contingent and contextual factors helped elucidate, document,
and demonstrate not only learners’ participation in the learning process but how acquisition had
taken place (Boxer & Zhu, 2017).
By the 2000s, in part an outcome of the cognitive–social debate along with the larger forces of glo-
balization, the multilingual turn had developed in SLA (Ortega, 2019). This view has problematized
the monolingual bias in SLA and how language learners were simply reified as (deficient) nonnative
speakers. Instead, the multilingual turn views learners as complex and heterogeneous, and the multi-
competence of multilingual learners as the basis of successful language learning.
As can be seen from this brief summary, SLA broadened and became increasingly transdiscipli-
nary, acknowledging multiple epistemologies and methods, especially (but not limited to) those from
linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics such as ethnography. As language learning came to be
viewed as more complex and more socioculturally and sociopolitically situated, there was a need for
more holistic and ecological approaches.

Sample studies

Sample study 1: Ethnography of communication (Duff, 2002)

Using language socialization (Duff & Yamamoto, Chapter 16 in this volume) as a framework and
employing ethnography of communication (EC) as a method, Duff (2002) examined how knowledge,
identities, and cultural differences were manifested and co-constructed in the interactions of a cul-
turally heterogeneous classroom and how students socialized or failed to socialize into mainstream
discourse. Although the study does not examine language learning per se, her findings have implica-
tions for L2 research, particularly those focusing on language socialization, classroom interaction,
and learner identity.

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 Ethnographic perspectives

Duff’s research site was a high school with a heterogeneous student population, where 60 percent
were Canadian native English speakers (“locals,” native English speakers), and the rest were Can-
tonese or Mandarin L1 speakers of Asian descent (“non-locals,” mostly nonnative English speakers).
The English proficiency of the “non-locals” varied according to their length of residence in Canada.
For over two years, Duff observed and audio/video-recorded two social studies classes taught by
two teachers, interviewed the students, talked to teachers and administrators, observed other classes
taught by these teachers in other schools, participated in school events, and collected documents
such as curricula and exams. The data reported in Duff (2002) were from classes taught by one of
the two teachers. Duff focused on the discourse of teacher-led classroom discussions where students
were encouraged to voice their opinions on social and cultural issues, and she analyzed interactional
features such as the sequential organization of talk and distribution of turns among the participants.
The analysis of the excerpts from the discussion showed how the teacher’s and students’ utter-
ances and interactional features positioned the students. For example, despite her well-meaning in-
tentions to foster active participation and respect for cultural diversity, the teacher allocated turns to
the non-locals in specific course contents, such as ancestor worship in Chinese culture, and thereby
attributed identity positions like Asian, alien, and non-Christian to them.
While ethnographic data are often used to provide larger sociocultural contexts, Duff’s participant
interviews also included the participant’s intentions and interpretation of what was occurring in the
discourse events. For example, she found that the non-locals’ silence in the discussions was not from
a lack of initiative or motivation but was a means of protecting themselves from humiliation, as they
were afraid of being criticized or laughed at by the locals because of their limited command of Eng-
lish. Hence the emic perspective obtained through these interviews provided an underlying explana-
tion of what Duff captured through the close analysis of classroom interaction. Through weaving the
macro- and micro-level contexts of communication, and the emic perspective of the participants and
the etic perspective of Duff as an outsider, Duff uncovered issues of variable participation, socializa-
tion, and the discursive positioning of self–other that were otherwise hidden or opaque. Triangula-
tions through the multiple data sources also provided the basis for her claims.

Sample study 2: Critical ethnography (Chun, 2016)

Informed by critical pedagogy, Chun (2016) examined racialized discourses that emerged in EAP
classes through textbook representations of successful immigrants and of perceived racial and cul-
tural differences among the students. Chun’s ethnographic study took place in a small English for
academic purposes (EAP) class in an intensive English program at a Canadian university. For 11
months, Chun audio/video-recorded the classes, interviewed the instructor and the students, held 18
discussion meetings with the instructor, wrote classroom observation field notes, and analyzed cur-
riculum materials.
Two months into the observations, prompted by the instructor’s concern that the students were dis-
engaged with the curriculum materials, Chun offered to discuss pedagogical approaches and shared
his work on functional grammar and critical pedagogies with her. As a result of the instructor’s en-
thusiasm to critically reflect on her classroom approaches, they held regular meetings where Chun
and the instructor discussed theories and how they could be incorporated into the classroom. Chun
also shared his observations, transcripts, and analyses of class sessions. Thus, these meetings be-
came “collaborative, research-oriented inquiries into the theoretical, practical, and resulting aspects
of implementing a critical pedagogies approach” (pp. 113–114). The meetings also enabled Chun to
examine and reflect on how the instructor’s pedagogical approaches evolved.
The data presented in Chun (2016) were from one of these meetings and two class sessions that
featured a textbook character called Jennifer Wong. Employing a discourse-analysis approach “which

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 Hanako Okada

holds that ‘the relationship of text to text, language to language, is not a direct relationship but is
always mediated by the actions of social actors’ …” (p. 115), Chun analyzed the cultural representa-
tions of Jennifer Wong in the textbook chapter, the classroom interactions about them, and the meet-
ing with the instructor.
The excerpts from two class sessions before and after the discussion meeting revealed how the
instructor’s newfound critical awareness of the course material fostered a more engaged and mean-
ingful discussion about the text with the students, enabling them to develop their academic literacies.
The layering of the emic perspective of the instructor obtained from the meetings, the discourse
data from the text and the class sessions, and Chun’s reflexive stance as a researcher actively involved
in the site enabled him to elaborate and warrant his critical claim that hegemonic discourses affect
classroom events and learning.5

Implications for second language research

Both ethnography and discourse analysis are multifaceted and share a wide range of contrasting
perspectives and approaches. As a combined form of two methodologies, ethnographic perspectives
on discourse (hereafter ethnographic perspectives) are epistemologically diverse, interdisciplinary,
holistic, and open-ended. While such a combination involves considering philosophical and episte-
mological challenges (cf. King & Mackey, 2016) and intense labor, when handled with care, it has
broad yet important implications for L2 research, particularly in bridging binary positions.

Bridging binary positions

Binary position 1: Cognitive–social divide

Ethnographic perspectives problematize examining individuals and their interpersonal and socio-
cultural contexts separately. They do not disregard the cognitive process as unimportant. Nor do
they treat social contexts as a mere variable that influences cognitive processes as mainstream SLA
theories do. Rather, individual cognitive processes are understood as situated in immediate and
larger sociocultural contexts, which leads to taking a holistic, ecological perspective in conducting
research.

Binary position 2: Macro–micro divide

Ethnographic perspectives involve a combination of micro- and macro-analytic methods. Early stud-
ies of L2 discourse typically attended to micro analysis of linguistic and interactional features in
the classroom, but the analyses were decontextualized. Ethnographic perspectives interweave rich,
detailed descriptions of the immediate micro contexts such as classrooms and larger macro contexts
such as political structures into the micro analysis of discourse.

Binary position 3: Research–practice divide

Ethnographic perspectives can help serve practice and bridge the research–practice divide. By being
immersed in the research site, the researcher becomes a “trusted outsider” of the examined site, such
as schools and classrooms. Such status can help establish a mutually collaborative relationship with
the participants, as Chun (2016) did with the instructor. While the studies may not necessarily include
pedagogical implications, researchers sharing their analysis of classroom context, interactions, and
materials can help teachers gain new awareness of their teaching.

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 Ethnographic perspectives

Practical implications
In addition, there are three practical implications for researchers: (1) An ethnographic study is time-
consuming and labor-intensive. Researchers are committed to “being there” on the site, drawing
from multiple data sources, and providing detailed macro/micro and emic/etic analyses. (2) Obtain-
ing permission to conduct an ethnographic study may be more challenging than other forms of L2
research due to the “perceived invasiveness” (Duff, 2007, p. 977) of extensive audio/video-recorded
observations, multiple interviews, and the omnipresent researcher. (3) Due to the abundance of data,
a comprehensive data treatment becomes challenging. A fuller representation of the investigated phe-
nomena and a thorough description of the methods and analyses would require a dissertation-length
project. As with the two sample studies, it may be necessary to select a particular speech event or
segments from the larger data set to publish the study as a journal article.

Future directions
The first future direction is to study multilingual language practices in heterogeneous, multilingual,
and transnational contexts. With increasing population mobility, global hybridity becoming the new
norm, and SLA considering multilingualism the central area of inquiry (Ortega, 2019), moving be-
yond the L1–L2 dichotomy is crucial.
The second direction is to study language learning, teaching, and use in digital contexts, such as
synchronous and asynchronous online classrooms, social media, and online chatrooms. As online
learning and interaction become increasingly common, a holistic perspective such as digital ethnog-
raphy (Pink et al., 2015) that treats online classrooms and communities as sociocultural contexts and
examines how digital platforms afford or constrain interaction, learning, and teaching and how learn-
ers’ textual identity develops, is much needed (e.g., Hafner et al., 2015; Shafirova & Cassany, 2019).

Conclusion
This chapter sought to describe the relationship between ethnography and discourse analysis and
how they could be combined effectively to study language, language learners, language learning, and
use, and how this combined perspective found its place in the field of SLA. Such development sug-
gests the open-ended nature of ethnography. When treated as a generalist approach, this open-ended
nature can be problematic, in that “anything goes.” However, when treated with care, thoroughness,
systematicity, and reflexivity, the open-ended nature of ethnography helps handle the complexity of
the language and the learner in an ever-changing world. The layering of different approaches such
as ethnography and discourse analysis may help develop SLA to expand and address pressing, real-
world issues on language learning (King & Mackey, 2016).

Notes
1 Ethnomethodology is a research approach developed by sociologist Harold Garfinkel (1967) that studies talk
to understand how people organize and understand the activities of everyday life. Although it has ‘ethno’ in
the term, it should not be confused with ethnography.
2 Not all combinations of ethnography and discourse analysis have specific names or fit into existing catego-
ries as the approaches discussed here. Many studies are simply referred as ethnography, ethnographic study/
research, or discourse analysis.
3 By “early SLA,” I refer to the field until the mid-1980s.
4 ‘Cultural turn’ refers to a movement in the humanities and social sciences where culture is seen as playing a
central role in creating meaning. It also describes a shift away from positivist epistemology (Nash, 2001).
5 For a more comprehensive version of this study, see Chun (2015).

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 Hanako Okada

Further reading
Hammersley, M., & Atkinson, P. (2019). Ethnography: Principles in practice (4th ed.). Routledge.
This book is an accessible introduction to ethnography as a research method in the social sciences. As the
book systematically covers each step of the research process, ranging from pre–field work preparation to writ-
ing up ethnography, it enables the readers to understand what is involved in conducting ethnographic research.
Paltridge, B., Starfield, S., & Tardy, C. M. (2016). Ethnographic perspectives on academic writing. Oxford
University Press.
Taking a context-sensitive, situated approach to writing, this book brings together studies in the broad area
of academic written discourse that take an ethnographic perspective. By using Lillis’s (2008) influential three-
leveled ethnographic approach to studying writing as a framework, the book systematically reviews a large
body of literature and brings to light how ethnographic perspectives are employed and what they can achieve in
academic writing research.

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 15
SOCIOLINGUISTIC
PERSPECTIVES ON DISCOURSE
AND SECOND LANGUAGE
RESEARCH
Corinne A. Seals and Honiara Salanoa

Introduction
It is not uncommon to hear second language research described as belonging to ‘applied linguistics’,
which academics in some regions divide from ‘sociolinguistics’. However, this chapter shows that in
fact, much contemporary second language research comfortably applies a sociolinguistic lens, and as
such, the division between ‘applied linguistics’ and ‘sociolinguistics’ is anything but neat.
How do we know that much second language research draws upon sociolinguistic perspectives?
One way we know is by looking at the research questions and/or aims of studies in second language
research. Any language study aiming to investigate a social influence, social meaning, and/or an as-
pect of the social world is connected to sociolinguistics. This includes studies involving intercultural
competence, cross-cultural misunderstandings, imagined futures as a speaker of another language,
ideologies regarding bi/multilingualism, language and identity, and more. As such, sociolinguistics is
embedded in a great number of contemporary studies in second language research, and much of this
investigates how and what is said through discourse.
The current chapter provides a brief overview of sociolinguistics in second language research, fol-
lowed by a short discussion of the main research methods used. This is then followed by a review of
research in three key contexts found in much contemporary research at this intersection: multilingual
homes, multilingual workplaces, and language classrooms, before concluding with a short discussion
of implications for language teachers and learners, and future directions.

Overview of sociolinguistics in second language acquisition research

As previously stated, sociolinguistics involves any study of language that also focuses on society,
which means that it also includes multilingual communities. The founding position of sociolinguis-
tics is that ‘language use symbolically represents fundamental dimensions of social behaviour and
human interaction … from broadly based international relations to narrowly defined interpersonal
relationships’ (Wolfram, 2022, n.p.). Sociolinguistics ‘is arguably the best known and most firmly
established of the various hyphenated varieties of linguistics (e.g., psycholinguistics, neurolinguis-
tics, sociolinguistics) that emerged during the second half of the twentieth century’ (Holmes, 2001,
p. 14,562).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003177579-16 187

 Corinne A. Seals and Honiara Salanoa

The field of sociolinguistics began with a focus on human behaviour and was heavily influenced
by anthropology. Well-known anthropologist Dell Hymes is often pointed to as one of the founding
figures of sociolinguistics, particularly through his books Language in Culture and Society: A Reader
in Linguistics and Anthropology (Hymes, 1964), The Ethnography of Communication (Gumperz &
Hymes, 1964), and Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach (Hymes, 1974). As
noted in the titles of these books, the anthropological practice of ethnography has played an important
role in sociolinguistic research (discussed further below in the section, ‘Main research methods in
sociolinguistics and second language research’), and ethnography of communication highlights the
role of society in influencing expectations around communicative events.
Along with Dell Hymes, linguist John J. Gumperz is another key figure in the foundation of
sociolinguistics. Gumperz also made use of the ethnography of communication and argued for the
importance of a deep contextual understanding in order to be able to interpret what he called contex-
tualisation cues. As defined by Gumperz (1982, p. 131), contextualisation cues are ‘any feature of
linguistic form that contributes to the signalling of contextual presuppositions’, inclusive of register,
intonation, facial expressions, gesture, and so on. In short, contextualisation cues allow interlocutors
to interpret the meaning of an utterance as well as the social expectations associated with being an
interlocutor in that interaction at that moment in time.
A third key figure in early sociolinguistics research is William Labov (Gordon, 2014). Labov es-
tablished the field of sociolinguistic variation, taking an interest in the ways that people say things in
different ways, as connected to social variables such as class, gender, ethnicity, and the like. Notably,
Labov’s research is quantitative, while that of Hymes and Gumperz is qualitative. Thus, two meth-
odological sub-branches of sociolinguistics were formed, but both still highlight the role of social
influence on language use.
Sociolinguistics came to be used in second language research through the influence of several
key theories, including sociocultural theory, social identity theory, and the theory of identity in sec-
ond language learning. In brief, sociocultural theory (cf. Lantolf & Thorne, 2007; Vygotsky, 1978)
posits that language is developed for inherently social purposes, and it is a tool that humans use to
access and convey their cognitive processes. Language allows individuals to mediate their cognitive
processes, and the best learning is achieved in the zone of proximal development (a learner’s current
ability plus one level higher).
Social identity theory (Tajfel, 1974) draws upon the psychological understanding that people tend
to categorise things into groups that are ‘similar’ and ‘different’. People also apply this to the social
world, understanding themselves and who they are in relation to groups to which they believe they
belong (‘us’) and to those to which they don’t (‘them’). Through this categorisation, people identify
their social place in the world. This has been connected to second language research by looking at the
ways in which bi/multilinguals use their linguistic resources to identify with (or not) certain social
groups (e.g., Seals, 2019; Zentella, 1997).
Connecting with social identity theory, Norton Pierce (1995) established the theory of identity in
second language learning. This theory argues that learners have multiple, dynamic identities that are
often in struggle with each other, which are negotiated as learners invest (or not) in the perceived bene-
fits (i.e., social and economic capital) of language learning. This third theory has remained particularly
popular in contemporary second language research, as illustrated in the research overviews below.

Main research methods in sociolinguistics and second language research

There are a wide range of research methods to choose from when applying a sociolinguistic perspec-
tive to second language research. While some of these methods tend more towards the quantitative
(such as sociolinguistic variation), the majority of methods related to a sociolinguistics approach

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favour a qualitative paradigm. As such, popular research methods from this perspective draw upon a
multidisciplinary tradition, informed by linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and psychology in par-
ticular (as discussed in the previous section). This multidisciplinary influence is visible in the types
of methods employed, especially interviews, an ethnographic approach to observation, and discourse
analysis.
When it comes to interviews, a sociolinguistic approach emphasises that the interview is not just
a research instrument, but it is also a place of meaning-making through the enactment of social prac-
tice (Talmy, 2010). For example, the interviewer(s) and interviewee(s) rely upon the interpretation of
contextualisation cues (cf. Gumperz, 1982) during the course of the interview to determine when to
speak and how to respond to the interlocutor. The interview as a site of social practice has been ex-
amined in second language research to investigate a multitude of questions related to the experiences
of language learners, teachers, and additional stakeholders (e.g., Dawson, 2017; Dunmore, 2019;
Humphreys & Baker, 2021; Pérez-Llantada, 2018; Ross & Rivers, 2018; Seals, 2019).
An ethnographic approach to observation is a second popular research method in sociolinguistic
studies of second language acquisition. This is because the social roles and complex networks that
make up participants’ everyday interactions can be more deeply understood once researchers have
spent a significant amount of time with those participating in the research and in the contexts to
be researched. This is particularly important when investigating issues through which a contextual
understanding is paramount to research reliability. For example, research into the experiences of
heritage language learners when reclaiming their heritage language(s) is a deeply emotional issue
and one for which researchers need to have a grounded contextual perspective for interpreting
interaction (cf. Nofal, 2020; Seals et al., 2019; Shah & Brenzinger, 2018). Additionally, acquiring
an additional language can often be a face-threatening experience, and being able to relate to par-
ticipants’ experiences through a knowledgeable position is crucial in developing meaningful and
reliable findings (cf. Dawson, 2017; Greenbank, 2020). Such a depth of understanding also sup-
ports one of the most popular methods of analysis from a sociolinguistic perspective—interactional
sociolinguistics.
Interactional sociolinguistics is an approach to analysing discourse that places emphasis on a con-
textual understanding of the data being interpreted (Gumperz, 1999). As such, researchers using this
perspective are encouraged to develop a longitudinal research programme and to draw upon their full
knowledge of the participants and the context when interpreting any moment of interaction. Interac-
tional sociolinguistics recognises that communication does not occur in a vacuum; rather, it is built
upon previous interactions and anticipates future responses, much in the way of dialogism (Bakhtin,
1981). Interactional sociolinguistics is one of the most popular approaches to discourse analysis and
is often that which is drawn upon when the generic label of ‘discourse analysis’ is given (cf. Seals,
2021b for more on this).
To conduct an analysis with interactional sociolinguistics, researchers read through (and often
listen to) a transcribed interactional event. Researchers then analyse what meaning-making occurred
during the interactional event and what meaning-making resources (including intonation, indexical-
ity, etc.) were drawn upon by those involved in the event. Researchers also consider any relevant
contextual information about the participants, the setting, the topic, current events, prior interactional
events, and so forth to reach a deeper understanding of the various resources at play amongst inter-
locutors. Excerpt 1 in the section ‘Sample studies in sociolinguistics and second language research’
and the associated discussion provide an example of interactional sociolinguistics.
In the next section, we present an overview of studies that have taken a sociolinguistic perspec-
tive when analysing discourse in a second language research context. As mentioned above, the most
popular discursive approach from this perspective is interactional sociolinguistics, and indeed this is
what the vast majority of studies discussed in that section employ.

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Sample studies in sociolinguistics and second language research

Sociolinguistic approaches privilege context as one of the means by which to investigate social influ-
ence on language. In what follows, we have identified three of the most common research context in
second language research applying a sociolinguistics lens: (1) multilingual homes, (2) multilingual
workplaces, and (3) language classrooms.

Multilingual homes
One of the most popular research contexts featuring a crossover between sociolinguistics, second
language acquisition, and discourse is that of bi/multilingual homes. Decades of research have shown
us that what goes on inside the home has a major influence upon whether or not people acquire and/
or maintain multiple languages, and how active or passive their linguistic abilities might be. The
reason why sociolinguistics in particular has been a useful lens through which to investigate second
language acquisition (or additional language acquisition) in the home is because of its privileging
of longitudinal data, day-to-day ‘normal’ discursive routines, and the influence of society and social
expectations (such as family structures) on language and use.
While many studies in second language acquisition prefer breadth over depth when it comes to
data, sociolinguistics (in most cases) prefers depth. One of the ways which depth of understanding
of the data is achieved is through the collection and analysis of longitudinal data. This is particularly
true when the interactional sociolinguistics approach to discourse analysis is taken, as researchers
are encouraged to include the small contextual nuances that can only be understood from familiar-
ity with particular participants and a particular setting over an extended period of time (Gumperz,
1999). For example, in Seals’s (2017) study examining the linguistic practices of Russian heritage
language speakers1 in the United States, she followed two case-study families over the course of three
years and collected naturalistic in-home recordings twice per week for six weeks from each family.
As a result of applying an interactional sociolinguistics lens and focusing on longitudinal contex-
tual understandings of the data, Seals was able to find that languages were used strategically by the
children, particularly the youngest children, to persuade family members to help them achieve their
interactional goals. Additionally, a number of studies have examined the ways that heritage language
speakers negotiate their identities over time in the home (e.g., Li, 2006; Oriyama, 2016; Revis, 2019),
drawing on the hugely popular field of language and identity (cf. Norton Pierce, 1995).
Additionally, as part of understanding how language operates in the social realm, a major focus of
research from this perspective includes studying day-to-day ‘normal’ discursive routines. They are
of interest in sociolinguistics because they tell us about how people navigate the spaces around them
every day. In fact, studying everyday talk in the context of second language acquisition has been
of interest to family language policy researchers (cf. King & Fogle, 2017). Family language policy
looks at the beliefs and practices of multilingual families in the day-to-day and week-to-week normal
routines that constitute raising children (e.g., Nofal & Seals, 2021; Seals, 2017; Shin, 2014; Smith-
Christmas, 2016). Sociolinguistics has come to the fore when analysing how children are socialised
into the family language policy expectations, which are often covert in the day-to-day discursive
routines in the home. For example, in working with Ethiopian and Colombian families in New Zea-
land, Revis (2019) was able to uncover the important role that children’s agency plays in the families’
in-home language practices and beliefs. In particular, Revis found that children have a particular
influence on their families’ socialisation practices through actions such as providing metalinguistic
commentary and language brokering, amongst others.
Family language policies are likewise influenced by society and social expectations, another area
of interest to sociolinguists. The role of social expectations in particular becomes highlighted when
we ask who is considered a normative family in linguistics research in a given society. Research with

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families has often privileged heteronormative nuclear-family structures (King & Lanza, 2017). How-
ever, there is an increasing recognition that this assumption of what is ‘normal’ needs to be challenged
in research as well as in society itself. As such, researchers keen to apply a sociolinguistic lens to sec-
ond language acquisition research have looked to expand family language policy research to include
adoptive families, single-parent families, LGBTQ families, transnational families, and more (e.g., Fo-
gle, 2013; Nofal & Seals, 2021; Shin, 2014; Smith-Christmas, 2016). One such example comes from
Nofal & Seals (2021) who found through in-home recordings with an adoptive family in New Zealand
that daughter Muromaha was often positioned as Indian and a Hindi speaker, in contrast to her Anglo-
New Zealander English-speaking adoptive parents. Muromaha often resisted this positioning at times
when it made her feel othered in the family dynamics, as shown in the example in Excerpt 1:

Excerpt 1: Muromaha rejecting an ‘other’ positioning (Nofal & Seals, 2021, p. 39)

1. Sara: why did you put this disc this CD on today? [Indian music playing]
2. Muro: I dunno
3. Sara: the food is quite tasty
4. Mark: it’s nice
5. Muro: I dunno why + I didn’t think
6. Sara: I think you like it because it’s Indian music
7. Muro: why do//you?\
8. Mark: /I think\\you like it ++ you’ve got a nice choice
9. Sara: hm! so what do you think
10. Muro: I dunno + I think we should put it on
11. because we haven’t listened to it for a long time
12. Sara: no you like to listen to this sweetie + don’t you?
13. Muro: hmm

As shown in the above example, a routine dinnertime conversation takes an uncomfortable turn
for Muromaha after her Hindi music choice is repeatedly commented upon by her adoptive parents.
Noticeably, this conversation is conducted in English, as Muromaha’s parents are English speakers.
However, in an attempt to position Muromaha in line with the Hindi language music, her parents end
up othering her from the family structure. Such interactions were not uncommon in the everyday
conversations within this home and provide insight into Muromaha’s resistance to speaking Hindi
at home even though she was proficient in it at the time of the recordings. This example shows how
sociolinguistics combined with second language acquisition and discourse analysis allow for an in-
vestigation into the everyday in-home language practices of an adoptive family. By drawing upon
greater contextual knowledge, social ideologies, and expectations (including how a child is expected
to act and talk in a particular social structure within a particular society), researchers are able to gain
greater insight into matters of second language acquisition and maintenance.
This chapter now turns to a second context in which sociolinguistics and second language acquisi-
tion research often join—multilingual workplaces.

Multilingual workplaces
The practice and usage of many languages for work commitments has been longstanding. Studies of
multilingual workplaces have shifted away from formal aspects of language analysis towards explor-
ing the nature of communication and language use. The ability to interact successfully with others in

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the workplace is fundamental to improving day-to-day interactions between workers, especially for
those from diverse cultures and backgrounds.
Rapid developments and changes in technology have exposed many workplaces to substantial
structural changes (Koester, 2010). Such changes have not only seen ‘workers across a variety of sites
being confronted with having to renegotiate their knowing, their doing, and their worker identity’
(Iedema & Scheeres, 2003, p. 316), but also the need for constant change in order to stay competitive.
These changes influence the way people communicate (Koester, 2010); people from different cultures
are coming into contact more regularly and working together through migration and the increasingly
global nature of business (Schnurr et al., 2007).
Workplace discourse analysis is a rapidly developing field of research, focusing on the ways in
which language is used to convey meaning in diverse workplaces. Contextual information holds a
central focus, and the contextual settings for workplace discourse analysis have expanded signifi-
cantly in the last 20 years, with researchers paying growing attention to interaction in a much wider
range of workplace contexts (Candlin & Sarangi, 2011; Holmes & Marra, 2014). The array of re-
search has seen a shift away from the dominance of healthcare (e.g., Cicourel, 1999; Ragan, 2000),
legal proceedings (e.g., Bhatia, 1993; Gibbons, 1994), and new jobs and interviews (e.g., Holmes,
2009; Koester, 2006) to different types of institutional and non-institutional contexts and countless
features of workplace interaction (Holmes, 2009, 2011; Koester, 2010).
The theoretical approaches used have also expanded to include interactional sociolinguistics
(Gumperz, 1982), approaches to politeness (Holmes, 2012; see also Mullany, 2006), rapport theory
(Spencer-Oatey, 2008), critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995), post-structural theory (Baxter,
2016), and the social constructionist approach (Holmes & Marra, 2011). While each of the theoreti-
cal approaches has different goals (e.g., interpersonal relationships in politeness and rapport man-
agement, identities in social constructionism), these frameworks reflect the different questions and
assumptions that workplace communication researchers are addressing in their analyses (Holmes &
Marra, 2014).
The developing body of research into workplace interaction includes studies of blue-collar work-
sites such as factories, building sites, mines, and construction work (Baxter & Wallace, 2009; Holmes
& Woodhams, 2013; Lønsmann & Kraft, 2018; Lucas, 2011; Lucas & Buzzanell, 2004; Sunaoshi,
2005). Initial analyses in this area were mostly concerned with intercultural communication, recognis-
ing that participants were expected to participate in a predominantly English-speaking environment
despite being from diverse linguistic backgrounds (Holmes & Woodhams, 2013; Sunaoshi, 2005).
Examples include workers in a car-manufacturing factory negotiating shared understanding (Suna-
oshi, 2005), and more recently, workers on building sites (e.g., Baxter & Wallace, 2009). Within the
blue-collar context, there has also been focus on relational work and its importance, with researchers
such as Lønsmann and Kraft (2018) highlighting the significance of understanding the meaning of
particular language use as embedded in specific contexts because language and communication play
an influential part in both everyday work and the social lives of blue-collar workers.
In workplace discourse, the focus to date has mainly been on workers integrating and having to
use English to communicate. Language has been shown to be an essential tool to access knowledge
and participation. A central emphasis in the field of workplace discourse is the importance of and the
ability to use language in a way deemed ‘appropriate’ in a given workplace. However, recent discus-
sions in the field of workplace communication have indicated difficulties faced by adult immigrants
in communities that use English as a first language (Marra, 2012; Yates, 2011; Yates & Major, 2015).
Yet, successful interaction is dependent on the migrants’ involvement with the local community in
English, which arguably contributes to facilitating language learning and increasing motivation (Yates
& Major, 2015). Therefore, the ability to communicate fluently in the second language is reliant upon
active involvement with and immersion in the language of the new workplace context (Salanoa, 2020).

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We now turn to a third popular context in sociolinguistic approaches to second language re-
search—that of language classrooms.

Language classrooms
Classroom interaction is an essential part of language learning and teaching in educational systems,
as it enhances speaking and listening among learners. More importantly, it not only helps the learner
to be able to think critically and share their views among their peers, but provides meaningful com-
munication among the students in their target language. Within the general framework and context
of a communicative approach to second/additional language teaching, which has as one of its main
aims that of developing the learner’s ability to use real language in daily life, academics and teach-
ers are beginning to understand that discourse analysis has the potential to play a significant role in
pedagogy, including language choice (Paltridge, 2021).
Discussions of additional language teaching methodologies and approaches have reinforced the
benefits of switching from a traditional teacher-focused to a more learner-centred classroom setting.
This necessarily involves some reconception of the roles of teachers and learners. The communica-
tive language teaching (CLT) approach moves the focus to the learner across a variety of aspects of
classroom instruction. A CLT curriculum reflects the needs of the learner, the activities engage learn-
ers in communication (involving information sharing and negotiation of meaning), and the teacher’s
role is that of facilitator in the communication process (Nunan, 1989).
There have been, since before the Second World War, a number of significant changes in language
teaching methodology, which have been recommended largely on the basis of research findings.
However, there is very often a time lag in the uptake of new pedagogies (Borg, 2008). While the
linguistic education of many language teachers currently is still very much influenced by a structural
approach prioritising the study of language as an autonomous system of rules rather than as a means
of communication, the introduction of the notion of communicative competence has been helpful in
encouraging the understanding that communication is also the result of the effective application of
pragmatic knowledge and skills.
One of the post-structural approaches to language teaching that has become very popular in recent
second language research is translanguaging. Translanguaging as a pedagogy welcomes and builds
upon:

the ways in which [multi]lingual students and teachers engage in complex and fluid discursive
practices that include, at times, the home language practices of students in order to ‘make
sense’ of teaching and learning, to communicate and appropriate subject knowledge, and to
develop academic language practices.
(García, 2014, p. 112)2

Research into sustainable translanguaging (Cenoz & Gorter, 2017) and socially responsive
translanguaging (Seals & Olsen-Reeder, 2020) has sought to further uncover how researchers can
work directly with communities to overcome the suppressive powers of dominant social structures,
which is particularly important when working to maintain and reclaim minority and Indigenous
languages.
The example below (Excerpt 2) illustrates some of the research being done by the Wellington
Translanguaging Project, looking at how ethnographically informed understandings of translanguag-
ing practice can inform translanguaging pedagogy. All speech originally in te reo Māori (and its
translation) is in bold, while all speech originally in English is unbolded, thus allowing the reader to
experience the translingual text whether reading the original or the translation.

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Excerpt 2. Translingual teaching approach in a Māori puna reo (Seals et al., 2019, pp. 55–59)

Original Translation
13 Teacher He aha te āhua o te huarere ki waho? What is the weather like outside?
14 What’s the weather like outside? What’s the weather like outside?
15 Titiro ki waho. Look outside.
16 Nā R-- te wā ki te kōrero i tū tana It is R--’s time to talk, he put his hand
17 ringa. up.
18 It’s R--’s time to speak so me It’s R--’s time to speak so we need to
19 wahangū tātou. be quiet.
20 Child 1 Raining. Raining.
21 Teacher Āe kei te ua, he aha atu? Yes, it is raining, what else?
22 Tū mai to ringa Re---. Put your hand up Re---.
23 Child 2 Wet. Wet.
24 Teacher Āe tino pai tō whakautu. Yes very good answer.
25 K----. K----.
26 Child 3 Cold. Cold.
27 Teacher Āe kei te pupuhi te hau, kei te Yes, the wind is blowing, its cold, it is
28 makariri, kei te ua hoki nē. raining too.
29 So mehemea ka haere tātou ki So if we go outside, what should we
30 waho me aha? do?
31 P---. P---.
32 Child 1 Put your pōtae on or your hū. Put your hat on or your shoes.
33 Teacher Ka pai, he aha atu? Good, what else?
34 Child 4 Umm … Umm, put your jacket on. Umm … Umm, put your jacket on.
35 Teacher Āe me whakamau ō koti nē nō Yes, you need to wear your jacket
36 reira tino makariri ki waho. because it is cold outside.
37 It’s very cold outside. It’s very cold outside.
38 If we get a chance to go outside me If we get a chance to go outside you
39 mau ō pōtae, so pōtae mahana, should wear your hat, so warm hat,
40 your beanie pērā ki a Russell. your beanie like Russell.
41 Titiro pērā ki a Russell. Look, just like Russell.
42 Me mau ō koti me mau hoki i ō You should wear your jacket and you
43 hū. should also wear your shoes.
44 We don’t want to see anyone We don’t want to see anyone running
45 running outside with no hū on okay. outside with no shoes on okay.
46 Okay me whakamau ō hu i mua i Okay you need to put your shoes on
47 tō puta i te kūaha okay. before you exit the door okay.

The example shown in Excerpt 2 illustrates translanguaging in practice at a Māori puna reo (early child-
hood education centre in Aotearoa, New Zealand). By basing the pedagogical translanguaging research on
ethnographic investigations into actual everyday language use (through interactional sociolinguistics), the
researchers were able to uncover how translanguaging operates naturally in practice, which allowed them
to build upon this to create supportive pedagogical materials (cf. Seals & Olsen-Reeder, 2020).
In addition to helping us understand more about what is happening in language classrooms, dis-
course analysis has also become a teaching tool, allowing teachers to raise students’ consciousness
of language in social use. Bringing discourse analysis into the language classroom requires that the

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teacher, and then the students, understand that the main focus of study is not structural language, but
communication. With a focus shifted towards social communication instead of abstract linguistic
features, the discursive approach to teaching languages has also become an area of interest in socio-
linguistic studies of additional language acquisition.
Discourse-oriented teaching using authentic discourse includes teachers and students engaging
with different language skills. For instance, through a newspaper article, a letter, or an extract from a
book, a teacher can teach a grammar rule. Students can learn the rule and how it is used in context as
well as learning new vocabulary, gaining knowledge, and, potentially, critical problem-solving skills
from reading the article. Then through using the same piece of text or discourse, students can practise
speaking by retelling the information in the article to another member in the class, with an emphasis
on using the taught grammar point. The advantages of using this kind of discursive approach are
that the students will learn grammatical rules in context, become familiar with textual organisation,
explore how punctuation is employed in a text, and explore different writing styles, as well as im-
proving their oral communicative competence by mastering oral discourse management of prosody:
rhythm, stress, and intonation (Celce-Murcia & Olshtain, 2000).
One way that a discursive approach to language teaching has been operationalised is through fo-
cusing on the discourse of genres, their conventional structure, and the norms for how and by whom
they are used in the context of the surrounding community. The notion of genre studies has led to a
number of movements in the teaching and learning of languages (Paltridge, 1994). Although there are
various approaches that have been acknowledged, the main differences amongst researchers working
in this area relate to how they define genres; whether genres influence actual language selection and
combination, and the extent to which they believe that speakers and writers have the freedom to in-
novate (Johnson, Personal communication: lecture notes, 2 September 2013).
Within second language research, the systemic-functional approach also highlights the role of
language use in society. This approach ‘is characterised by its emphasis on function (how language
enables us to do things like argue, reflect, in order to achieve specific purposes) and on the language
systems (aspect/modality) that play a role in the achievement of goals’ (Johnson, 2013, n.p.). Fur-
thermore, work in this area shows that there is a tendency for speakers and writers to conform closely
to established norms. Dereiwanka’s (2003) work belongs in this category as she takes a functional
linguistics approach to language—looking at how people use language for real purposes in society
and develop it so that needs and meanings are clear. This approach is further illustrated in the work
of Halliday and Hasan (1985), which makes clear that grammar is not just a matter of grammatical
knowledge but rather for a matter of how it is applied incommunication. Moreover, Halliday and
Hasan (1985) maintain that the ‘assumption of coherence can be sustained so well because human
language has the resource for indicating coherence, while the nature of language as a resource has
developed in a particular way because it has to serve the needs of the community’ (p. 96).
A discourse-oriented approach to language teaching (both informing pedagogy and use as a tool
in the classroom) is perhaps the beginning of a new approach to methodology that requires further
work by both teachers and students.

Implications for second language learning, teaching, and use

The benefits for second language learning, teaching, and use of focusing on context should not be
underestimated. Indeed, this is one of the key reasons why the sociolinguistic approach to second
language research has been so popular. Understanding the nuances of language use in interaction is
beneficial for students studying an additional language in order for them to be able to more accurately
use the language variety ‘in the wild’. Additionally, teachers who are aware of students’ needs based
on the future context(s) of language use can design richer teaching materials to meet these needs.

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 Corinne A. Seals and Honiara Salanoa

Additionally, a sociolinguistic approach to second language research privileges diversity of ex-

perience and speakers’ identities. This can be seen in the large amount of research to date focusing
on identity and diversity in relation to language use in the home, at work, and in the classroom. By
recognising students’ identities and their diversity of experience, teachers are able to support their
investment in continued and future meaningful language learning, which can be applied to real-life
situations such as continued education, the workplace, and home life.
A sociolinguistics approach to second language research puts social practice first and does not
foster belief in separating linguistic form from function. Rather, form is determined by function, and
the two are inextricably linked. This is a different approach to second language learning and teaching
from that which some students may have previously experienced, but it is also one that brings mean-
ingful learning and teaching to the fore and thus has a lasting impact.

Future directions for sociolinguistics and second language research

Going forward, research at the intersection of sociolinguistics and additional language acquisition
would do well to maintain a focus on social context, but with an increased focus on and critical
awareness of how the ways we as researchers view language is also subject to social norms and
biases. As such, a critical reflexive approach to research will continue to be key. This includes re-
evaluating our biases when it comes to both theory and context. Developments around the theory of
translanguaging have picked up this task, and second language researchers would do well to apply it
to other sociolinguistic areas as well.
Some of the contexts into which sociolinguistics and second language research could expand include
areas of technological development and non-traditional areas of inquiry. For example, with the heavy reli-
ance on video communication software in the current and post-pandemic era, researchers could contribute
to our understandings of identity negotiation and the role of society when we are operating in a digital
teaching and learning space. Furthermore, researchers have considered the role of languages in transna-
tional communities, but very little attention has been given to how this works for overseas returnees who
must renegotiate what it is to belong in a society that is at the same time both old and new. Finally, we
recommend that more attention be given to language use in bi/multilingual seasonal work sectors—how
does membership and workplace culture connect with language in such a dynamic, shifting space? There
are many rich areas at the intersection of sociolinguistics and second language research yet to be explored.

Notes
1 Heritage languages include ‘Indigenous and immigrant/diaspora community languages, due to the recogni-
tion that languages do not have to be either one thing or the other; they can be both … since the term “herit-
age language” focuses on identity, agency, and cultural history, it is a self-identifying categorization and one
that is up to the individual and/or community to decide upon’ (Seals & Shah, 2017, p. 3)
2 Translanguaging exists as theory, practice, and pedagogy. To read more about this, see Seals (2021a).

Further reading
Blackwood, R., & Røyneland, U. (Eds.). (2021). Spaces of multilingualism. Routledge.
This edited collection focuses on creating an interdisciplinary conversation about how multilingualism is
connected to identity and modern-day society drawing on state-of-the-art research.
Garrido Sardà, M. R. (2020). Community, solidarity and multilingualism in a transnational social movement: A
critical sociolinguistic ethnography of Emmaus. Routledge.
This monograph focuses on the French social movement Emmaus via a critical ethnographic approach to see
how language and languages are used to connect transnational communities across disparate spaces.

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Seals, C.A., & Dawson, S. (2024). Sociolinguistics for language teaching. Cambridge University Press.
This book introduces a number of key concepts in sociolinguistics and applies them directly to the areas of
language teaching and learning.

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 16
LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION,
DISCOURSE, AND SECOND
LANGUAGE RESEARCH
Patricia A. Duff and Masaru Yamamoto

Introduction
Language socialization (LS) research examines the concurrent development of linguistic and cul-
tural knowledge through mediated social experience. Increasingly, LS research is being conducted in
multilingual contexts, both inside and outside of classrooms, where second language (L2) develop-
ment is one of the expected outcomes of interaction. (We use the term L2 generically to refer to a
foreign, second/additional, or heritage language.) Other goals often include the transmission, uptake,
or contestation of linguistic ideologies and social values, membership in a real or desired community
mediated by the L2, particular affective dispositions, and other forms of knowledge that are learned
and expressed at least in part through languages (L1, L2, Lx) and other semiotic systems (Duff &
May, 2017; Duff & Talmy, 2011).
In this chapter, we first describe the theoretical underpinnings of LS and the main research meth-
ods or approaches used in studies that are either explicitly or implicitly framed as LS. We then re-
view and illustrate through selected sample studies how research has analyzed oral and multimodal
discourse to demonstrate L2 socialization processes and (in some cases) outcomes. We examine re-
search situated within classrooms and other less formal settings, such as dormitories, where multilin-
gual students engage in discursive events and interactions with teachers and peers using their diverse
linguistic repertoires and multimodal/embodied resources to develop their L2 proficiency as well as
other competencies and dispositions. We then discuss how such interactions and discourse contribute
to participants’ L2 development and their understandings of local cultural ideologies connected with
the L2 and of themselves. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of the contributions of LS studies to
SLA, implications for educators, and promising directions for future research in this area.

Overview of second language socialization research: Theoretical underpinnings

The first generation of research on LS in the 1980s focused primarily on children’s first language (L1)
development and use within families and communities. Often the linguistic focus was L1 pragmatics,
such as requesting and shaming behaviors or other common routines of sociolinguistic significance
(Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986). Since the early 1990s, the scope of LS research has expanded substan-
tially (Duff & Hornberger, 2008; Duff & May, 2017; Duranti et al., 2012). In particular, there has
been greater attention to the assisted development of linguistic/discursive and cultural knowledge and

200 DOI: 10.4324/9781003177579-17

 Language socialization, discourse, and second language research

practices among multilingual individuals of all ages (children, adolescents, adults) in their nonpri-
mary languages, as well as attention to newcomers’ integration into or participation in new com-
munities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Often these communities are in transnational contexts
involving migration and other forms of mobility, such as study abroad.
Many LS researchers (including the authors of this chapter) are involved in L2 teaching and learn-
ing, teacher education, and research within English-L2 or other L2 educational settings. Therefore,
learners’ L2 development and successful participation in new sociocultural and educational contexts
are crucial to us and our research participants. Unlike much conventional SLA research, LS studies
tend to use ethnographic case studies that examine not just learners and their L2 development but
also the cultural practices and values considered important in their communities of learning and prac-
tice. For that reason, studies of L2 socialization and development may provide broader contextualiza-
tion with respect to intergenerational change, migration histories and contexts, and factors that may
have an impact on learners’ identities as “legitimate” members of their communities as well as their
discourse practices and learning (see Duff, 2019; Miller, Chapter 25, this volume).

Explanation of terminology

Socialization
As we mentioned in the introduction, socialization refers to the kinds of multimodal assistance and
interaction provided to facilitate the concurrent, mediated development of linguistic, cultural, and
other forms of knowledge and practice within a particular sociocultural domain. The “socializers” (or
socializing agents) typically are people or resources that convey knowledge of the cultural systems
involved: parents, siblings, teachers, and peers, as well as “how-to” manuals, technologies, text-
books, and other entextualized forms of mediation. Learners themselves can be highly agentive and
self-directed in seeking the knowledge and experience they need to perform as expected; they can
also resist current practices and expectations, introduce innovations, and help socialize others—their
mentors, peers, and so on—into new ways of engaging in linguistic and cultural practices, includ-
ing those preferred by the learners. The sociocultural domains might include family or community
settings (e.g., “dinnertime” as a sociolinguistic event), classroom and extracurricular activities, and
disciplinary or professional genres and discourse, among others.

Discourse
In applied linguistics research, including LS, the term discourse has two common connotations: (1)
the broader ideological (“discursive”) and historical contexts and policies in which language learn-
ing/use takes place (e.g., discourses of monolingualism, language purity, or linguistic hierarchies
that affect language choice, policy, and practice), and (2) the actual features of oral, written, or multi-
modal texts, genres, and interactional practices that learners are expected to engage with and emulate
through implicit or explicit instruction (Burdelski & Howard, 2020; Duff & May, 2017). These two
levels are of course interrelated, if not always congruent. An examination of discourse at the micro
level might focus on the following: features of a particular genre or speech (communication) event,
such as an oral presentation, graduation ceremony, or poetic performance; specific linguistic forms,
such as stance-markers to indicate the speaker’s or writer’s affective or epistemic orientation to utter-
ances that are produced (e.g., excitement or degree of certainty, respectively); particular lexical items
and formulaic phrases; feedback practices (e.g., error correction, advice about writing), and verbal as
well as nonverbal cultural signifiers (see examples in Burdelski & Howard, 2020). As we illustrate in
the sample studies below, the interactions between these two senses of discourse (macro and micro)

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are fundamental to understanding language learning processes and experiences. Therefore, in this
chapter we focus on both in relation to one another.

Second language acquisition (SLA) vs. socialization

As noted under discourse, LS research often looks more at learning processes, ideologies, and con-
texts than discrete learning outcomes such as L2 accuracy, fluency, and complexity—or test scores
and other global indices of linguistic performance or attainment. Furthermore, LS research takes a
fundamentally nonlinear approach to linguistic, sociocultural, and sociocognitive development, ac-
knowledging that SLA and other forms of learning are fluid, multidirectional, contingent, temporary,
or transitory (Duff & Talmy, 2011). In other words, the experiences may or may not result in learners’
internalization, retention, and subsequent use of L2 linguistic/discursive forms or structures that are
being analyzed as normative in the given context. Instead, studies might focus on what forms and
practices are privileged or expected in particular situations and why. Increasingly, contemporary SLA
theory also views learning as highly dynamic and unpredictable (e.g., Douglas Fir Group, 2016).

Communities or networks of practice

Some studies of L2 socialization adopt Lave and Wenger’s (1991) notion of communities of practice
(CoP)—the kind of social group dynamics that help support newcomers to become more integrated,
functioning members—when examining the development (or lack thereof) of L2 learners’/users’ lin-
guistic repertoires (e.g., Sauer & Ellis, 2019). Related foci include examinations of discursive nego-
tiations and social constructions of community membership and social identities (Morita, 2004; Park
& Lee, 2022), as well as other sociocultural norms and values in the communities within which their
social lives unfold. Alternatively, instead of the construct of community, researchers may describe
participants’ distributed social networks to see how they support learners’ academic and linguistic
development and performance, as we illustrate in the sample studies section.

Research methods in second language socialization studies

Research designs and methods for studies of socialization in multilingual contexts in which discourse
is examined can take several possible forms. Traditionally, as we will illustrate in our sample stud-
ies section, ethnographic approaches with multiple focal cases have been used (i.e., ethnographic
multiple-case study) to examine macro and micro discourse contexts as people’s participation in key
L2-related activities evolves over time. As Duff and Talmy (2011) and various others (e.g., Garrett &
Baquedano-López, 2002) have pointed out, such studies typically include some or all of the follow-
ing methods and data sources:

• Descriptions of the wider context of learning (e.g., evidence may include documents such as
course syllabus, policy documents, curriculum materials, news reports, signage).
• Sustained and regular observation of a particular type of activity over time (e.g., from the start of a
course to the end of the course or academic year); typically this is a recurring high-stakes activity
(e.g., an oral presentation or written assignment) and involves various forms of socialization (e.g.,
instructions and other preparatory work, feedback, corrections, revisions).
• Recordings of the observed activities (audio and/or video); sometimes these are self-recorded
by participants themselves when not directly observed by researchers and later transcribed (e.g.,
Study #8 reviewed below).
• Field notes taken by the researcher of the observations.

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• Selection of focal cases (participants) whose performance and perspectives are tracked over time
(e.g., an instructor and 2–4 learners in a multiple-case study).
• Oral or written journals kept by research participants documenting their experiences or reflections.
• Artifacts produced by participants: for example, essays, recordings, posters, images.
• Interviews with focal participants that are then transcribed.

These data are then analyzed for the following:

Firstly, salient themes related to LS within this context; for example, Quan and Menard-­
Warwick’s (2021, p. 358; see Study #5 below) multicycle thematic analysis (with first-cycle open-
coding, followed by second-cycle axial coding applied) identified three themes related to the
outcomes of structured critical reflection during study abroad:

1 Evaluations of [the participant’s] background, upbringing, and language practices.

2 Critical awareness of the link between language, identity, and culture.
3 The application of course content to current and past observations and experiences.

Miles et al. (2019) and Saldaña (2021) also provide practical advice on thematic analysis.
Secondly, articular discursive features as the units of analysis (e.g., corrective feedback practices:
“talk about language,” e.g., Surtees, 2018) to examine evidence of LS. Furthermore, the linguistic
forms or interactional patterns may be analyzed in terms of how they index particular social/cultural
meanings and relationships. The following discursive practices (among others) have been the fo-
cus of past classroom-based LS studies: questions, error correction or repair, elicited repetition and
prompting, accounts, fill-in-the-blank utterances, assessments or evaluations, directives, modeling
and demonstration, reported speech, narrative or storytelling, and participant examples (Burdelski &
Howard, 2020). For example, Moore (2020) described how a teacher introduced church-related Rus-
sian vocabulary (e.g., poručni, “armlets” on priests’ attire) in a weekend Russian Orthodox Christian
heritage-language Saturday school in California. She also noted the teacher’s very positive affective
stance regarding the robe’s beauty, thereby socializing children not only into relevant religious Rus-
sian vocabulary but also into particular dispositions toward the language and culture and into the
children’s own identities as Russian Americans who embrace Orthodox values.

Indirect vs. direct observation of discourse

Despite the obvious benefits of researchers’ direct observations of participants’ behaviors, inter-
actions, and cultural processes, it is not always possible to enter into others’ learning or living
spaces to record observations (using audio- or video-recording tools or field notes). Other ap-
proaches may be necessary if teachers, parents, or other participants do not want to be observed
or recorded in an obtrusive manner or if the researcher’s very presence would significantly alter
the behaviors under scrutiny (i.e., more than usual). In such cases, researchers must rely more on
their field notes, learners’ journals, self-recordings by participants (e.g., Diao, 2016; Hasegawa,
2019; Surtees, 2018), artifacts, and interview accounts to understand the dynamics, at least from
participants’ perspectives and from data they have selected to share. There are some drawbacks if
researchers are not able to make direct, recorded observations, though, especially when in-person
classroom interaction or other micro-level discourse processes are being studied. However, when
these interactions are viewed as part of multifaceted developmental and cultural processes, ascer-
taining participants’ experiences and triangulating those views with other kinds of data, including
their self-recorded data, can nevertheless shed light on LS and its relationship to L2 learning, social
interactions, and performance.

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In summary, many approaches to LS research and analysis exist and the choice of which to use
depends on the research questions and contexts, as well as the willingness of research participants to
engage in various data generation practices, often over weeks, months, or even years.

Sample studies on LS, discourse, and second language acquisition

In this section, we present eight representative studies that illustrate some of the features of L2/SLA so-
cialization research described in the earlier section “Research methods in second language socialization
studies” with a focus on discourse (i.e., either or both senses of that construct). The studies are grouped
into three sections, although there is sometimes overlap across them, such as when identity is involved:
(1) LS in face-to-face educational contexts, (2) LS in relation to identity primarily, and (3) L2 socializa-
tion through social networks. Not all the studies provide theoretical framing that draws explicitly on LS,
but the processes described are completely compatible with and complementary to an LS perspective.

Second language socialization research in face-to-face L2 learning contexts with a

focus on language/discourse
Perhaps the most common types of L2 socialization studies are conducted in face-to-face learning
contexts (in classrooms, tutorials), as the following studies demonstrate. The first two used qualita-
tive methods only, whereas the third study used mixed methods to track developmental trends.

Study #1
Kobayashi and Kobayashi’s (2018) classroom-based multiple-case study was conducted at a Japa-
nese university. The study examined how EFL students’ repeated engagement in doing poster presen-
tations (the focal task) contributed to improvements in the students’ subsequent L2 oral performances
and, thus, L2 learning. The authors showed that repeated poster performances provided what van Lier
(2004) calls linguistic “affordances” to different students to improve their subsequent performances
in unique ways. In one case (i.e., Ryo), opportunities for noticing linguistic forms by means of “lan-
guaging” (Swain, 2006) arose in a contextually contingent manner from presenter–viewer Q & A
interactions, behind-the-scenes joint lexical negotiations with co-presenters, and during the spoken
delivery itself. These discursive practices resulted in gradual linguistic and performative refinements
in the subsequent performances, which were interpreted as cases of LS. Other students improved
their ensuing performance by “unpacking” information-dense nominalized phrases into less techni-
cal, more audience-friendly spoken expressions or by acting upon an audience-generated question to
better express their intended meaning. In another case, however, such opportunities were neglected,
especially when speakers were more oriented toward flawless task completion.

Study #2
Routarinne and Ahlholm (2021) employed multimodal conversation analysis to elucidate how a
school-aged, Russian-L1 child, Radmir, enacted and developed his requesting practices in Finnish
over time in a linguistically diverse elementary classroom in Finland. Overall, they reported that
Radmir’s Finnish requests became more grammatically complex over time. At an early stage, his
emerging Finnish requesting practices were largely characterized by single-word utterances whose
intended meaning could not be captured solely by linguistically available information (e.g., sininen
[‘blue’] to request a blue token in a board game). Indeed, Radmir’s requesting behavior was a com-
plex multimodal achievement; in addition to his single-word speech, he made full use of embodied

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resources (posture, arm extension, gaze shifts) as well as physical/material and spatial resources to
successfully get his pragmatic intention across. In another instance, four months later, although there
were occasional morphosyntactic inaccuracies, Radmir’s Finnish requests were more grammatically
complex, less independent of contextual information as the earlier instance had been (e.g., opetaja
anta minu *tuoli [“teacher give my chair”], which involved an address term, verb, beneficiary, and
object). Moreover, Radmir’s requests were often achieved through the fluid mobilization of his rich
multilingual repertoires through translanguaging. With his limited command of Finnish, Russian re-
quests were directed specifically toward another Russian-speaking pupil, whereas English was de-
ployed as a lingua franca to establish a broader participation framework to invite other potential
recipients to respond to his requests. The authors’ multimodal analysis demonstrates the importance
of multimodality and embodiment for L2 learning and, thus, socialization.

Study #3
Sauer and Ellis (2019) employed a mixed-methods design to investigate two L1-German intermediate-
level English learners’ linguistic development as measured by L2 speech scores (complexity, accuracy,
lexis, and fluency, or CALF). These linguistic measures were viewed in relation to the social identi-
ties and communities of practice the learners developed over a 5.5-month period at a New Zealand
high school. The authors’ qualitative analysis showed that students’ in- and out-of-school socializa-
tion involved an expansion of their interpersonal relationships from German-speaking co-nationals to
English-speaking locals, but their trajectories and the degree of access to English speakers differed con-
siderably. Alia, for example, was granted unlimited access to communicative environments in homestay
conversations and out-of-school sport club activities to engage in a wide range of conversational topics
in English. In contrast, Jana negotiated a transfer from her homestay family, with whom she had little
interaction, and deliberately stayed apart from her German-speaking peers in order to socialize with
locals, thereby exercising her agency to insert herself into English-speaking environments. The authors’
quantitative analysis of CALF scores showed both students’ overall L2 improvement was primarily
in the domain of lexis and fluency. In contrast, their gains were different in accuracy and grammatical
complexity, depending on their initial L2 proficiency levels (i.e., the less proficient learner, Alia, benefit-
ted more in these aspects). Sauer and Ellis (2019) concluded that L2 development is dynamic, unique,
and nonlinear, and that the areas of improvement may reflect the spontaneous and conversational nature
of L2 interactions (socialization) students had in their respective communities of practices.

Second language socialization and social identities

In addition to analyzing the particular linguistic or discursive measures of L2 socialization and de-
velopment described in the previous examples, a common focus in L2 research is learners’ identities
in multilingual contexts, particularly within the macro-discursive, ideological contexts in which they
learn and use languages. Here we present two illustrative studies: one examines a North Korean
transnational’s experiences learning English in North and South Korea and then in the United States.
The other study discusses a Vietnamese-American student’s experiences learning Spanish in Gua-
temala. Both focus on the individuals’ complex linguistic and cultural repertoires and identities in
relation to their shorter- or longer-term migration histories.

Study #4
Park and Lee (2022) examined the English-learning narrative of an adult North Korean defector, Min.
They illustrated how Min’s views of himself and of his linguistic repertoires (i.e., a North Korean dia-
lect of Korean, plus English) shifted as he moved across and navigated three different sociopolitical

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settings in North Korea, South Korea, and the United States. The authors’ narrative-based thematic
analysis showed that Min’s perceptions of English and his attitude toward English learning changed
considerably as he crossed political boundaries and gained more opportunities for receptive expo-
sure to and productive use of English. In North Korea, Min had viewed English to be of no utility or
real-world relevance other than political propaganda (i.e., there were no English street signs in his
environment). In South Korea, however, his recognition of the prevalent symbolic value of English
altered his orientation toward the language, eventually leading him to the United States on a univer-
sity exchange program. With increased opportunities and confidence in authentic communications in
English, he developed the identity of a competent transnational North Korean who could transcend
spatial, cultural, and national boundaries. Despite the strong social stigma associated with North Ko-
rea and its dialect(s) outside that country, Min also exercised his agency to maintain his accent and
identity as North Korean in order to access certain forms of socioeconomic capital (i.e., the schol-
arship application; a job teaching the North Korean accent to South Korean actors), gain visibility
among others in his transnational environments, and so forth. His transnational experience ultimately
resulted in his desire to “work for North Korean people when the two Koreas are reunited” (p. 15),
an imagined identity situated within his imagined community of a united Korea (see Norton, 2013).

Study #5
Also focusing on identity, Quan and Menard-Warwick (2021) examined the experiences of a Vietnamese-
American student (Terry) from Texas, one of a number of participants in a Spanish study-abroad
program in Guatemala. The study’s goals were closely aligned with traditional LS research ques-
tions and methods. Added, however, was “structured critical reflection”—a meta-awareness-raising
assignment—in the form of blogging and/or journals about participants’ study-abroad learning and
community engagement. Thus, the study did not just use descriptive journal or interview accounts of
experiences, which are common in LS research (see the earlier section “Research methods in second
language socialization studies”), but rather pedagogically oriented reflections focused specifically on
“translingual” and “transcultural” identities and competencies based on first-hand experiences and
academic readings in their past and current cultural “contact zones.” (Spanish language class observa-
tions also took place.) A language ecology project assigned as part of the program encouraged Terry to
include reflections on Vietnamese (her heritage language), English (Standard American English plus
African American English varieties she grew up with), Mayan/Kaqchikel, and Spanish languages and
cultures; all of these languages became integral to understanding her translingual “contact zone social-
ization” and learning in the 13-week program. As such, the study illustrated how LS/SLA research can
be not only descriptive, but also critical and transformative in affirming participants’ complex prior
histories and identities as translingual subjects and supporting them and their learning accordingly.

Second language socialization in distributed social networks

Another area of L2 socialization research draws on social network analysis (SNA)—combined with
ethnographic methods—in order to elucidate relational, often socially and geographically distributed,
dimensions of second language socialization as well as long-term transformations in networks and
their impact on L2 learning and use. We present three such studies below.

Study #6
Hasegawa and Shima (2020) traced the semester-long transformation of the social networks of L2-
Japanese international students living with their local L1-Japanese counterparts in a residential hall

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called Nihongo House at a Japanese university. Their analysis showed that the overall density (i.e.,
connectedness) of inter-resident networks intensified as both local and international students spent
time together, forged their relationships, and strengthened their social ties over time through vari-
ous institutional and private activities. One notable transformation was the overall dissolution of
group-based boundaries among residents of diverse backgrounds. That is, in addition to institution-
ally arranged roommate matching, the international students had initially nurtured their relationships
according to their shared linguistic and racial/ethnic backgrounds and interests, as well as their L2
Japanese proficiency. Eventually, these group-based boundaries dissolved as in-house networks de-
veloped over time. Here, Hasegawa and Shima noted the significance of a particular material and
spatial resource called kotatsu, a traditional, heated, blanket-covered Japanese table, installed in a
common lounge area. Especially during the cold winter, the kotatsu-equipped space was a crucial site
of L2-Japanese use and learning and, thus, “kotatsu socialization” (p. 50). Some residents, however,
seldom spent time in the lounge area due to lack of access to the key individuals who organized the
kotatsu gathering. Therefore, despite learners’ high L2-learning motivation and awareness of the
interactional affordances of the space, these students could not participate in the group gathering and
lost opportunities for L2-Japanese interactions and socialization.

Study #7
Zappa-Hollman and Duff (2015) described three Spanish-speaking Mexican undergraduate students
on a 6-to-12-month study-abroad sojourn at an English-speaking Canadian university. To investigate
the complex web of interpersonal relationships within and beyond a single social group (such as
their cohort) and host institution, they developed the notion of individual network of practice; an
INoP is an individual-centered alternative to a community of practice, which enables researchers to
explore how learners’ social networks beyond a single community (e.g., course) support their lin-
guistic, sociocultural, and academic learning. The authors’ analysis portrayed various ways in which
three Mexican students formed their respective interpersonal relationships and networks. Through
these networks, they each navigated the new academic environment and English-medium academic
coursework requirements using both Spanish and English. The authors found that academically and
emotionally supportive social ties were shaped by many factors, such as shared home university and
friendships, dorm situations, academic majors, and shared courses. Their analyses also underscored
the contingency, unpredictability, and multidirectionality of L2 socialization (see Talmy, 2008). Un-
favorable interpersonal relationships often emanated from dissonance between individual learners’
social worlds and worldviews as well as between their personal dispositions learned in and through
primary and secondary socialization along their own life trajectories. Their study exemplifies the
significance and utility of examining learners’ social networks within and beyond a particular social
group, which together shape—and both facilitate and constrain—their L2 use and socialization in a
given environment. As the authors acknowledge, however, a single visual or narrative representation
of a learner’s social network can only provide a partial account of what is typically a dynamic, mul-
tilingual ecology that changes over time.

Study #8
Hasegawa’s (2019) monograph provides a more granular analysis of what transpires discursively
inside social networks. By integrating SNA and conversation analysis, he provided a multilayered
description of the ecology of L2 socialization across three different Japanese universities as expe-
rienced by L2-Japanese learners. His SNA demonstrated that each university program presented a
rather unique constellation of interpersonal relations and change over time, including what he called

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closed (Program A), open (Program B), and collapsed (Program C) networks. In the closed network,
the group demonstrated cohesiveness and exclusiveness but also was prone to subversive ingroup
social forces (i.e., violating the Japanese-only policy). In contrast, in the open network, the formation
of the network was more discretionary, fluid, and open to local individuals unaffiliated with the pro-
gram. In the collapsed network, students were polarized and they acted independently to develop their
own unique networks. Hasegawa’s microanalysis compared two focal participants’ distinct practices
in the same closed-network program. Rose, an “extrovert” who was socially visible and prominent,
tactically engaged in and shifted between multiple multiparty conversations by utilizing a range of
communicative resources. On the other hand, Joe, a “loner,” displayed limited interpersonal connec-
tions and yet engaged in more topically meaningful and prolonged one-on-one conversations with
those he was closely connected with. Interestingly, despite her ostensibly “successful” social partici-
pation and integration (which are often deemed to be strong indicators of successful socialization),
Rose scored lower than other focal participants enrolled in lower-level courses at the end-of-program
oral-proficiency rating. Hasegawa attributed this contradictory outcome to her ephemeral interaction
patterns and very short length of turns (i.e., limited output). This finding shows the socially situated
and unpredictable nature of L2 socialization, anchored in language-mediated social interaction.

Summary
The studies reviewed above illustrate contemporary L2 socialization research (or closely aligned
work) by foregrounding, respectively, (1) the kinds of L2 linguistic forms, constructions, or develop-
mental measures that have been the focus of studies, drawing on conversation analysis, (multimodal)
discourse analysis, speech-act analysis (requests), and CALF; (2) the relationship between L2 learn-
ing and identity, especially in transnational, multilingual contexts in which participants draw on their
diverse linguistic repertoires and histories; and (3) the complexities of learners’ participation in dif-
ferent kinds of social networks in relation to the achievement of their personal learning goals and
integration within L2-speaking communities. Much of this research, as shown by the study examples,
occurs in study-abroad situations, which is not surprising given the dual linguistic and sociocultural
or experiential objectives of such programs.

Implications for second language learning, teaching, and use

LS research offers many insights for the preparation of programs, teachers, mentors, or peers to sup-
port newcomers within an L2 community or learning context. First, the research suggests that it is
important to focus on L2 learning and use at various levels (macro, meso, micro; historical/temporal;
spatial; local/transnational; see Douglas Fir Group, 2016). It is also important to examine the wider
linguistic and cultural repertoires, experiences, and aspirations of learners (Duff, 2019). In addition,
the experiences of focal participants, or cases, should be viewed in relation to social or community
aspects of participants’ learning. However, it is not feasible to consider all these possible dimen-
sions either for instruction or research for each individual (e.g., linguistic features, identity aspects,
interaction patterns, social networks or communities, migration patterns). Indeed, the challenge for
educators and learners alike is to strike a balance in the larger project of helping people simultane-
ously become successful, competent, functioning members of a discourse community, affirm and
develop their multilingual repertoires and identities, and achieve other personal goals (e.g., academic
achievement, cultural learning, interpersonal relationships). The research reviewed in the previous
section reveals that these processes of L2/discursive learning are affected by many factors. Because
a fundamental principle in LS and other sociocultural research is that social interaction and media-
tion play an important role in language learning, it is incumbent on instructors or mentors to provide

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opportunities for learners to observe and engage in linguistic practices with others and receive timely
instruction, feedback, and encouragement on their performance and on their status as social actors
and group members. Duff (2010) provides some practical considerations for educators aiming to
prepare teachers to take part in such practices. These include: (1) becoming acutely aware of the lin-
guistic and other requirements of particular discursive events and raising students’ awareness of the
same; (2) understanding the complicated social and interpersonal dynamics of learning and how best
to structure activities and assignments; and (3) gaining familiarity with students’ cultural and semi-
otic repertoires and learning how to leverage them effectively and creatively in support of students’
educational pursuits.

Future directions for LS, SLA, and discourse research

Given the recent global COVID-19 pandemic, which moved much teaching, learning, and other com-
munication to virtual platforms, future research should look more closely at how language socializa-
tion occurs in digital spaces or in hybrid situations. A recent pre-pandemic study of mentoring among
Chinese-L2 learners and their mentors illustrated some possibilities for peer socialization in informal
virtual L2 communities (Doherty, 2021). Platforms and applications such as Zoom and cloud-based,
synchronous and asynchronous online collaborative tools (Google Docs and Slides) are now ubiqui-
tous in professional, academic, vocational, and personal communication. These tools allow different
means of participating in interactions than those typically found in either face-to-face synchronous
or independent asynchronous modes of learning: the ability to either show or not show one’s image;
mostly disembodied, visually two-dimensional participation for those showing their video feeds (and
then, only from the neck up, typically, but with real or virtual backgrounds that can be “read” in par-
ticular ways); the potential for concurrent sidebar communication, including the provision of advice,
correction, information, greetings, and other phatic communication through “chat” features—either
one-to-one (privately), to panelists in a webinar (one-to-many), or one-to-all (“everyone”); the inclu-
sion of other interactive features, such as third-party quizzes, polls, or Q & A sites (e.g., Slido); and
the provision of breakout rooms for smaller-group communications with many of the same features
(e.g., Chat). Given the recent surge in the use and roles of AI-powered tools such as ChatGPT, this is
another promising venue for further L2 socialization research, especially in formal academic settings.
Many kinds of analysis of SLA and discourse in such settings and of the mediating role of interlocu-
tors, tools, and other affordances would be possible, but have yet to be explored in terms of LS, to
our knowledge.
Furthermore, unlike traditional LS research where observation and recording of in-class or out-of-
class interactions can be complicated, as noted earlier, the recording features in such virtual platforms
create many efficiencies and are less intrusive than when a physically co-present researcher has a
video camera (or two) trained on interlocutors. Research in such digital environments also illustrates
how different forms of multimodality might be researched in LS research—through a combination of
voice, text, image (e.g., through screen-sharing), intertextual links, and some degree of embodiment
(although with many aspects of gesture and bodily comportment stripped away). How does L2 learn-
ing and socialization take place in such multimodal online sites?
Another future direction for LS research is increased use of mixed methods instead of qualitative-­
only approaches (which already comprise many different methods) as a way of capturing more
global, longitudinal aspects of linguistic development differently (as in Sauer & Ellis, 2019). Ob-
served discrete or holistic aspects of L2 development have not, to date, been well documented in
most LS research.
In addition, future research using social networks could aim to juxtapose multiple visual rep-
resentations, possibly with animation, to track both short-term and longer-term transformations

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(tie-building and untying) of a social network or use discourse analyses to illuminate L2 development
within a particular interactional environment. The role of a wider range of semiotic resources (and not
just the target language, e.g., in a study-abroad context) might also be examined.
Given the high stakes associated with successful academic performance, a growing number of
studies focus specifically on academic discourse socialization, particularly in English-medium higher
education for multilingual students (Duff et al., 2019; Kobayashi et al., 2017). This trend is likely to
continue and should expand to include a wider range of disciplinary contexts, with more multimodal
analysis as well. In this chapter, we have focused primarily on oral and multimodal communication
and learning, with limited attention to studies of L2 writing. Although there has been some important
research on LS through L2 written feedback, more studies across a range of genres would be helpful
(Duff et al., 2019).
In summary, LS research is likely to grow to encompass a wider range and combination of lan-
guages, learning situations, geographical, disciplinary, and transnational contexts, and with a wider
range of socializing agents and modalities. Furthermore, the agents will include not only teachers
but also peers, mentors, and resourceful learners themselves and the tools or objects at their disposal.
Finally, as in other areas of SLA research, future studies must aim to be more inclusive of diverse
populations (e.g., such as racialized minorities participating in study abroad, and not just the White,
middle-class European Americans who have typically been featured in study abroad, or the relatively
affluent international students studying in English-medium contexts). Including wider demographics
will allow educators and researchers to understand a fuller, more intersectional range of socialization
experiences, processes, and trajectories (e.g., Duff, 2019; Quan & Menard-Warwick, 2021) and will
expose some of the barriers that exist for some individuals. The research should also aim to embrace
the many semiotic and relational resources that learners can avail themselves of as they make sense
of their lives and multilingual experiences.

Further reading on LS, SLA, and discourse

Burdelski, M., & Howard, K. (Eds.). (2020). Language socialization in classrooms: Culture, interaction, and
language development. Cambridge University Press.
This edited volume focuses on LS within classrooms primarily, often in multilingual, transnational contexts.
It provides a comprehensive introductory chapter, plus examples of studies examining macro-micro LS pro-
cesses, particularly (but not exclusively) focused on immigrant or international students negotiating identities,
languages, values, and histories in local institutional contexts.
Duff, P. A., & May, S. (Eds.). (2017). Language socialization: Encyclopedia of language and education
(3rd ed.). Springer.
This volume contains 30 chapters, taking a lifespan perspective on LS within and across numerous trans-
lingual, and often transnational, contexts, such as Deaf, Francophone, Indigenous, Japanese, Jewish, Korean,
and Latinx communities. Some of the chapters focus on particular discursive activities, such as hip-hop cipher
performance, narrative, and dinnertime discourse, as well as academic and workplace communicative events.
Duff, P. A., & Talmy, S. (2011). Language socialization approaches to second language acquisition: Social,
cultural, and linguistic development in additional languages. In D. Atkinson (Ed.), Alternative approaches to
second language acquisition (pp. 95–116). Routledge.
This chapter provides an overview of LS in the context of SLA, with a focus on the similarities and differ-
ences between LS and some other sociocultural approaches to L2 learning.
Fogle, L. W. (2012). Second language socialization and learner agency: Adoptive family talk. Multilingual
Matters.
This monograph examines three American families with adopted Russian-speaking children. It documents
how LS occurred in each context through narrative bilingual or English-medium discursive practices, some of

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which were contested by the children (thereby demonstrating their agency), with implications for the social/
discursive construction of each family and its members’ identities.
Hasegawa, A. (2019). The social lives of study abroad: Understanding second language learners’ experiences
through social network analysis and conversation analysis. Routledge.
By combining social network analysis and conversation analysis, this monograph richly and holistically
details macro-/meso- and micro-level processes of L2 socialization experienced by three cohorts of L2-Japanese
learners in three university-based short-term study-abroad programs in Japan.

References
Burdelski, M., & Howard, K. (Eds.). (2020). Language socialization in classrooms: Culture, interaction, and
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Diao, W. (2016). Peer socialization into gendered L2 Mandarin language practices in a study abroad context:
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Doherty, L. (2021). Transnational long-term learners of Chinese as peer mentors: Language socialization, on-
line learning, and identity [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. University of British Columbia. https://open.
library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.0401379?o=0
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 PART II

Types of discourse
 17
SPOKEN DISCOURSE AND
SECOND LANGUAGE RESEARCH
Midori Ishida

Introduction
Spoken discourse is not simply an orally produced coherent string of sentences but is the primordial
means by which humans engage in social life. In second language acquisition (SLA) and neighboring
fields and disciplines, spoken discourse has been investigated from an array of approaches—each
reflecting their particular ontological and epistemological orientations to language, communication,
and learning. The present chapter surveys research on a variety of spoken discourse topics, tasks,
and settings involving second language (L2) speakers, focusing primarily on nonclassroom settings
(see Jenks & Sert, Chapter 21 in this volume, for a survey of classroom discourse). It begins with
an overview of two primary strands of L2 spoken discourse research to show how they contribute to
second language acquisition (SLA) research: (1) studies that approach discourse as a means of reveal-
ing L2 speakers’ competence and its development, and (2) those that approach discourse as a site for
L2 learning. After surveying selected methodological approaches in these two strands of research,
the chapter concludes with implications for teaching and assessment and suggestions for future SLA
research on spoken discourse.

Overview of L2 research on spoken discourse

Studies of spoken discourse for understanding L2 competence and its development

In a brief historical overview of research approaches to understanding L2 developmental trajectories,
this section will explicate how these approaches conceptualize discourse and competence.

Discourse competence and interlanguage studies

In the early period of SLA research, researchers studied L2 speakers’ developing knowledge of the
target language as interlanguage (Selinker, 1972)—the learner’s unique, independent language sys-
tem. Following first language (L1) studies on morpheme acquisition order, linguistic competence in
the L2 was studied in the 1970s by coding speakers’ accurate use of various morphemes (e.g., plural
-s, past -ed) in spoken discourse. Building on morpheme acquisition order studies, Huebner (1979)
traced the shifts in the use of the articles the and a in the speech of an adult L2 speaker of English.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003177579-19 215

 Midori Ishida

Because the accuracy of article use is determined by the context of the discourse (e.g., There was a
baby in a crib. The baby began crying), Huebner’s study can be regarded as one of the first SLA stud-
ies on discourse competence.
The term discourse competence was introduced by Canale (1983) as one component of commu-
nicative competence, along with grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, and strategic
competence. Viewing discourse as coherent text beyond a sentence, Schmidt (1983) carried out a case
study of an adult L2 speaker of English, Wes, that investigated the relationship between interaction
and communicative competence. Tracking Wes’s language use through observation and a corpus of
oral descriptions and narratives of daily activities that Wes recorded himself, Schmidt found the use
of connectives (e.g., so, then) and discourse markers (well, anyway) helped Wes produce coherent
and more comprehensible language in later speech samples. Other linguistically oriented studies of
L2 spoken discourse have revealed the use of various coherence-making linguistic resources, includ-
ing the use of connectives, differential uses of particles for introducing references, and manipula-
tion of morphological forms for clarifying topic continuity. These studies share the view of spoken
discourse as a representation of the speakers’ linguistic knowledge acquired and stored in their brain
and as a manifestation of their competence in deploying linguistic means for creating cohesive text.

Sociolinguistic and pragmatic competence

Studies of discourse competence in the tradition of interlanguage research reviewed above mainly
view discourse as text that is not bound by a specific context; meanwhile, other research has exam-
ined discourse in the context of specific speech events (Hymes, 1967), “activities … that are directly
governed by rules of speech” (p. 19). Drawing on Hymes’s (1972) conceptualization of commu-
nicative competence, SLA researchers have studied sociolinguistic competence as competence in
using language appropriately in a given speech event. For example, Regan (1996), in a study of the
acquisition of spoken French in a study abroad context, found the appropriate deletion of ne (for in-
formal speech style) from the full negation form ne … pas challenging for L2 learners. The concept
of pragmatic competence, or the competence in using language forms for “doing things” (Austin,
1962) in ways that are appropriate to a given context, also gained traction in the 1980s. Interlanguage
pragmatics studies (e.g., Kasper & Blum-Kulka, 1993) have also examined L2 speakers’ pragmatic
competence at different points of development, and in comparison to the speech of L1 speakers of
the target language.

Social constructionist views of interactional competence

Although L2 studies of sociolinguistic and pragmatic competence have provided valuable pedagogi-
cal insights, relying solely on Hymesian notions of communicative competence risks overlooking
the dynamic nature of social interaction in which L2 speakers’ and their co-participants’ language-
mediated actions are co-constructed. Spearheaded by Firth and Wagner’s (1997) call for “social, dis-
cursive approaches” to SLA (p. 287), an increasing number of studies have investigated L2 speakers’
interactional competence since the mid-1990s.
While the term interactional competence was first used in the field of SLA by Kramsch (1986) in
her call for a better way to assess students’ L2 competence than through the monolithic concept of
“proficiency,” the theoretical underpinning of interactional competence is based on the ethnometh-
odological tradition that sees social interaction as discursive practices (Edwards, 1997). Founded
on Garfinkel’s (1967) theory that people’s accounts reveal how they make sense of social reality,
ethnomethodology investigates people’s emic views of social reality and their publicly available
(and analyzable) methods of making practical actions, through detailed analysis of discourse as it

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unfolds in real-time interaction. Social constructionists argue that meanings do not objectively exist
but are reflexively constructed in and through discourse. Social interaction is thus seen as dynamic,
emergent discursive practices in which participants are engaged in the construction of reality and
reflexive construction of meanings (see also Prior, Chapter 9 in this volume). With this understanding
of social interaction, ethnomethodological CA (conversation analysis, Hutchby & Wooffitt, 2008;
also Hasegawa, Chapter 2 in this volume) engages in “the analysis of the competences which under-
lie ordinary social activities” (Heritage, 1984, p. 241) and delineates how members establish mutual
understanding, or intersubjectivity. It is this view of “interactional competence” that informs much
contemporary L2 research, especially what has come to be known as CA-SLA (or CA-for-SLA) stud-
ies (Kasper & Wagner, 2014; Markee, 2008; Pekarek Doehler, 2018; Sert, 2015).
Over the past two decades, CA-SLA researchers have uncovered various aspects of L2 speakers’
interactional competences and their developmental trajectories (see Skogmyr Marian & Balaman,
2018, for an overview), focusing on methods of taking turns, sequencing particular actions, structur-
ing activities, and repairing threats to intersubjectivity—all managed through the use of linguistic and
other semiotic and multimodal resources. For example, Berger and Pekarek Doehler (2018) investi-
gated the developmental trajectory of an L2 French speaker’s storytelling competence. They traced
how the L2 speaker initiated a storytelling sequence, developed the story into a climax, and brought it
to a close, while detailing the progression of turns in relation to the co-participants’ contributions, and
they concluded the L2 speaker “increased ability, over time, to engage in L2 interaction in a locally
efficient and recipient-designed way” (p. 98). Such an approach to the examination of co-constructed
competence for delivering narratives is in stark contrast to linguistically oriented approaches that
analyze narrative as a monologic, coherent, and self-contained or independent text (see also Warriner
& Pomerantz, Chapter 4 in this volume). Gaining and maintaining the right to speak in multiparty
interaction (Pallotti, 2001) is also a part of interactional competence, which requires an understand-
ing of the progression of the current talk, judgment of the moment when one can join, and knowledge
of the linguistic resources that one can draw on.
These aspects of interactional competence epitomize what L2 speakers can do and accomplish,
rather than assessing success or failure against an ideal native-speaker model. Firth and Wagner
(1997), who pronounced the “discursive turn” in the field of second language acquisition (SLA),
stressed the significance of such a reconceptualization of L2 speakers/users, which frames com-
petence in terms of their diverse interactional resources, repertoires, and achievements rather than
perpetually positioning them as deficient L2 “learners” or “non-natives” (see also Kecskes, Chapter
24 in this volume)

Studies of spoken discourse as a site for L2 learning

As with research on L2 speakers’ competences and developmental trajectories, approaches to in-
vestigate the conditions for learning vary considerably across the field of SLA. This section intro-
duces different approaches to studying interactional discourse for understanding the conditions for
L2 learning.

Cognitive-interactionist studies of the mechanisms of acquiring the L2

Based on descriptive analyses of interactions between an L2 speaker and their interlocutor, Hatch
(1978) suggested various roles of interaction in acquiring structures of the target language, in contrast
to views of interaction as merely opportunities for practicing already acquired linguistic structures.
She discovered that the “vertical structures,” which stretch over several turns, “form the prototypes
for longer horizontal constructions at a later period” in children (p. 407). Building on Hatch’s research

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on the role of interaction in SLA, Long (1981) investigated the relationships between interaction and
SLA, and found that negotiating meanings within interactions, along with an interlocutor’s modifi-
cation of input that is made comprehensible for the L2 speaker, facilitates SLA. Long hypothesized
that negotiation for meaning in meaning-oriented communicative activities promotes SLA, and the
interaction hypothesis (Long, 1996) has been tested by later researchers. These studies collectively
provided evidence of the importance of corrective feedback for improving lexical and morphosyn-
tactic accuracy. Schmidt (1990) further hypothesized that corrective feedback induces L2 speakers to
notice the correct form in the input and to notice the gap between the input and their own linguistic
knowledge, and that noticing promotes acquisition of the L2. While studies that take this cognitive-
interactionist approach to SLA (Ortega, 2009) mainly conduct statistical analyses of related variables
to test hypotheses, other approaches use detailed analyses of discourse for insights into the processes
and outcomes of SLA.

Usage-based approaches to understanding the emergence of grammar

While cognitive-interactionists see acquisition of L2 linguistic structures as driven by the speaker’s
cognitive function of noticing during negotiation for meaning, usage-based approaches to SLA (Ellis,
2015) see L2 acquisition as exemplar-based associative learning of form–meaning patterns based on
language input and use. In the usage-based theory of children’s L1 acquisition (Tomasello, 2003), it
is theorized that frequent exposure to a linguistic construction in meaningful input promotes associa-
tive learning of the construction and entrenchment of it. Researchers use longitudinally collected
interactional discourse data, conduct type-token ratio analyses of linguistic constructions found in
the discourse, and identify how the learner uses new forms over time. In SLA research, Eskildsen
(2012) applied this methodology to identify the developmental trajectory of negation in L2 English,
and documented the crucial status of “fixed multi-word expressions” (e.g., I don’t know) for later
grammatical development.
While Eskildsen (2012) analyzed spoken discourse in the line of cognitively oriented usage-based
linguistics, in the same study he also used CA to examine “interactional contingencies of emergent L2
construction” (p. 337). Through close analysis of interactional discourse, he concludes that an ESL
speaker’s entrenched non-target-like negation form remained in use not because of fossilization but
due to the local contingency of its use. He thus shows through microanalysis of social interaction that
the emergence of specific constructions is contingent on the local and situated needs of participants’
actions. This kind of “interactional usage-based approach to L2 development” (Pekarek Doehler,
2018) highlights the affordances and constraints of social interaction for emergent L2 construction.

CA studies of spoken discourse and social interaction

As the above-mentioned and many other CA-SLA studies show, CA offers powerful analytic tools for
investigating the conditions for learning linguistic constructions. Kotilainen and Kurhila (2020), for
example, document an interactional process by which two L2 speakers of Finnish learned the meaning
of the Finnish word kuori (“to peel”) and later used the word during a 14-minute cooking session. The
L2 speakers first faced a gap in their knowledge of the verb when trying to talk about the action of
peeling, and later publicly indicated their detection of the “sought-for-verb” when they heard it in the
recorded cooking instruction. CA analyses like this reveal the local, emergent processes by which L2
speakers “contingently generate learning opportunities while pursuing the activity at hand” (Kasper
& Wagner, 2014, p. 195), and are engaged in “learning as social practice” (Pallotti & Wagner, 2011).
Learning as social practice is observable in social interaction because participants’ cognition is
publicly shared and thus analyzable and traceable, and the activity of repair (Schegloff, Jefferson, &

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Sacks, 1977) is considered to offer significant moments for such learning. A robust research finding
of CA studies is that participants typically initiate repair when there is a breakdown or a threat to mu-
tual understanding in the ongoing interaction. For example, Eskildsen and Wagner (2015) explicate
how repair is initiated in an ESL classroom to deal with a problem with understanding and producing
a word, under, and how gestures were also utilized when solving the problem. Through the process
of interactional breakdowns and restoring intersubjectivity, L2 speakers and their co-participants are
oriented to the repairable and reach a change-of-state (e.g., saying oh). However, “learning as social
practice” through repair activities is not a given. In nonclassroom settings, linguistic issues rarely get
topicalized or oriented to as problematic. In a study of naturally occurring interactions in mundane
and institutional settings in Finland, for example, Kurhila (2001) documented that, while L2 speak-
ers often flag linguistic problems or uncertainties and thus initiate repair, their interlocutors typically
correct deviant morphological forms only en passant (in passing). Firth (1996) also observed that
co-participants often let pass deviant forms that L2 speakers used in lingua franca interactions. Thus,
it is possible to theorize that such interactions offer reduced opportunities for learning.
Meanwhile, some CA-SLA researchers consider that learning is afforded by the social interaction
that one is engaged in, even without observable “learning as social practice.” Greer (2016), in his
analysis of four successive interviews that one L2 speaker of English conducted in one day, showed
that repetitions of short interviews afforded the speaker chances to produce more refined formulations
of clarification requests and follow-up questions. This finding suggests that “despite the fact that the
expert speakers in no way oriented to it as repairable,” L2 speakers “took charge of language learn-
ing” by self-repairing their previous formulations in recurrent opportunities for similar actions and
by “incorporating” their co-participants’ use of a particular construction in later opportunities (p. 85).
Ishida (2006), in an analysis of decision-making sequences repeatedly occurring within a 10-minute
interactional task, also documented an L2-Japanese speaker’s incorporation of modal expressions
that her co-participant had previously used. These CA-SLA studies show affordances of social inter-
action for more refined use of “L2 grammar for interaction,” or “a grammar that serves as an instru-
mental tool for conduction and coordinating L2 talk-in-interaction” (Pekarek Doehler, 2018, p. 4).

Other theoretical approaches to understanding the conditions for learning

It is the approach of mainstream SLA research to investigate constructs such as linguistic input,
interactional modifications, and L2 speakers’ cognitive processes as the primary independent vari-
ables that affect SLA. Other factors such as interlocutors’ status (e.g., native speakers or nonnative
speakers), social context (e.g., inside or outside the classroom, study abroad), and biographical and
other personal characteristics of the L2 speakers (e.g., age, gender, social identity, affective states,
motivation, learning styles) are also investigated as other independent variables or intervening vari-
ables. However, since the “social turn” in SLA (Block, 2003) in the mid-1990s, a growing number of
SLA researchers have analyzed interactional discourse to shed light on the dynamic ways in which
these social and contextual “factors” affect L2 learning processes and outcomes, by drawing on vari-
ous theories from other disciplines.
An influential perspective for investigating and understanding the interactional processes of and
conditions for L2 learning is Vygotsky’s (1978) theory of cognitive development. In his research on
educational psychology, Vygotsky theorized that cognitive functions develop first on the social plane
through interaction with others, and then become internalized in the individual’s cognition. That is,
mediation offered in the zone of proximal development (ZPD) by an interlocutor (typically a more-
knowing “expert”) helps a learner complete a cognitively difficult task that they would not be able
to do alone. Drawing on this theory of cognitive development as sociocultural theory of L2 learn-
ing (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006; see also Ohta, Chapter 10 in this volume), SLA researchers since the

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mid-1990s have analyzed longitudinally collected interactional data and documented that the learner
can complete a task with less and less mediation and finally by themselves through repeated engage-
ment in mediated interaction. In a longitudinal study of L2 Japanese classrooms, for example, Ohta
(2001) traced a change in which a student used acknowledgments and assessments after a question–
answer sequence, and related it with the mediation in the forms of models and feedback provided by
the teacher and the peers. Sociocultural theory thus offers rich analytical insights into the mediation
the L2 speakers’ interlocutors provide in L2 learning.
The social and relational aspects of discourse that afford or constrain L2 development have also
been examined in language socialization research (see also Duff & Yamamoto, Chapter 16 in this
volume) since the mid-1990s. The theory of language socialization in the field of linguistic anthropol-
ogy “has as its goal the understanding of how persons become competent members of social groups
and the role of language in this process” (Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986, p. 167). Language socialization
research sees language as a resource for learning cultural meanings and learning to participate in
social activities as a competent member of a social group or a community of practice (Wenger, 1998),
while many of the other approaches reviewed earlier in this section see accurate and functional use of
particular linguistic forms as the target of learning.
Shima’s (2014) year-long ethnographic study of Indonesian and Filipino nurses in Japan offers
a model of an L2 socialization study that provides thick descriptions of L2 learning and shows the
dynamic process of becoming a competent member of a specific community of practice (e.g., a hos-
pital). Shima illustrates a Filipino nurse’s situated learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991), for instance, of
a contextually dependent meaning of a dialectal expression ee wa (“It’s good/That’s enough”): She
came to learn the meaning of ee wa through repeated exposure to patients’ frequent use, repair initi-
ated by a patient when he detected her misunderstanding, and confirmation of its meaning through the
use of a candidate understanding. Such analyses illuminate the role of feedback, repair, and mediation
as features of interaction that afford L2 learning at specific moments and over time. This study also
showed that many of the nurses often avoided initiating repair when they did not understand direc-
tions provided by the Japanese nurses, so as not to take the time of their co-workers and to avoid
negative consequences such as being seen as professionally incompetent. Thus, Shima portrays how
the nurses’ use and learning of L2 Japanese are situated in the web of their (own sense of) limited L2
competences, their professional identity (Darvin & Norton, 2015), and how they position themselves
and are positioned both discursively and within the macro social context. Such findings resonate with
other L2 socialization studies that draw on poststructuralist approaches (Pavlenko & Blackledge,
2004) for understanding the ideological, sociocultural, and political context in which L2 speakers are
positioned and position themselves (Davies & Harré, 1990).

Main methodological and analytical approaches in L2 studies of

spoken discourse
This section will introduce some of the methodological and analytical approaches that have been
taken for each of the two strands of L2 research on spoken discourse introduced so far: (1) for un-
derstanding competences and their developmental trajectories, and (2) for understanding conditions
for learning.

Experimental interlanguage studies of L2 development

SLA researchers typically rely on two methodological approaches to study developmental trajecto-
ries: experimental studies and microanalytic studies. Experimental and quasi-experimental meth-
odologies are generally employed in linguistically oriented interlanguage studies, and it applies to

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studies of spoken discourse, including interlanguage pragmatics studies. Many of the experimental
studies of spoken discourse compare L2 speakers’ data with native-speaker data, by treating the latter
as the baseline data, in order to judge the distance of L2 speakers’ language use from the trend seen
among native speakers. Developmental trajectories are surmised based on the comparison of charac-
teristics of discourse data collected through either a cross-sectional design with groups of L2 speak-
ers at different proficiency levels, or a longitudinal design with the same L2 speakers’ data collected
at different points in time. For exploring influences of one’s L1 on the L2, comparable data that L2
speakers produced in their L1 is also collected. Researchers collect comparable discourse data, usu-
ally through elicitation tasks, and then transcribe the audio- or video-recorded speech. After coding
speech data using predetermined categories and counting, frequency and ratio are often compared.
Inferential statistics such as t-tests, ANOVA, and MANOVA are popular methods of analysis, and
VARBRUL analysis (Preston, 1993) has been used in a small number of sociolinguistic studies (e.g.,
Regan, 1996). Because coding is key to ensuring the reliability of analysis, research reports usually
include detailed theoretical explanations of coding categories along with discourse samples within
the methodology section. However, analysis of actual L2 discourse collected for a particular study is
usually not provided; instead, quantitative analyses are presented to show the trends in the character-
istics of competences at different points in the developmental trajectories.

Sample study
For example, in a study of L2 speakers’ competence in coherently narrating a story, Nakahama (2009)
used a wordless picture book to elicit narratives in Japanese from L1-Korean and L1-English speak-
ers. Using a cross-sectional design, Nakahama divided the L2 speakers into three proficiency-based
groups, and compared their narratives with those of L1-Japanese speakers, which served as the base-
line data. Furthermore, for the investigation of L1 influences, narratives in Korean and English were
also elicited by L1 speakers of those languages. The researcher served as the “interlocutor” for all the
participants but “attempted to maintain uniformity by consistently suppressing interaction” (p. 245)
to control the discourse context for comparability. The reliability of coding was statistically checked
and ANOVA was used to analyze the data, and the results showed L1 influences with some linguistic
constraints.

Microanalytic studies of co-constructed discourse and L2 development

The highly controlled experimental study by Nakahama (2009) is in stark contrast to the naturalistic,
descriptive, or qualitative L2 studies of spoken discourse taken by socio-constructionist approaches
to discourse. While Nakahama eliminated the need to deal with the effect of the interlocutor’s in-
volvement in the activity of narrating by suppressing the interlocutor’s responses, analysis of natural
interaction between the focal L2 speaker and their co-participants constitutes an important part of the
analysis in socio-constructionist studies.
In social constructionist approaches, L2 spoken discourse is analyzed often through the meticu-
lous sequential analysis in the tradition of ethnomethodological CA. Discourse data are mostly made
up of spontaneous interaction but situations vary, such as L2 classrooms (e.g., Sert, 2015), telecol-
laboration as part of classroom activities (e.g., Black & Barron, 2018), face-to-face interactions out-
side the classroom provided as L2 learning opportunities (e.g., Greer, 2016), mundane talk in a host
community during a sojourn (e.g., Berger & Pekarek Doehler, 2018), workplaces (e.g., Shima, 2014),
and also assessment situations, such as oral proficiency interviews and role plays (Roever & Kasper,
2018). Audio- or video-recorded interactional discourse is transcribed in detail, including notations
of overlaps, length of pauses, and embodied actions if observable in video data. While CA analysts

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approach individual discourse data at hand with unmotivated looking, it is a standard method in CA to
make a collection of data intentionally (e.g., collecting telephone conversations at a dispatch service).
Although some studies collect discourse data as part of a larger ethnographic study, contextual infor-
mation and the participants’ self-report data are usually not used in CA analyses of interaction unless
the information becomes relevant for analysis. Some CA-based studies use coding and conduct fre-
quency analysis for capturing some trends (see Stivers, 2015 on the legitimacy of utilizing counting
in CA), but the coding categories are ones that emerge through meticulous analysis of the data set
rather than being predetermined, and inferential statistics is not used due to the co-constructed nature
of discourse.
While some socio-constructionist studies on L2 development collect discourse data using a cross-
sectional design (e.g., Pekarek Doehler & Pochon-Berger, 2011), a longitudinal design (Berger &
Pekarek Doehler, 2018; a “learning behaviour tracking,” Markee 2008) is prevalent (see Skogmyr
Marian & Balaman, 2018, for an overview). A micro-longitudinal design, in which participants en-
gage in recurrent activities of the same kind in a short span of time (e.g., Greer, 2016, four interviews
in one day), is also used in some studies.

Sample studies
Al-Gahtani and Roever’s (2012) study of requesting sequences, for example, employed a cross-sec-
tional design. Instead of relying on the pervasive research method of discourse completion tasks,
role-play data was collected from groups of L2 speakers at different proficiency levels. CA was
used to document how L2 English speakers took several turns for making a request, and how their
interlocutors contributed to the sense-making of their actions. Comparison of data from different pro-
ficiency groups yielded the observation that more advanced learners can effectively use preliminary
moves before making a request, and thus captured characteristics of pragmatic competence at differ-
ent developmental points.
Berger and Pekarek Doehler (2018), introduced earlier, using a longitudinal design, collected
audio-recordings of 20 informal meal-time conversations between Julie and her host family. Then,
from the whole data set spanning for nine months, 30 instances of Julie’s storytelling that naturally
came up during the informal conversations were compiled. The researchers then conducted a CA
analysis of Julie’s storytelling in each instance, and finally made aggregated analyses to compare the
practices of storytelling observed at different points in time in order to capture changes.
The way of gauging development in discursive approaches differs from that of interlanguage stud-
ies that compare L2 speakers’ data with the baseline native-speaker data. In CA-based L2 studies of
spoken discourse, researchers draw on previous findings of CA studies of L1 speakers as a reference
for explicating what practical actions the L2 speaker and their interlocutors are co-constructing (e.g.,
pre-sequence for requesting, closing of a storytelling) at a particular moment within an interaction.
Instead of directly equating the similarity with native-speaker data as evidence of a higher level of
development, the co-constructed nature of discourse is considered when exploring nonlinear trajec-
tories of development.

Experimental studies of the conditions for L2 learning

While experimental methodologies with the use of discourse data are employed for understand-
ing L2 development, they are also utilized for understanding the conditions for learning as well as
examining various cognitive, interactional, and social factors. The most common factor that has
been investigated using experimental methodologies is “interaction” as the treatment. Cognitive-­
interactionist approaches to SLA typically employ a pre-test/post-test design with interactional

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treatments in between. The effect of the interaction on language development can be inferred from
the relationship between the pre-post difference and the characteristics of the interaction (e.g., the
kinds of recasts provided during treatment).

Sample study
In an experimental study on the effects of recasts (a correct version of a previously used L2 speaker’s
utterance, provided in response by an interlocutor), McDonough and Mackey (2006) examined the
development of question formation with the use of a pre-test/post-test design. They audio-recorded
interactions in communicative tasks and conducted statistical analyses based on codings of question-
sentence structures. They discovered that the L2 speakers in the treatment group, who were provided
with recasts on their production of incorrectly formed question sentences, showed higher develop-
ment than the L2 speakers in the control group, who did not receive any recasts. The researchers
further coded L2 speakers’ production of questions in a turn immediately or a little after the recasts:
repetition of a recast, which is produced immediately after the recast, and primed production, which
is the L2 speaker’s later use of a new question that has the same syntactic structure as the one used in
the recast (cf. modified output, Swain, 1985). Statistical analyses showed that, while the correlation
between primed production and development (measured in pre-test/post-tests difference) was signifi-
cant, the correlation between repetition and development was not. This finding casts a doubt on the
usefulness of immediate repetition of a recast as a powerful predictor of later development.

Microanalytic studies of the conditions for L2 learning

Experimental interlanguage studies, which are intended to test hypotheses about particular conditions for
learning, control various details of data collection procedures and use predetermined coding categories
to extract relevant information from discourse data. Meanwhile, descriptive microanalytic studies, which
are intended to make data-driven explorations, use spontaneously occurring interactional discourse in
naturalistic settings that are not particularly controlled for the sake of the research (including L2 class-
rooms), and analyze the dynamic interactions as they are, using CA or as guided by sociocultural theory.

Sample studies
To explore the question of whether recasts actually serve as corrective feedback as claimed by cog-
nitive-interactionists, Fasel Lauzon and Pekarek Doehler (2013) examined transcripts of video-­
recorded L2 French lessons at a high school in German-speaking Switzerland, and coded the teacher’s
responsive actions as “recasts” and “explicit corrections” as defined in the cognitive-interactionist
approach. The quantitative analysis of students’ responses to recasts and explicit corrections shows
that, while 42% of the responses include repetitions of the correct forms used by the teacher, in other
responses students do not show orientation, or public display of attention, to the teacher’s feedback
as providing correction. Based on CA analysis of sequences with no orientations—especially in re-
sponse to embedded correction— the researchers argue that a co-participant’s response to an L2
speaker’s deviating language use should be identified as corrective feedback only if the participants
show their orientation to the action as such: for example, through the interlocutor’s emphasis on
reformulated parts, and the L2 speaker’s repetition of the reformulated part preceded by a change-of-
state marker oh. The participants’ public display of cognition in the process of maintaining intersub-
jectivity is what CA analysts delineate to address the issue of conditions for learning.
The role of feedback in helping L2 speakers achieve higher linguistic competence is related to
the concept of mediation in sociocultural theory. In L2 studies that take sociocultural theory as the

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theoretical framework, as in the previously introduced longitudinal classroom study by Ohta (2001),
researchers collect recordings of a series of interactions in which an L2 speaker repeatedly faces
a challenging language-mediated task (e.g., provide an appropriate follow-up turn). Data analyses
focus on how the focal speaker’s ways of tackling the task and the kinds of mediation offered by the
interlocutors change over time. If the focal speaker can successfully complete the same task with less
mediation than in an earlier session, or if they can deal with the task at a more advanced level, it is
interpreted as showing development.

Ethnographic studies of the conditions for learning

Language socialization studies, especially those with poststructuralist concerns with the dynamic
relationship between micro and macro contexts, employ ethnographic methodology: The researcher
goes into the field, carries out participant observation for an extended period of time while keeping
field notes, conducts ethnographic interviews with focal participants and other informants, and col-
lects relevant documents. Such triangulation of data is necessary for producing thick description of
the social life in the community.

Sample study
Shima’s (2014) ethnographic study of Indonesian and Filipino nurses in Japan, introduced in the sec-
tion “Studies of spoken discourse as a site for L2 learning,” uses the standard method of triangulating
data collection, including video-recordings of interactions and ethnographic interviews. What is im-
portant in ethnographic research is the researcher’s critical awareness of their own positionality and
writing of it as a part of ethnography (see Okada, Chapter 14 in this volume). Positioning herself as
a “language teaching professional” and “bilingual resource,” Shima observed how the focal partici-
pants learned everyday institutional practices in the community of practice at the hospital. Detailed
analysis of interactions that the nurses engaged in with Japanese colleagues and patients shows the
various affordances and constraints of those interactions for L2 use and learning; meanwhile, analysis
of interview data, which shows participants’ own accounts of the particular interaction and of their
L2 use and learning, complements the analysis of discourse in explicating the dynamic interaction
between the micro and the macro contexts.

Implications of L2 spoken discourse research for teaching and assessment

As this chapter has shown, research on L2 spoken discourse has offered many important insights into
the developmental trajectories and conditions for learning. These findings offer valuable informa-
tion for L2 educators to make instructional guidance, for instance, for telecollaboration (O’Dowd &
Dooly, 2020, for an overview) via video conferencing. Students can reflect on their own language-
mediated actions (e.g., providing acknowledgments and assessments in the follow-up turn, e.g., Ohta,
2001; developing a story, e.g., Berger & Pekarek Doehler, 2018) by watching digital recordings of
their own telecollaborative interaction, and comparing them with others’ language-mediated actions
found in existing multimedia spoken corpora. If instructional guidance and teachers’ feedback are
given based on findings of L2 spoken discourse research, it will facilitate students’ reflective learn-
ing and data-driven learning (O’Keeffe, 2021) and thus prepare them to handle similar situations in
future encounters.
Ways of assessing spoken L2 competencies can also be improved based on L2 spoken discourse
research. While the holistic rating scale for standardized oral proficiency interviews addresses some

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discourse features, discourse analyses of proficiency interviews (e.g., studies collected in Young &
He, 1998) cast doubts on the validity of the rating scale due to the co-constructed nature of interaction
and L2 speakers’ competence. Based on research on L2 interactional competence and its develop-
ment, alternative ways of collecting samples for assessing L2 pragmatic and interactional compe-
tences and rating them have been proposed, implemented, and evaluated (e.g., May et al., 2020). Just
as dynamic assessment (Poehner, 2007) was developed out of research that draws on sociocultural
theory, further research is necessary for improving oral assessment procedures and rating criteria that
can easily be used by teachers while ensuring their validity and reliability.

Future directions for L2 research on spoken discourse

Various approaches to research on L2 spoken discourse have uncovered L2 speakers’ competences
beyond monologic discourse competence for creating a coherent string of sentence, including in-
teractional competences in real-life encounters, or “in the wild” outside the classroom (Hellermann
et al., 2019). However, just as Byram (2020) takes plurilingualism (García & Otheguy, 2020) in a
recently updated version of his model of intercultural communicative competence, a plurilingual per-
spective would also advance L2 spoken discourse research. Like migrant workers in Shima’s (2014)
study, an ever-growing number of people face the needs and opportunities to use their L2s in work-
places and other cross-cultural and cross-linguistic communities of practice, not only in in-person
environments but also in technology-mediated communication (e.g., see Sykes, 2019, on gaming
communities). In these natural settings, both the L1 and the L2 are frequently utilized as important
resources for social interaction. This suggests SLA researchers should investigate L2 competence as
part of multicompetence (Cook, 1992), or the competence for effectively communicating by drawing
on linguistic and other resources from their languages. However, more recent developments are call-
ing on L2 researchers to move beyond named languages and to examine the conditions, processes,
and outcomes of translanguaging (García & Otheguy, 2020), or the ways the speakers make use of
their entire communicative or semiotic repertoires.
The concepts of multicompetence and translanguaging open up a new realm of SLA research that
investigates the relationships among different kinds of competences and availability of particular
linguistic and other semiotic resources. Some CA-SLA studies and usage-based approaches to under-
standing emergence of grammar highly contribute to the field of SLA, but the learning objects that
have been studied so far are mostly lexical and morphosyntactic items (e.g., the preposition under,
negation constructions). More studies of “L2 grammar for interaction” (Pekarek Doehler, 2018), L2
discourse competence, and L2 interactional competence as the learning object are awaited. Such re-
search regards the availability of L2 grammar as the condition for executing higher multicompetence.
Research on conditions for learning has thus far focused on gaining a thorough understanding of the
sequential environment and contextual factors for SLA, mainly with linguistic competence or gram-
mar knowledge as the learning object. It is time for SLA researchers to place more attention on the con-
ditions for executing multicompetence, while treating available L2 grammar as one of the resources or
conditions that enable an L2 speaker to engage in both monological and interactional discourse. Such
a research goal requires researchers to examine a particular case from different perspectives, using
aggregated analysis of findings obtained from different methods of data collection and analytical ap-
proaches. Collaboration on one research project by researchers with different expertise and theoretical
inclinations is possible and deemed promising, as the Douglas Fir Group (2016) proposes—following
the truism: Two heads are better than one. Four eyes see more than two. Research projects that aim
at understanding the relationship between learning conditions and learning outcomes from different
angles are much anticipated in the future for a holistic understanding of SLA.

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Further reading on spoken discourse and second language research

Cadierno, T., & Eskildsen, S. W. (Eds.). (2015). Usage-based perspectives on second language learning. De
Gruyter Mouton.
The chapters in this edited book collectively present how CA-based analyses of discourse combined with
cognitive usage-based approaches to SLA contribute to cross-fertilization of the understanding of processes and
conditions for L2 learning.
Hellermann, J., Eskildsen, S. W., Pekarek Doehler, S., & Piirainen-Marsh, A. (Eds.). (2019). Conversation ana-
lytic research on learning-in-action: The complex ecology of second language interaction “in the wild.”
Springer.
Research interests in both developmental trajectories and conditions for learning are investigated through
CA-based analyses of out-of-classroom discourse in this edited book, including a chapter on “noticing” in vo-
cabulary learning.
Salaberry, M. R., & Kunitz, S. (Eds.). (2019). Teaching and testing L2 interactional competence. Taylor &
Francis.
In addition to laying out theoretical and methodological approaches to the research on L2 interactional com-
petence, this edited book presents a concerted effort to find optimal pedagogical practices that help L2 learners
develop interactional competence and assessment practices that properly assess interactional competence.

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Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge University Press.
Young, R., & He, A. W. (Eds.). (1998). Talking and testing: Discourse approaches to the assessment of oral
proficiency. John Benjamins.

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 18
WRITTEN DISCOURSE AND
SECOND LANGUAGE RESEARCH
Elena Cotos and Kimberly Becker

Introduction
Interfacing second language (L2) writing and second language acquisition (SLA) is a relatively re-
cent undertaking (Manchón & Polio, 2022) striving to reveal the language learning affordances of L2
writing (Manchón, 2020). L2 writing provides a significant source of discourse data, and it has been
argued that “discourse-based approaches to second language teaching and learning should be cen-
tral to the process of enabling learners to become competent and efficient users of a new language”
(Celce-Murcia & Olshtain, 2005, p. 279). Therefore, discourse analysis (DA) is entwined with sec-
ond language writing research and pedagogy.
L2 writing is a robust area with roots in a range of influential perspectives. In this chapter, we first
cover theoretical tenets from contrastive rhetoric, cognitive, sociocultural, and genre orientations,
which share recognizable threads with DA and SLA. Then we describe and exemplify how research
analyzes the discourse of L2 writing (i.e., learners’ written discourse) and discourse about L2 writing
(i.e., learners’ written or oral discourse excerpts about writing and language learning) to understand
textual, linguistic, cognitive, and sociocultural aspects of second language learning. Although for
years there was a “lack of cross-fertilization between the fields of SLA and L2 writing” (Manchón
& Williams, 2016, p. 567), epistemologically and methodologically varied research has begun to
generate insightful evidence about the manifold phenomena contributing to the development of learn-
ers’ written language. Arguably, theoretical and empirical knowledge has important implications for
teaching and learning in writing-to-learn and learning-to-write contexts, which we also address be-
fore concluding with directions for advancing SLA-oriented L2 writing research.

Overview
Despite the salience of the connection between L2 written discourse and DA, no one theoretical,
methodological, or conceptual framework has come forward as predominant (Silva, 2016). Given
that, it is important to first consider some terminology, starting with discourse and then turning to L2
writing. Definitions of discourse commonly account for language—composed of stretches of text,
representing actual use, or rendering some social practice. Thus, discourse can be considered a lin-
guistic unit made of sequenced sentences, certain ways of using language in particular contexts,
and communicative events that shape and are shaped by contextualized sociocultural activities.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003177579-20 229

 Elena Cotos and Kimberly Becker

Gee (1990) emphasizes that language use is about “saying (writing)-doing-being-valuing-believing

combinations” (p. 142). Following this logic, Gee distinguishes between “discourse” with a little “d”
(meaning “connected stretches of language that make sense”) and “Discourse” with a big “D” (mean-
ing socially constructed “ways of being” that combine language, actions, values, ideology, power
relations, etc. to enact particular social roles and identities) (p. 142).
Analyses of written discourse have generally been text-focused, where language used to commu-
nicate in given contexts is pragmatically analyzed at the level of textuality, as well as socioculturally
focused, where analyses center on communication within and among social groups or cultures relying
on an ensemble of means beyond language use (Paltridge, 2022). These are not necessarily mutu-
ally exclusive. On the contrary, all DA approaches, albeit to a different extent, are concerned with
the meaning of discourse—how it is structured and signaled in texts as well as how it is constructed
through language used to communicate in the broader contexts of social practices. Since learners
make meaning using language when writing in the L2, analyzing learners’ discourse about writing
and learning can also be considered an important constituent area for DA and SLA.
As to L2 writing, a multitude of definitions can be found in the literature. Perhaps the most in-
clusive and most relevant for this chapter is “change over time in any of the following areas re-
lated to written text production: language (e.g., complexity, accuracy, fluency, cohesion, mechanics);
knowledge of different genres; text production processes; metacognitive knowledge and strategy
use; and writing goals and motivation” (Polio, 2017, p. 261). This definition resonates well with
textual, corpus-based, rhetorical, and critical analysis strands of DA. Noting it here is essential, as we
further review writing theories and attempt bridges with relevant SLA areas such as “characteristics
of learner language,” “psycholinguistic processes involved in both L2 acquisition and L2 use,” and
“learner-external factors that can account for how an L2 is acquired” (Ellis, 2008, p. 33).
The understanding of L2 written discourse originated from a text-focused tradition called contras-
tive rhetoric (CR) (Kaplan, 1966). Connor (1996) defines it as “an area of research in second lan-
guage acquisition that identifies problems in composition encountered by second language writers”
(p. 5). Matsuda (1997) calls CR an “early pedagogical theory of L2 textual organization” concerned
with informing L2 writing instruction by explaining the lack of coherence in learner texts (p. 47). The
purpose of approaching the analysis of L2 written discourse from the CR perspective was twofold: to
serve as an analytic framework for teachers and to help learners overcome the transfer of L1 textual
patterns that were preventing them from developing advanced levels of L2 writing proficiency.
A writer-oriented theoretical perspective has grown out of cognitive models originally formulated
for L1 writing. From the cognitive viewpoint, writing was theorized as “a set of distinctive think-
ing processes which writers orchestrate or organize during the act of composing” (Flower & Hayes,
1981, p. 366). Cognitive models of writing endeavor to describe dynamic, interactive, and recursive
metacognitive operations occurring when writers produce texts. An underlying tenet is that the act of
writing happens via cognitive resolution of problems, and text composition is a mental rather than a
linguistic process. L2 process writing distinguishes the role of language in the process of formulation,
or transforming ideas into language, as writers produce texts to communicate their ideas (Manchón &
Roca de Larios, 2007). If we are to map this perspective and SLA, a conspicuous degree of overlap
would be in the area of mental processes activated during text production using knowledge of the L2.
Regardless of whether the focus is on the text or the writer, theories emphasizing emic perspec-
tives are typically juxtaposed with individual and social theories that spring from etic approaches.
In fact, the definition of discourse as language in action contrasts with the approaches that separate
language from context. Especially in the case of L2 writing, sociocultural-based perspectives signifi-
cantly broadened the theoretical territory, swaying away from cognitive processing to socio-affective
factors framing the potential of writing for language learning.

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Sociocultural perspectives, springboarding from Vygotsky’s (1978) work, focus on language and
literacy as the primary mediating tools for communication, socialization, and thinking, attributing
findings to symbolic and material artifacts that point to the acquisition of language via interaction
afforded by media/tools (see also Ohta, Chapter 10 in this volume). For L2 writing specifically, direct
parallels have been drawn between feedback (Leow & Suh, 2022) and face-to-face and computer-
supported collaborative writing (Storch, 2022) by linking these to the SLA hypotheses of noticing,
interaction, and output, which are thought to foster language learning. Therefore, sociocultural views
bridge SLA and L2 writing through their emphasis on “the interplay between learner-external and
learner-internal factors, treating acquisition as something that happens both outside and inside the
learner’s head” (Ellis, 2008, p. 35). This interplay, in turn, creates a tangency with individual differ-
ences in L2 writers and with the ways in which they process and act upon corrective or collaborative
feedback.
Clearly, social and cognitive aspects of writing cannot and should not be polarized if theory is
to advantage L2 writing pedagogy and writer development. The sociocognitive perspective, thus,
has merged the two opposing viewpoints (for more on sociocognitive perspectives, see Atkinson
et al. and Kecskes, Chapters 11 and 24 in this volume respectively). Some of the earliest attempts
to combine sociocultural and cognitive theories came from Firth and Wagner (1997), who asserted
the need for theory and methodology to integrate awareness of context and interaction, awareness of
fundamental concepts considering the emic/participant perspective, and expansion of the database
common to traditional SLA research. More recently, Nishino and Atkinson (2017; also Atkinson
et al., Chapter 11 in this volume) emphasized the value of examining writing “as a sociocognitive
process—one in which mind, body, and ecosocial world function integratively/ecologically rather
than as separate phenomena” (p. 37).
Genre theory is yet another tradition that has considerably influenced investigations of L2 writing.
It aligns well with instructed SLA in that it has provided influential guidance to L2 writing pedagogy.
The genre traditions stem from both linguistic and rhetorical approaches and are commonly described
as having a ternary epistemology: English for specific and academic purposes (ESP/EAP), systemic
functional linguistics (SFL), and rhetorical genre studies (RGS) (also see new rhetoric (NR) (Miller,
1994)). They all embrace the linguistic, social, and cognitive demands inherent to writing devel-
opment although to a different extent. ESP/EAP theorizes genre writing as purposeful communi-
cative actions with conventionalized structures and linguistic realizations, routinely conducted
by specific discourse communities in particular contexts (Swales, 1981). SFL forefronts the system-
atic relation between language and context, treating genres as “staged goal-oriented social processes”
(Martin, 1993, p. 13) where textual features and linguistic patterns underlie socially recognized func-
tions. RGS/NR, in turn, prioritize evolving processes over text structure and language use, explaining
genres as process-based “mediated interactions within a context” (Prior, 2007, p. 94).

Research approaches and methods

Research of L2 written discourse has a rich epistemological foundation, as each of the above-men-
tioned theories contributed with various approaches and methods. Polio and Friedman (2016) render
the breadth of L2 writing scholarship by highlighting different types of research based on: theoretical
perspectives; investigated phenomena; and writing-to-learn versus learning-to-write pedagogical ap-
proaches. This diversity of views has greatly enriched our understanding of how DA can contribute
to SLA research by bringing analytic complementarity through textual, linguistic, cognitive, and so-
ciocultural lenses. In this section, we review methodologies and research foci, first aligning them to
the theoretical perspectives covered in the previous section and then highlighting the methodological

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eclecticism in research on L2 written discourse, which is often complemented by analyses of dis-

course about L2 writing.
In CR, rhetorical structures of L2 writing were originally compared with writing deemed “con-
ventional” to provide a framework for language instructors seeking to aid students in counteracting
their tendencies to construct L2 texts in ways that are culturally and linguistically similar to their L1.
Examining the organizational structures of L1 and L2 written discourse, CR scholars maintained that
L2 writers’ L1, cultural backgrounds, and developmental and educational factors strongly impacted
the way they organized their texts. CR text analysis, rebranded as intercultural rhetoric (Connor, 2018),
still holds promise especially now that corpus linguistics methods entered the scene of DA, affording
tools for investigating SLA issues relative to linguistic development in L2 writing (e.g., errors, order of
acquisition, developmental patterns, and dimensions of complexity, accuracy, and fluency).
Writing-models research has focused on cognitive processes underlying text production, self-
monitoring, revision, attention, strategy use, and knowledge development, among others. SLA-
related research investigates, generally under laboratory conditions but also in instructed settings,
how L2 writing processes may foster language learning. Methodologies used to examine L2 writing
processes are quite varied, including keystroke logging, eye tracking, screen captures, and analy-
sis of video-recorded writing sessions, as well as the verbalization of writing actions/strategies and
stimulated recall. Questions can be raised as to how well a solely cognitive approach can describe the
multidimensional nature of L2 writing. DA, however, welcomes such data as discourse about writing.
Sociocultural and sociocognitive studies have centered on both sociocultural forces and mental
processes that contribute to gaining writing knowledge and expertise. These views have been pro-
ductively applied to collaborative writing, written corrective feedback, writing strategies, mediation
through scaffolding, and individual differences as building blocks for investigating writing develop-
ment and language acquisition. Explorations of L2 writing through these lenses use varied quantita-
tive and qualitative methods. The latter generate both written discourse and discourse about writing
through longitudinal case studies, action research, journaling, and collaborative, computer-mediated,
or multimodal L2 writing. Critics, however, may caution against issues like the lack relevant meas-
ures of learning gains and writing development.
It is worth noting that research on L2 writing from the social perspective has integrated the study
of genres as “abstract, socially recognised ways of using language” (Hyland, 2007, p. 149). Genre
theory-oriented research commonly employs text-based, writer-based, and reader-based methods.
SFL studies examine lexico-grammatical patterns and discourse practices realized in the sequencing
and content of texts. ESP/EAP studies use move analysis to identify and explain the communicative
goals and rhetorical strategies along with their functional language signals. Corpus-based methods
have enabled extensive analyses of genre-specific textual, linguistic, and rhetorical features in L2
writing, often compared with L1 or expert writing. Driven by strong beliefs in explicit teaching and
learning of the conventions and linguistic forms of genres, ESP/EAP and SFL scholars augment text-
based and move-based analyses of written discourse with surveys, observations, and other sources of
data obtained from L2 writers (and teachers), increasingly adopting mixed methods. RGS/NR stud-
ies, too, use mixed methods involving ethnography, observations, interviews, and other qualitative
data along with analyses of texts. However, NR opposed the idea of explicit genre pedagogy, instead
analyzing genres “to be understood as phenomena of unique social contexts rather than to derive
principles directly for teaching” (Cumming, 2016, p. 74). Looking at texts from this angle, RGS/NR
research focuses on interpreting the dynamic nature of genre conventions, considering how different
factors (e.g., target discourse communities, power relations, social identity) may impact how genres
are acquired, used, shaped, and reshaped (Freedman, 2008). In that, their boundaries transcend into
critical discourse analysis methods of inquiry.

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More generally, a few remarks should be made about the methodological approaches employed to
empirically operationalize and study the linguistic, cognitive, and social dimensions of L2 writing.
Historically, writers’ cognitive processes during text production were investigated using experimen-
tal designs and other quantitative methods. Experimental investigations have also largely centered on
feedback and the effects of various treatments related to L2 writing instruction. Quantitative studies
of text features and writing processes have dominated recent explorations of L2 written discourse.
Conversely, it has been commonly assumed that qualitative and naturalistic methods are more ap-
propriate for gaining insights about writing development, writer interaction, and sociocultural aspects
of L2 writing. Acknowledging that the choice of methods depends on the research questions and
phenomena subject to investigation, Polio and Friedman (2016) provide a comprehensive review of
representative L2 writing studies categorized based on research approaches: experimental research,
causal-comparative/correlational research, ethnography/case study, and mixed methods. This catego-
rization is suitable for studies of and about L2 writing, particularly considering the “little d” and “big
D” definitions of discourse as well as the SLA areas of study concerned with learner language, psy-
cholinguistic processes, and individual and contextual factors. Also suitable is Polio and Friedman’s
(2016) coverage of the different research methods, which are listed and exemplified in Table 18.1.
Given that L2 writing research is interested in empirical support for writing processes as much as in
writing as a context-dependent sociocultural means of language learning, with implications for teaching
and learning, it has been explicitly argued that methodological eclecticism should prevail over aligning
methods with theoretical or epistemological perspectives (Riazi et al., 2018). Contemporary scholarship,
thus, exhibits a tendency for integrating and triangulating, as opposed to associating, certain methods with
certain approaches, which can be seen in the selection of sample studies that follows in the next section.

Sample studies
In this section, we exemplify salient SLA-related studies of L2 written discourse to showcase how
methodologically complex and varied this domain of exploration is. Table 18.2 lists sample studies,
specifying their guiding theory along with the research approaches and methods employed. Then,
we provide a brief description of each study by presenting the research purpose, summarizing the
methodology, and concluding with key findings.

Table 18.1 Methods and foci in L2 writing research (based on Polio & Friedman, 2016)

Methods Types of analyses and example foci for inquiry

Learner text analysis Quantitative analysis of text quality, linguistic accuracy, syntactic complexity,
lexical sophistication, formulaic sequences, fluency, cohesion, text modifications.
Target text analysis Qualitative analysis of move/step composition of and distribution in genre texts
(generally compared with expert texts).
Quantitative corpus-based analysis of language features and functions of different
registers (generally compared with L1 texts and/or expert texts).
Retrospective/ Qualitative analysis of stimulated recall, think-aloud protocol, written reflection,
introspective analysis written journal, and discourse-based interview data.
Quantitative analysis of writing-process data (e.g., keystroke logs, eye gaze,
interaction logs) on writing processes, writing strategies, collaborative writing,
mental models of writing, audience awareness, noticing triggered by feedback.
Qualitative discourse SFL analysis of textual, ideational, and interpersonal metafunctions.
analysis Multimodal and critical analysis of text construction and L2 writers’ voice, identity, etc.

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Table 18.2 Theoretical perspectives, approaches, and methods in sample studies

Sample study Theoretical Approaches Methods DA focus

perspectives

Kubota (1998) Contrastive Mixed methods Learner text analysis L2 written discourse
rhetoric Correlational Interviews Discourse about L2
writing
Abdhi Tabari Cognitive Mixed methods Learner text analysis L2 written discourse
(2022) Quasi-experimental Retrospective/ introspective
Correlational analysis
Kim and Sociocultural Mixed methods Learner text analysis L2 written discourse
Emeliyanova Quasi-experimental Error coding
(2021) research
Storch and Sociocultural Case study Learner text analysis L2 written discourse
Wigglesworth Qualitative discourse analysis Discourse about L2
(2010) writing
Cotos et al. Genre Mixed methods Learner text analysis L2 written discourse
(2020) Cognitive Target text analysis Discourse about L2
Retrospective/ introspective analysis writing

Sample Study 1: Kubota (1998)

Purpose: Following on CR research indicating negative L1–L2 rhetorical transfer, Kubota (1998) was
motivated to probe the hypothesis that cross-linguistic similarities may also cause positive transfer.
The purpose of the study was to “investigate whether each individual student uses similar rhetorical
structures for writing expository and persuasive essays in Japanese as Ll and English as L2 and how
the use of similar/dissimilar rhetorical structures affects the quality of the L2 essay” (p. 76).
Methodology: Text analysis of writing (expository and persuasive essays) in English and Japanese
centered on identifying and manually coding the location of main ideas and macro-level rhetorical
patterns (collection, comparison, explanation, specification, and induction). The essays were given
scores used for calculations of MANOVA and Pearson product moment correlations. Language use
was additionally examined and rated in English essays. In individual interviews conducted after essay
writing, student participants were asked whether and why the writing tasks were difficult, whether
they developed and organized the content similarly or differently as they were writing in English and
in their native language, whether they thought the organization of English and Japanese essays was
similar or different, and whether they had previous formal Japanese/English writing instruction.
Findings: Negative transfer of culturally unique rhetorical patterns was not confirmed, as the pat-
terns used by roughly half of the participants in both their L1 and L2 texts were similar. On the con-
trary, instances of positive transfer were observed. According to the insights based on the language
scores and interview data, what appeared to affect the quality of English essays were aspects of writ-
ing ability, English proficiency, and composing experience, rather than L1-specific rhetorical styles.

Sample Study 2: Abdhi Tabari (2022)

Purpose: Abdhi Tabari (2022) focused on understanding how the underlying cognitive activities trig-
gered before and during L2 writing may affect L2 writing quality. The study pursued a twofold
purpose: “(1) investigate effects of task planning on the CAF [complexity, accuracy, fluency] of L2
written production under four conditions (i.e., pre-task planning, pressured within-task or online

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planning, and the joint combination of pre-task and online planning) and uncover the potential rela-
tionships among them, and (2) examine how task planning influences L2 writers’ attention orientation
under the assigned task conditions” (p. 2).
Methodology: The study employed a between-group quasi-experimental design with two se-
quenced phases, each aligned with the above stated purposes. Quantitative data were obtained in
the first phase of the study, which was set up with different task-planning conditions including no
planning. EFL students were randomly allocated to four groups (N=40 each group) and asked to
perform a written task (picture-based storytelling) under four respective planning time conditions. In
the second phase, qualitative data were obtained from 60 students (15 randomly selected from each
condition) through video stimulated recall interviews that elicited students’ thinking about writing
during planning and text production. Learner text analysis focused on CAF measures. Complexity
(general, subordination, phrasal) and lexical variability were analyzed automatically using Synlex
and Coh-Metrix. Manual analysis was performed for accuracy, focusing on identifying and counting
syntactic, morphological, and lexical errors. Fluency was examined based on calculations of the ratio
of words produced within a set time.
Findings: Accuracy improved under the online planning condition and when pre-task and online
planning were combined. In the case of the combined conditions, complexity and fluency improved
as well, which was also true for the separate pre-task planning and online planning conditions.
Fluency showed a significant interaction between pre-task planning and the combined conditions.
Triangulation of CAF measures with interview data indicated that planning played a facilitative
role by allowing more attention to translation processes during writing. From a second language
acquisition (SLA) standpoint, this is important because L2 writers require cognitive resources to
notice and process negative evidence in their texts, particularly at the level of lexis, syntax, and
cohesion.

Sample Study 3: Kim and Emeliyanova (2021)

Purpose: Driven by SLA tenets regarding written corrective feedback (WCF) as a means of scaffold-
ing that can facilitate learner’s acquisition of language forms, this study aimed “to compare students’
revision behavior when they processed WCF collaboratively and when they processed WCF indi-
vidually” (p. 239).
Methodology: In a quasi-experimental design, ESL students wrote timed opinion and compare-
and-contrast essays and were randomly divided into two groups based on two types of feedback pro-
cessing: individual self-correction and collaborative pair-correction. Students’ revision behavior and
writing accuracy measures were taken as dependent variables. Text analysis of L2 writing utilized
manual coding of errors, and writers’ revision behavior was analyzed in terms of the correctness of
revised errors. Writing accuracy was examined through calculations of error-free T-units and of the
number of errors per 100 words. Quantitative analyses included Mann–Whitney U tests comparing
the number of errors correctly revised after WCF as well as paired-samples t-tests determining the
significance of the improvement in writing accuracy for both groups.
Findings: The data did not appear to corroborate Kim and Emeliyanova’s (2021) hypothesis that
“collaboration while revising errors in response to WCF might benefit learners in improving the
accuracy of subsequent writing” (p. 249), as the pair-correction group did not produce more accu-
rate writing on the final timed writing task than the self-correction group. Finer-gained comparisons
pointed to differences; that is, the text revisions under the pair-correction condition reflected a higher
rate of accurately corrected errors while those under the self-correction condition had more error-free
T-units. Nevertheless, the results supported the potential of WCF because both groups significantly
improved overall accuracy after having processed and attended to the feedback.

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Sample Study 4: Storch and Wigglesworth (2010)

Purpose and research questions: This case study research centered on the efficacy of direct and indi-
rect forms of corrective feedback. Its purposes were “to explore (a) whether learners process direct
feedback differently from indirect feedback, (b) what factors affect learners’ uptake of feedback when
revising their text, and (c) what factors affect learners’ retention of feedback when writing a new text”
(pp. 306–307).
Methodology: Four pairs of ESL writers attended three sessions at different times. In session 1, the
pairs composed a data commentary text. In session 2, they received either direct feedback in the form
of reformulation (i.e., rewritten learners’ text) or indirect feedback in the form of editing symbols
(i.e., error codes) and discussed it. Then, they rewrote the original version of their texts, from which
the feedback was removed. In the last session weeks later, each participant wrote their individual
text based on the same data commentary prompt. The learner data obtained in this procedure consti-
tuted the original and revised versions of pair-written texts as well as of individually written texts.
Additionally, the participants’ pair talk during feedback processing and text rewriting was recorded
and transcribed, and the actual reformulations and editing symbols were also compiled for analysis.
Qualitative discourse analysis about writing was applied to the pair talk transcriptions, which were
coded as language-related episodes (i.e., instances when the participants talked about language items
related to morphosyntax, lexis, and spelling, and punctuation). The language-related episodes were
further analyzed in terms of correct, incorrect, or no resolutions and in terms of extensive, limited, or
no engagement with the feedback.
Findings: The case data revealed insights about the impact that different types of feedback and
processing may have on uptake (immediate revision produced in session 2) and long-term reten-
tion (captured in session 3). It appeared that indirect feedback generated more feedback-specific
language-related episodes and created conditions for higher levels of engagement, which positively
impacted immediate revision. Overall, the effects of direct or indirect feedback on both uptake and
retention seemed to depend on a complex and dynamic interaction of several factors. The linguistic
factors were the types of errors that the writers made, and the affective factors included their attitudes,
beliefs, and goals.

Sample Study 5: Cotos et al. (2020)

Purpose and research questions: Cotos et al. (2020) focused on the revision stage of the writing pro-
cess, as facilitated by a genre-based automated writing evaluation tool called the Research Writing
Tutor (RWT). The RWT provides different forms of automated feedback and scaffolding that are
genre-based, corpus-based, and discipline-specific. The purpose of the study was to explore “the link
between the technology-altered environment and the revision processes occurring in the working
memory […] by examining whether and how the features of the RWT, as an external environmental
factor, may impact revision” (p. 311).
Methodology: A mixed-methods concurrent transformative design was employed to obtain and
analyze data from graduate students (nonnative and native speakers of English). Text data included
student’s first and last drafts of a research-article introduction section. All drafts were analyzed
qualitatively by coding the moves and steps as well as the text changes that were made while revis-
ing with the RWT. Wilcoxon Signed-Ranks tests were run to gauge changes in rhetorical composi-
tion from first to last drafts. Integrated quantitative and qualitative analyses were also performed
on student-RWT interaction logs, on-task screen capture videos of students revising their texts, and
stimulated recalls.

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Findings: The results yielded descriptive insights about patterns in individual students’ interactive
behaviors when revising with the RWT, suggesting that interaction with its automated feedback and
scaffolding features can enhance metacognitive processing and improve the quality of genre writing.
The processes that appeared to be fostered the most were strategizing, reflection, and problem-solv-
ing, followed by text production and text processing. In terms of writing quality, students improved
their texts globally by making substantial changes in rhetorical and content composition. They also
made local-level improvements by using rhetorically appropriate language and making corrections in
grammar, syntax, and mechanics.

Implications for second language learning, teaching, and use

Even though ontologies and epistemologies underlying the interface between SLA and discourse
analysis—of writing and about writing—may stand out as distinct, research crossing methodological
boundaries to examine and describe the language learning affordances of writing has direct implica-
tions for L2 writing pedagogy. Teachers can apply “concepts, principles, and methods to analyze,
organize, and evaluate curricula, instruction, and assessment for L2 learners of writing” (Cumming,
2016, p. 79). Arguably, the implications for the practices of L2 writing instruction depend on the
contexts and purposes in which writing is taught and learned. Two widely acknowledged purposes
of teaching and learning of L2 writing are learning-to-write and writing-to-learn (Manchón, 2011).
L2 writing/SLA-oriented DA studies inform both the teaching of how to write and the teaching of
writing as a tool for learning.
The learning-to-write approach pursues instruction that focuses on writing as an activity as well
as on written texts as an outcome of that activity. Cognition-focused research (e.g., Sample Study
2) establishes that teachers should help L2 writers learn how to productively engage in the macro-
writing processes of planning, formulating, producing, and revising their texts. Teaching students to
learn how to write in L2 also means teaching them how to compose texts using organizational pat-
terns, accurate linguistic forms, and appropriate rhetorical resources taking into account the target
audience (e.g., Sample Study 1). To that end, findings from ESP/EAP and SFL analyses of learner and
target texts translated to instruction have substantiated a transition “from the implicit and exploratory
to a conscious manipulation of language and choice” (Hyland, 2007, p. 151), enabling explicit L2
writing pedagogy (e.g., Sample Study 5). Corpus-based findings have been increasingly applied in
data-driven learning activities designed to support L2 writers’ development. Specifically, they con-
duct their own top-down and bottom-up discourse analyses of general or specialized corpora. Such
analytic activities help them notice patterns and then form and test hypotheses about the linguistic
and rhetorical conventions of target written discourse, develop “general metacognitive awareness of
the reality of genre” (Ferris, 2011, p. 656) as shaped by socio-disciplinary cultures, and learn from the
way experts write in disciplinary genres. In tandem, process-based and genre-based writing instruc-
tional approaches anchored in writer-oriented and linguistic-textual evidence leverage cognitive and
discourse-level constructs associated with specific context and audiences.
In the writing-to-learn approach, writing is viewed as a vehicle supporting content and language
learning. The content orientation has been connected to the SLA construct of transfer (Hirvela et al.,
2016), which to some extent resonates with CR scholarship. ESP/EAP studies have also accounted
for variation in content (e.g., subject-matter, academic, professional, disciplinary, cultural). However,
it is the language orientation that is believed to create optimal conditions whereby writing can be a
site for enhancing L2 learning in the context of instructed SLA (Manchón & Roca de Larios, 2007).
L2 writing pedagogy adopting this approach is guided by empirical evidence indicating that the lan-
guage learning potential of L2 writing is largely due to focus on language forms during writing (e.g.,

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Sample Study 2), noticing while processing individual and collaborative feedback, meaning-making
as a problem-solving response to the feedback (e.g., Sample Study 4), and scaffolding afforded by
collaborative or computer-assisted writing. Clearly, the theoretical framework here encompasses
cognitive, textual/linguistic, and sociocultural theoretical postulates.
The impact of DA on L2 writing instruction, whether learning-to-write and writing-to-learn, has
been varied and helpful, though not without disagreements and constraints (Ferris, 2011). Referring
specifically to pedagogical implications based on collective evidence, Hyland (2011) concludes that
“we might see the research as advising us to reject a single formula for teaching writing and look at
what the different models tell us” (p. 32).

Future directions
As we look forward into continued inquiry at the intersection of L2 writing and SLA, analysis of writ-
ten discourse can further bridge these two fields to reinforce their dedication to pedagogically moti-
vated research. Leow and Manchón (2022) urge that instructed SLA studies should be situated within
a language curriculum; it should be ensured that language learning gains “are not only theoretically
predicted, but also pedagogically expected while fulfilling curricular learning goals” (p. 303). This
direction also holds true for future research on the effectiveness of the learning-to-write and writing-
to-learn approaches in both L2 experimental and intact instruction settings, the latter preferably stud-
ied over time to address ecological validity concerns.
Some previously noted directions (e.g., Manchón & Williams, 2016) remain salient and can be
undertaken by research that involves DA. For example, text analysis of learner corpora can help dive
deeper into the linguistic dimension of L2 writing development by documenting the use of language
features and could potentially explain L2 writing development in more generalizable ways. Corpora
can be scrutinized by employing statistical/interpretive multidimensional analysis (Staples et al.,
2022) as well as automated analysis of writing and natural language processing technologies (Kyle
et al., 2021). Mixed-methods research integrating qualitative DA can merge text/product-oriented
with process-oriented foci to unveil the role of language proficiency in writing ability and the extent
to which feedback, especially feedback for accuracy and feedback for acquisition (Manchón & Wil-
liams, 2016), and collaboration may enhance the acquisition of writing as a language skill.
The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Writing edited by Manchón and
Polio (2022) puts forth a number of propositions for expanding the research agenda. Révész et al.’s
(2022) chapter describes the research design for future experimental studies focused on cognitive
processing and L2 text production, changes in cognitive processing over time, and the relationship
between feedback processing and accuracy in the revised text. Recommended methods include a
combination of learner text analysis, qualitative analysis of stimulated recalls, keystroke logging,
and eye tracking. Indeed, a higher level of generalizability is needed to understand and model the
various internalized cognitive operations, as smaller-scale and sometimes contradictory empirical
results cannot lead to valid models of learning how to write. Izumi and Hanaoka (2022) describe sug-
gested empirical studies for investigating different factors that affect L2 writers’ attentional alloca-
tion, writing performance, and subsequent learning. Furthermore, Lim and Kessler (2022) exemplify
future research tasks, recommending cross-sectional and/or longitudinal research on individual and
collaborative multimodal writing. They recommend using SFL and genre analysis to investigate how
linguistic resources for meaning-making while interacting with multimodal texts may impact L2
writers’ language learning.
We would add that these research directions call for eliciting rich data on internal/cognitive and
external factors through retrospective/introspective analysis. Such data would represent discourse
about writing and would necessitate qualitative discourse analysis. In that regard, DA researchers will

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 Written discourse and second language research

need to devise new analytical categories to identify and code SLA phenomena. Along similar lines,
Lu (2022) highlights the need to develop new natural language processing methods for automating
text analysis of learner corpora, and to also increase the accuracy of existing methods, in order to
improve L2 writing assessment and feedback, particularly emphasizing function-oriented feedback.
Finally, the twenty-first century has provided much movement in the direction of enhancing the
authenticity of learning how to write and writing for language learning under different conditions,
for different tasks, with different anticipated outcomes, and in different contexts (e.g., digital, flipped,
hybrid)—which all require unceasing empirical evidence that is theoretically grounded, methodo-
logically sound, and pedagogically informative. New trends in the L2 writing–SLA interface could
benefit from expansion in the area of multilingualism and linguistic diversity, to avoid anglocentrism
and broaden the scope of research to include languages other than English. Besides diversifying lin-
guistically with a focus on discourse with a little “d,” encompassing Discourse with a big “D,” with
a larger focus on ideological and sociocultural/sociopolitical factors, could yield new knowledge
through analyses of both L2 written discourse and discourse about L2 writing.

Further reading
Hanford, M. & Gee, J. P. (Eds.). (2023). The Routledge handbook of discourse analysis (2nd ed.). Routledge.
This volume is a comprehensive introduction to theories and approaches to discourse analysis. It covers the
application of discourse analysis to register, genre, spoken discourse, and education as well as identity and culture.
Manchón, R. M. (Ed.). (2020). Writing and language learning: Advancing research agendas. John Benjamins.
This book offers a retrospective view of the intersection of writing and language learning by highlighting
landmark research and examining writing as a site for language learning, which is presented as an adjunct to the
study of SLA. It addresses the issue of literacy and SLA in terms of theory, methodology, and empirical aware-
ness of current and forthcoming research.
Manchón, R. M., & Polio, C. (Eds.). (2022). The Routledge handbook of second language acquisition and writ-
ing. Routledge.
As an all-encompassing view of L2 writing and learning, this book synthesizes and contextualizes the theo-
ries, methodologies, findings, and themes associated with the topic. It outlines future research directions relevant
to applied linguistics, education, and composition studies.
Paltridge, B. (2021). Discourse analysis: An introduction (3rd ed.). Bloomsbury.
This reference textbook presents key concepts in discourse analysis and focuses on the interconnectedness
of texts and contexts. It equips readers with techniques for discourse analytic approaches to the examination of
narrative and nonnarrative texts within the context of past, present, and future research.

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DISCIPLINARY DISCOURSES AND
SECOND LANGUAGE RESEARCH
Bethany Gray and Chris Nuttall

Introduction
The focus of the present chapter is on the analysis of L2 discourse produced within disciplinary
communities. There is widespread acknowledgment of systematic variation in discourse across dis-
ciplines (Gray, 2015; Hyland, 2004), and many second language (L2) learners need to master these
discipline-specific patterns of language use—for example, students taking content-area courses and
writing theses/dissertations in a second language, and researchers writing for publication worldwide
or presenting their scholarship at international conferences.
While disciplinary discourse can be spoken or written, and in any language being learned as
a second/additional language, the vast majority of research on L2 discipline-specific language has
investigated written texts in English. In academic contexts, writing has been prioritized as “the pri-
mary product of most disciplines,” which is “taken to constitute the knowledge of the disciplines”
(Bazerman, 1994, p. 104), particularly for academics publishing for a global community. For L2
students, writing contributes to the assessment of academic achievement, demonstrates content-area
learning, and serves as a major component of degree completion. Writing in English has received the
most attention, likely because of “a context where English is the assumed linguistic medium of aca-
demic texts” (Lillis & Curry, 2016, p. 201) and the widespread enrollment of L2 students in English-
medium-of-instruction universities worldwide (Ferris, 2016). Thus, the present chapter will survey
and discuss discourse-analytic research on the linguistic and rhetorical characteristics of discipline-
specific writing produced by L2 English learners.

Overview of disciplinary discourse and second language research

The need to develop discipline-specific patterns of language use typically arises at more advanced
levels as L2 learners move beyond general education to participation in specific disciplinary
communities (typically within higher-education or scholarly contexts). Thus, competence in dis-
ciplinary discourse is viewed as involving much more than the acquisition of linguistic forms
and the ability to use those forms accurately. Rather, there is an inherent understanding that such
development involves an acculturation of discourse patterns and pragmatic functions valued by
the disciplinary community. In this section, we explore the major foundations of L2 disciplinary
discourse research.

242 DOI: 10.4324/9781003177579-21

 Disciplinary discourses and second language research

Beginnings: English for (specific) academic purposes

Given the preponderance of research on English, most L2 disciplinary discourse research is situ-
ated within English for academic purposes (EAP), which developed out of the English for specific
purposes (ESP) movement during the 1980s in response to “the growth of English as the leading
language for the acquisition, dissemination and demonstration of academic knowledge” (Hyland &
Shaw, 2016, p. 1). L2 disciplinary discourse may best align with what Hyland (2016) calls English for
specific academic purposes (ESAP), which prioritizes the needs of students in specialized contexts,
including within specific disciplines. Hyland (2016) argues that ESAP is supported by the theory of
social constructionism, in which members of a discipline use discourse to construct a view of the
world, and this leads to the need to “deploy a repertoire of literacy practices appropriate to different
settings, and handle the social meanings and identities that each evokes” (Hyland, 2016, p. 21). Such
discipline-specific literacies are equally important beyond the student years, as scholars seek to par-
ticipate in the global dissemination of their research (Lillis & Curry, 2016).
As a practice-oriented field, EAP has focused on understanding the textual practices and com-
municative needs of novice and expert academics in order to inform the instruction and assessment
of language in academic contexts. These efforts often involve analyses of academic texts (Hyland &
Shaw, 2016), including those produced by L2 learners.

Writing across the Curriculum and Writing in the Disciplines

The Writing across the Curriculum (WAC) and Writing in the Disciplines (WID) movements also
emphasize the interconnectedness of writing and disciplinarity, bringing together writing and subject-
matter specialists to address the needs of novice writers. While EAP arose out of applied linguistics
and focused on L2 learners, WAC/WID stemmed from rhetoric and composition studies and ini-
tially focused on (typically undergraduate) native-speaking writers. The last decade has witnessed
increased calls for collaboration between WAC/WID professionals and L2 writing and SLA special-
ists (Cox & Zawacki, 2011), although the discussion has often centered around how L2 writing and
SLA can inform WAC/WID (e.g., Hall & Navarro, 2011).
Yet WAC/WID courses have the potential to contribute to L2 development research, as they pro-
vide naturalistic contexts in which to study L2 learners and their acquisition of “academic register”—
“the means by which the values and procedures of the (disciplinary) community are expressed and
inculcated in specialized language” (Hall & Navarro, 2011, p. 8). Since writing is taught with the
support of content-area specialists who are members of the discourse community, studying writing
development in WAC/WID contexts aligns well with sociocultural theories of SLA, in which “all
human knowledge, higher cognitive abilities, and activities are considered to be mediated culturally
and historically by social practices” and which “focus on collaborations among people … to produce
writing and learn from each other” (Cumming, 2016, p. 76). WAC/WID can thus provide sites for
sociocultural SLA research on the development of disciplinary discourses.

Second language writing: Contrastive analysis and genre theory

Given the myriad ways that writing is integrated into academic life, it is not surprising that much
research falls within the field of L2 writing, which seeks to “[explain] the development of multiple-
language written literacy capacities” (Ortega, 2012, p. 404). While L2 writing research includes a
range of concerns (e.g., error correction, composing process, written feedback), discourse analyses of
L2 writing are used to understand the linguistic and rhetorical characteristics of learner production. Of
the four theoretical orientations of the field of L2 writing (Cumming, 2016), two have been productive
in discourse analyses of L2 disciplinary writing: contrastive/intercultural rhetoric and genre theory.

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 Bethany Gray and Chris Nuttall

Contrastive analyses of L2 disciplinary writing are common, and typically involve L2 disciplinary
texts being compared to L1 or “expert” texts that are viewed as a target for L2 writers. Contrastive ap-
proaches developed out of contrastive rhetoric (Kaplan, 1972), which posited that L2 writing tended
to contain certain rhetorical and syntactic characteristics, and that pedagogical practices could help
students move beyond those tendencies (Cumming, 2016). Over time, work by Connor (e.g., 2004)
shifted the discussion toward intercultural rhetoric, which focused more on differences across writ-
ers with different cultural backgrounds (Cumming, 2016). Contrastive approaches remain common,
despite criticisms that they prioritize L1 norms and position L2 writers under a “deficit” model of
language ability (see Lillis & Curry, 2016; Tribble, 2017).
Genre theory has long been seen as a fundamental component of writing studies, particularly as
learners take part in situated practice within disciplinary communities (Tardy, 2006; Tardy & Gevers,
Chapter 6 in this volume). Genre theory in L2 writing contexts focuses on “the conventional organi-
zation of types of texts, the discourse practices and knowledge, and the sequences of development
that L2 writers acquire and can be expected to perform” (Cumming, 2016, p. 72). The concept of
genre underlies all L2 disciplinary writing research; genres represent the types of texts learners need
to gain competence in and provide a pedagogical approach for grounding writing instruction in spe-
cific disciplinary contexts (Hyland, 2007).

Main research approaches in disciplinary discourses and second

language research

Approaches to discourse analysis

The predominant approach to discourse analysis in L2 disciplinary discourse research aligns with
Fairclough’s (2003) “textually-oriented discourse analysis,” based on the premise that “no real under-
standing of the social effects of discourse is possible without looking closely at what happens when
people talk or write” (p. 3). Although the focus is typically on observable linguistic and rhetorical
characteristics of texts, those discourse patterns are interpreted relative to the social functions of texts
using discourse-analytic methods that enable such explicit connections, including corpus linguistics
approaches, detailed analyses of individual texts, and genre analysis.
Corpus-based discourse analysis involves the collection of a sample of texts intended to represent
a larger discourse domain (called a “corpus,” plural “corpora”). That sample of texts is analyzed to
identify quantitative patterns of use alongside qualitative/functional interpretations of those patterns
(Gray & Biber, 2021). Lorés-Sanz (2011) exemplifies this quantitative/qualitative synergy, analyzing
the frequency of first-person pronouns in business management articles, followed by their functional
roles of (e.g., stating a goal/purpose, elaborating an argument). Specialized corpora representing
specific disciplines, genres/registers, and populations of learners are well suited to the goals of this
research. Corpus sizes vary widely, often corresponding to the degree of specialization of the cor-
pora, the extent to which analyses rely on manual vs. technology-facilitated processes, and specific
research traditions. For example, Pérez-Llantada’s (2014) study of lexical bundles is based on 1,056
research articles (RAs) in 12 disciplines, while Xu and Nesi (2019) base their analysis of engagement
on 30 L1 and L2 RA introductions/conclusions in applied linguistics.
Other textually oriented analyses of disciplinary discourse have carried out rich descriptions of
a restricted sample of texts and/or learners. For example, Geng and Wharton (2016) analyze twelve
L1 and L2 discussion sections from applied linguistics dissertations, manually annotating each for
engagement features. Restricted samples are common for analyses requiring extensive manual in-
terpretation, such as studies utilizing systems from systemic functional linguistics (SFL) (Geng &
Wharton, 2016; Lancaster, 2011) or Hyland’s (2005) model of engagement (see the section “What

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linguistic and rhetorical features are analyzed?”). These detailed analyses are sometimes supple-
mented with additional methods such as interviews (Fogal, 2020; Li & Schmitt, 2009), which enable
researchers to gain insight into the writer’s processes, attitudes, and genre awareness.
A third major type study is genre analysis, often following the EAP/ESP tradition established by
Swales (1990). This approach shifts focus to the rhetorical structuring of texts through the use of
“moves,” or segments of texts that fulfill specific rhetorical functions (e.g., “establishing a niche” or
“commenting on results”). Genre analyses are typically based on a few texts (Cheng, 2007 on three
article introductions written by one (post)graduate engineering student) or on small corpora (Shel-
don, 2019 on 54 RAs).
In the remainder of this section, we identify trends in L2 disciplinary discourse research based on
a review of 47 discourse studies. Our goal is to illustrate the breadth of research with a selection of
representative studies.1

What populations of L2 writers and genres/registers are analyzed?

Because disciplinary specialization typically occurs in higher-education/scholarly contexts, most re-
search has involved three populations of learners: (a) undergraduate students shifting from general
composition or ESL/EAP courses to content courses within their field of study; (b) students pursuing
advanced (post)graduate degrees; and (c) researchers disseminating their research in global contexts.
The genres/registers being analyzed correspond to the text types important for these populations,
which are typically collected from learners’ participations in the disciplinary community (rather than
texts elicited for assessment or general L2 writing research), leading to a high degree of ecological
validity.
Undergraduate disciplinary texts are typically produced for content-area courses and are varied
in terms of genre/register (e.g., research reports, critiques, case studies, and lab reports in Goulart,
2021). These papers are often sampled from specific populations, such as Ädel and Erman’s (2012)
collection of texts from courses in a local linguistics program. The development of publicly avail-
able corpora like the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus and the Michigan Corpus
of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP) have facilitated studies of undergraduate writing across
university disciplines (e.g., Staples et al., 2023). Because these corpora were collected by soliciting
texts from US and UK university students, most texts come from L1 writers, with smaller samples
for L2 writers from mixed-L1 backgrounds. Care must be taken to ensure adequate sample sizes and
the comparability of samples when multiple corpora are combined. For example, Larsson (2017)
extensively describes how texts were sampled from BAWE and MICUSP to represent L1 writers in
specific disciplines (linguistics, literature) and genres/registers (topic-based or thesis-driven papers)
to compare to a corpus of research-based papers in linguistics/literature by L1 Swedish writers.
Disciplinary discourse is of particular concern for (post)graduate students as they move toward
the role of disciplinary expert who contributes to knowledge-building in their field. Writing in the
discipline is important at multiple stages of graduate education: during graduate-level coursework, in
the culminating assessment for degree completion (i.e., theses/dissertations), and in moving toward
publication outside of educational contexts. Studies of graduate coursework writing are somewhat
common (e.g., Li & Schmitt, 2009), while a major focus has been placed on theses/dissertations as a
high-stakes genre that fulfills pedagogic functions as well as establishing the writer as a disciplinary
insider (Geng & Warton, 2016).
L2 English scholars writing for publication are a third major population of interest. This atten-
tion is not surprising, given the high stakes of publishing in peer-reviewed, international, English-
medium journals for scholars around the world with respect to success, retention, and promotion
in academia (Friginal & Mustafa, 2017). Discourse analyses of L2 writing for publication has thus

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 Bethany Gray and Chris Nuttall

almost exclusively focused on RAs (e.g., Ye, 2019), sometimes honing in on RA part-genres such
as abstracts (Friginal & Mustafa, 2017), introductions (Xu & Nesi, 2019), or discussion sections
(Sheldon, 2019).

What is the role of discipline in analysis and research design?

While it is obvious that “discipline” plays a major role in L2 disciplinary discourse research, it is
useful to address how “discipline” is accounted for in research design. Most common is a focus
on a single specific discipline (e.g., Lafuente-Millán, 2014 on business management; Ye, 2019 on
energy engineering) or disciplinary group2 (e.g., Yang, 2013 on “science,” encompassing biology,
agriculture, and medicine). Single-discipline studies avoid any confounding effect of discipline and
provide discipline-specific descriptions. A less common design includes multiple disciplines without
cross-disciplinary comparisons (e.g., Goulart, 2021; Pérez-Llantada, 2014). A third research design
includes multiple disciplines and systematic analyses of how discipline mediates discourse patterns
and/or L2 writing development. For example, Staples et al. (2023) found that while L2 undergraduate
writers in three disciplines showed similar developmental trajectories for several grammatical com-
plexity features, the mean frequencies of those features differed across disciplines; they argue that
because the L1 norms that L2 writers develop toward are different by discipline, disciplinarity must
be considered when interpreting writing development.

What linguistic and rhetorical features are analyzed?

The first type of study examines the use of various linguistic forms to carry out rhetorical or prag-
matic functions in texts. There has been substantial focus on the construction of “voice” in academic
discourse, or how “writers project an impression of themselves and of how they stand in relation to
their arguments, their community, and their readers” (Lorés-Sanz, 2011, p. 174), often through the
use of first-person pronouns or self-mentions (Walková, 2019). Other studies consider textual prac-
tices such as citation (Wette, 2017). Many studies have explored the expression of stance/evaluation
(the expression of the speaker/writer’s attitudes, evaluations, and level of commitment), including
through the use of specific lexicogrammatical devices that convey the writer’s evaluations (e.g.,
it is important to; Larsson, 2017), as well as modal verbs, epistemic adverbs, and phraseological
expressions that perform hedging functions (Yang, 2013). The SFL appraisal system is commonly
employed as an analytical and interpretative frame for understanding such language choices (Geng &
Wharton, 2016; Lin & Lau, 2021). A related construct is engagement, or how “writers relate to their
readers with respect to the positions advanced in the text” (Hyland, 2005, p. 176), following either
Hyland’s model of engagement (Lafuente-Millán, 2014) or the model of engagement included in the
SFL appraisal system (Xu & Nesi, 2019).
While the analytical foci discussed to this point have involved specific linguistic choices, the third
major type of study considers the rhetorical structuring of texts. This research has typically relied on
Swales’s (1990) approach to genre, in which discourse is described according to its use of rhetorical
“moves” (segments of texts performing specific rhetorical functions, such as “establishing a niche”
or “commenting on results”). For example, Sheldon (2019) uses a contrastive approach, showing that
L2 English writers “displayed hybridity” (p. 1) in their move structures within discussion/conclusion
RA sections, relying on patterns observed in both L1 English and L1 Spanish RAs.
Disciplinary discourse research has also considered two components of language that are asso-
ciated with advanced language proficiency: formulaic language and grammatical complexity. For-
mulaicity, or “the knowledge of conventionalized multi-word combinations” (Pérez-Llantada, 2014,
p. 84), is viewed as a marker of advanced language proficiency. Studies have analyzed the use of

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“lexical bundles,” continuous sequences of three or more words (e.g., the beginning of the, what I
want to) that recur frequently and across a range of texts. These studies have focused on the ability to
use formulaic language fluently and in pragmatically appropriate ways (e.g., Ädel & Erman, 2012).
Grammatical complexity has played an important role in L2 disciplinary discourse for two rea-
sons: its association with language proficiency and with empirically documented register- and dis-
cipline-based patterns of use (Biber et al., 2022). Within disciplinary writing research, the focus is
not only on the extent to which L2 writers produce more structurally complex language, but also
the extent to which they use the specific types of complexity features that are most characteristic of
highly informational academic discourse—that is, a greater reliance on phrasal complexity features
to create informationally dense discourse (e.g., adjectives, nouns, prepositional phrases, and nonfinite
clauses as noun modifiers; see Biber et al., 2022). Patterns of use in L2 disciplinary writing are also
analyzed in light of well-documented patterns of variation across disciplines, which rely on differ-
ent complexity features to varying extents (Biber et al., 2022; Gray, 2015). Thus, discipline-specific
competence includes the ability to construct discourse following patterns of use for particular fields
of study (e.g., Staples et al., 2023).

What types of research designs and comparisons are used?

Three main contrastive research designs are prevalent in disciplinary variation research (summarized
in Table 19.1). The three comparison types share an underlying goal of identifying the ways in which
L2 texts differ from L1/expert texts, so that instruction can target those aspects of disciplinary writing
and help L2 writers adopt the target norms (specific goals are indicated in Table 19.1).
Despite criticisms of contrastive approaches (see “Second language writing: Contrastive analysis
and genre theory”), L1 versus L2 comparisons remain common. However, researchers are beginning
to address criticisms by defining the ‘target’ by publication status, regardless of the native or nonna-
tive status of the authors. For example, Wang and Zhang (2021) compare L2 writers to an “expert”
corpus of articles in prestigious journals (including L1 and L2 writers), under the view that all the au-
thors in the latter group had “sufficient academic training and experience to publish in peer-reviewed
international journals” (p. 52). Other researchers have analyzed only L2 texts, acknowledging the
successes of L2 learners and the value of considering their discourse patterns in their own right (Lin
& Lau, 2021; Wette, 2017).
Most contrastive studies are cross-sectional (i.e., each group represents a different level or popu-
lation of writer), in part because of the challenges of collecting and analyzing longitudinal data (see
discussion in Biber et al., 2016). Indeed, only three of the 47 studies (6%) surveyed for this chapter

Table 19.1 Types of comparisons

Comparison Goal Example

L2 vs. L1 at the same Identify the impact of L2 status on Larsson (2017) on L1 and L2
level discourse characteristics writers in their third year of
university
L2 vs. L1 (or other Describe similarities/differences between L2 unpublished manuscripts vs.
“expert”) as a L2 texts and an ultimate goal/target published RAs (Wang & Zhang,
perceived higher target discourse 2021)
L1 English vs. L2 Describe similarities/differences between Walková (2019) on L1 English,
English vs. NL L2 texts and an ultimate goal/target L2 English (by native Slovakian
discourse, and identify potential transfer speakers), and L1 Slovakian RAs
from the L2 writer’s native language

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are longitudinal (Biber et al., 2016; Fogal, 2020; Li & Schmitt, 2009). Both perspectives are useful
and can offer insight into L2 discipline-specific writing skills. However, we hope to see an increase
in longitudinal designs that follow specific learners over time, observe changes in their discourse, and
potentially explore the processes of learning through additional methods like interviews and writing
journals (e.g., Fogal, 2020; Li & Schmitt, 2009).

Sample studies in disciplinary discourse and second language research

In this section, we summarize three sample studies of L2 disciplinary writing, selected because they
illustrate a range of approaches and methods. Table 19.2 provides an overview of these studies.

Lancaster (2011): Interpersonal stance in L1 and L2 economics coursework writing

Lancaster (2011) analyzed four papers from an undergraduate course in economics, considering how
writers construct interpersonal stance in policy papers about the economic consequences of antitrust
legal decisions. Lancaster utilized the Engagement framework within the appraisal system in SFL
to explore L1 and L2 writers’ use of dialogic expansion (i.e., resources that engage with alternative
perspectives/voices). The analyses of the texts were complemented by interviews with the instruc-
tor about the goals of the assignment and rationales for the grades assigned: the L1 papers received
high marks while the L2 papers received lower scores (language issues and a lack of sophisticated
argumentation).
All sentences in the papers were coded for dialogic expansion (e.g., endorsing and attributing
statements bring in others’ claims) or contraction (e.g., assertions limit engagement). Lancaster found
that all four papers relied more on dialogic expansion than on contraction. Yet the L1 papers had a
balance of expanding and contracting resources, with frequent use of “rhetorical pairs” in which an
expanding move is followed by a contracting move—bringing in others’ voices but then guiding the
reader back to the author’s own argument. These rhetorical pairs were largely absent from the L2
texts. In addition, one L2 paper seemed to lack “control over the discursive resources used to con-
struct an interpersonally engaged argumentative stance” (p. 17). Lancaster argues that these results

Table 19.2 Overview of sample studies

Population and Role of Linguistic/ Comparisons/ Framing

text types analyzed discipline rhetorical features research design
analyzed

Lancaster Undergraduate Single discipline Interpersonal L1 English WAC/WID

(2011) “policy papers” (economics) meanings through L2 English SFL
from economics engagement Four texts
course (pragmatics)
Pérez- Expert RAs Multiple Lexical bundles L1 English Contrastive
Llantada disciplines; no (formulaic L2 English analysis
(2014) disciplinary language) L1 Spanish L1 transfer
comparison Large-scale corpus
analysis
Biber et al. Undergraduate and Multiple; with Grammatical L2 English EAP
(2016) graduate-level disciplinary complexity Medium-size Developmental
coursework over comparisons corpus analysis; stages
two years longitudinal

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signal the need for WAC/WID courses to direct learners’ attention to the use of engagement features
to strike a balance in discourse that is dialogically engaging yet returns to an authoritative stance.

Pérez-Llantada (2014): Formulaic language in L1, L2, and NL research articles

Pérez-Llantada (2014) is a contrastive study of RAs analyzing to what extent L2 writers exhibit
“native-like mastery of idiomaticity” (p. 85), while also investigating interlanguage development and
L1 transfer of lexical bundles. The study was based on three subcorpora of 1,056 published RAs in 12
disciplines: (1) L1 English texts published in peer-reviewed journals; (2) L2 English texts published
in the same peer-reviewed journals whose authors’ first language was Spanish; and (3) L1 Spanish
RAs from Spanish-medium journals. From each subcorpus, Pérez-Llantada extracted four-word lexi-
cal bundles occurring at least 20 times per million words and in at least 10% of the texts, which were
then analyzed in terms of frequency, structural characteristics, and discourse function (distinguishing
between referential, text-organizing, and stance).
Pérez-Llantada found that “L2 writers’ bundle usage reflects a ‘hybrid’ formulaic profile, not fully na-
tive-like” (p. 89). Evidence of similarity included a set of core bundles (shared between all three corpora)
and overlapping bundles (shared between L1 and L2 English writers), with many exhibiting no significant
frequency differences (interpreted as demonstrating idiomatic production). However, Pérez-Llantada also
observed that bundles were acquired at different stages of interlanguage development, with L2 writers
exhibiting statistical overuse for some bundles (indicating near-proficiency), yet statistical underuse for
others (showing that native-like usage has not yet been achieved). Pérez-Llantada found minimal evidence
of L1 transfer (only 13 bundles shared between L2 English and L1 Spanish but not in L2 English), but an
underuse of “hedging” bundles (which limit the writer’s commitment to their propositions). This underuse
was interpreted as indicating a lack of pragmatic competence that “neither fully aligns with the pragmatics
of the target language nor with the pragmatics of the L2 writers’ native L1” (p. 93).

Biber et al. (2016): Longitudinal development of discipline-specific

grammatical complexity
Biber et al. (2016) carried out a longitudinal corpus-based analysis of 22 undergraduate and graduate
students, analyzing 148 writing assignments completed for content courses over a two-year period.
Based on the recognition that grammatical complexity is a marker of language proficiency, the study
is framed with respect to a series of hypothesized developmental stages, in which writers move
from clausal complexity features (which are more common in conversation) toward phrasal features
(which are more common in academic writing and function to create informationally dense, com-
pressed discourse styles) (see Biber et al., 2022).
The corpus contains texts in four disciplinary groups (business, humanities, social sciences, natu-
ral sciences) and a range of text types (e.g., case studies, informational essays, research reports). Four
complexity features that vary by structure type (phrasal vs. clausal) and syntactic function (clause
element vs. noun-phrase modifier) were analyzed: finite adverbial clauses (clausal, clause element),
finite relative clauses (clausal, modifier), attributive adjectives (phrasal, modifier), and nouns as pre-
nominal modifiers (phrasal, modifier). Biber et al. found that changes in the use of these features
generally followed predicted patterns of development: the clausal features decreased over time, while
phrasal modifiers increased. Yet these trends were mediated by both level (undergraduate vs. grad-
uate) and discipline (with clausal features remaining more frequent in humanities writing). Biber
et al. argue that despite the complications of longitudinal research designs of coursework writing, the
greater ecological validity of such studies makes them worthwhile contributions to our understanding
of how language develops as students pursue specific fields of study.

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Implications for second language learning, teaching, and use

Analyses of learner disciplinary discourse provide an understanding of the characteristics of L2 texts
and identify learning needs within specific contexts (Manchón & Williams, 2016). These studies
are thus typically framed relative to second language learning and teaching (with less focus on the
traditional concerns of SLA proper) and express a motivation to inform pedagogy and facilitate the
acculturation of L2 writers.
In this section, we take a broad view of the major takeaways from this body of research, which
has provided evidence of systematic differences between L1 and L2 disciplinary writing while also
demonstrating that achieving high levels of competence in disciplinary discourse norms is an attain-
able goal (e.g., Ye, 2019).
This research has shown that many L2 texts exhibit a use of rhetorical and pragmatic features that is
still developing to approximate the norms of the discipline, often using such features in similar ways to
L1 writers but with less rhetorical complexity and nuance. For example, L2 writers exhibit similarities
to L1 writers with respect to rhetorical organization/move structures, but often with less complex rhetor-
ical patterns (Sheldon, 2019). Studies on stance, engagement, and voice have shown a fairly consistent
underuse of hedging strategies by L2 writers (Pérez-Llantada, 2014; Yang, 2013), less complex/bal-
anced strategies for engaging with others’ versus the writers’ own views (Lancaster, 2011; Xu & Nesi,
2019), and differences in the specific linguistic realizations of pragmatic features (Yang, 2013). Within
formulaic language, L2 writers (particularly at lower levels) are found to use a more restricted set of
lexical bundles, often with less varied rhetorical functions (Ädel & Erman, 2012). While some research-
ers attribute such differences to the need for instruction on rhetorical/pragmatic/phraseological concerns
to make such resources salient to learners, others raise the possibility that language proficiency may
play a role. For example, Xu and Nesi (2019, p. 132) suggest that L2 writers “might not have had access
to all of the lexicogrammatical resources available to [L1] authors” to carry out balanced engagement
strategies, a perspective echoed by other researchers (e.g., Lafuente-Millán, 2014; Lancaster, 2011).
The concept of “transfer” has also been considered in L2 disciplinary research, including (a) evi-
dence that general language proficiency, writing ability, and genre knowledge can transfer to discipline-
specific discourse needs (e.g., Cheng, 2007), and (b) the notion that language features and/or discourse
patterns from the learner’s L1 can be reflected in L2 production. While Pérez-Llantada (2014) found
little L1 transfer for lexical bundles in published research articles, rhetorical/pragmatic transfer has been
observed with respect to rhetorical organization (Sheldon, 2019), the construction of voice through first-
person pronouns (Lorés-Sanz, 2011), and self-mention and hedging (Walková, 2019).
Much L2 disciplinary writing research is seen as having the potential to directly inform writing in-
struction, particularly through genre-based pedagogy that allows teachers to “ground their courses in
the texts that students will need to write in occupational, academic, or social contexts” (Hyland, 2007,
p. 149). Indeed, most studies reviewed in this chapter include specific pedagogical recommendations.
Researchers point to the potential for genre-based teaching to provide opportunities for learners to
participate in noticing and rhetorical consciousness-raising, develop explicit metalinguistic knowl-
edge, and otherwise engage in complex language learning processes that will promote additional
language acquisition and internalization (Hyland, 2007; Manchón & Williams, 2016).
Despite few explicit connections to SLA proper, the characterizations of L2 discourse made pos-
sible by analyses of disciplinary texts can only help SLA researchers’ efforts to understand interlan-
guage development, and these studies support a view of L2 writing as consisting of “rich sites where
important additional learning takes place” (Ortega, 2012, p. 405). Thus, we join in calls for increased
attention to the potential interfaces between SLA and these research traditions, including L2 writing
(Manchón & Williams, 2016; Ortega, 2012), WAC/WID (Cox & Zawacki, 2011), and learner corpus
research (McEnery et al., 2019).

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The relationship between L2 writing and SLA is not without “ontological and epistemological
tensions” (Ortega, 2012, p. 404). Manchón and Williams (2016) characterize L2 writing and SLA as
having developed along parallel paths, with L2 writing having a primary focus on “the development
of arguments, text structure, genre, and voice” and SLA on “how language develops and how to
facilitate and accelerate acquisition” (p. 567). Yet Ortega (2012) and Manchón and Williams (2016)
also recognize potential intersections of SLA and L2 writing, including an increased exploration of
L2 proficiency and its role in writing development, the potential for writing (including disciplinary
writing) to facilitate language learning, and the fit between sociocultural theories of acquisition and
the development of disciplinary discourse. In addition, studies of formulaic language in discipline-
specific contexts offer a potential intersection with cognitive and usage-based theories of SLA that
link frequency of use to language learning and acquisition.

Future directions for disciplinary discourse and second language research

Despite a robust body of research on L2 development of disciplinary discourse, several areas of po-
tential growth can extend our understanding of this stage of language learning.

Broadening the disciplinary focus

There is a need to extend the disciplinary focus of this research by (a) diversifying the disciplines ana-
lyzed, and (b) integrating more disciplinary comparisons to explore how development is mediated by
field of study. Of the 47 empirical studies surveyed, 32 (68%) analyzed a single discipline—a logical
research design, given that discipline is a major predictor of linguistic and rhetorical variation, and
that EAP researchers often want to learn about specific groups of L2 writers and disciplines in order
to inform particular teaching contexts. Thus, analyses of single disciplines will likely continue to be
a major research design within the field.
However, more efforts should be made to diversify the disciplines being studied: almost half (15)
of the 32 single-discipline studies focused on (applied) linguistics or a related subfield. This over-
representation may in part be pragmatic: linguists likely have better access to L2 texts in language-
related fields, and they have the background knowledge needed to understand the subject matter
and the discourse practices of the community. Yet there are many other disciplines with substantial
populations of L2 learners: more than half of international students in US universities enroll in engi-
neering, math and computer science, or business management (Institute of International Education,
2021), with similar trends observed in the UK. Expanding disciplinary representation can increase
the impact of this research, although it is likely that further collaboration with disciplinary experts
will be needed.
In addition, more research that compares L2 writers in multiple disciplines can provide a better
understanding of whether discourse patterns that vary by discipline have differential impacts on de-
velopment. For example, are the discourse practices of some disciplines more different from general
EAP writing than others, and what does this mean for the learning and teaching of writing in these
fields? We have initial evidence that development varies by discipline (e.g., Staples et al., 2023), but
such studies are comparatively rare.

Increased focus on earlier development

The research reviewed in this chapter has shown a substantial focus on (post)graduate student and
expert disciplinary writing, with comparatively fewer studies on undergraduate writing, despite the
undergraduate years being a key developmental period when L2 learners begin to pursue disciplinary

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specializations. Corpora like BAWE and MICUSP have been important resources for studying under-
graduate disciplinary writing, although much of this research has disregarded L1/L2 status or focused
primarily on L1 writers. Researchers are beginning to make more L1-vs.-L2 comparisons using these
corpora (e.g., Goulart, 2021; Staples et al., 2023), but analyses are often restricted due to the much
smaller and unequal sample sizes for L2 writers.

Extensions to spoken disciplinary discourse

We will conclude this chapter with a call for increased attention to spoken discourse. As this chapter
has shown, discussions of L2 disciplinary writing have dominated. Yet many L2 learners also need
to develop competence in the spoken discourses within their fields. We have preliminary work on the
communication of disciplinary knowledge through speech, such as L2 thesis defense sessions (Lin &
Lau, 2021), lectures in an L2 (Crawford Camiciottoli, 2004), and 3-Minute-Thesis (3MT) presenta-
tions (Hu & Liu, 2018). These studies offer important frameworks that could be used to explore L2
spoken disciplinary discourse and contribute to our understanding of how L2 speakers communicate
disciplinary content in oral modes.

Notes
1 The full list of reviewed studies can be obtained by contacting the first author.
2 These broader conceptualizations of “discipline” are based on the premise that specific disciplines that share
related epistemologies and subject matter will also share discoursal characteristics.

Further reading
Cox, M., & Zawacki, T. (Eds.). (2011). WAC and second language writing: Cross-field research, theory, and
program development [Special Issue]. Across the Disciplines, 8(4). https://wac.colostate.edu/atd/special/ell/.
This special issue of Across the Disciplines brings together WAC/WID scholars and SLA specialists to demon-
strate the potential connections between the fields. Articles in the special issue focus on contextual issues such as
attitudes and L2 services, carry out discourse analyses of L1 and L2 student writing in a WAC course, and propose
synergies between SLA and WAC/WID (see especially the article by Hall & Navarro on register acquisition).
Hyland, K. & Shaw, P. (Eds.). (2016). The Routledge handbook of English for academic purposes. Routledge.
This handbook provides a broad overview of EAP, including discussion of the history and underlying theo-
ries. Perhaps most relevant to L2 disciplinary discourses research is Hyland’s chapter, which contrasts how
English for general academic purposes and English for specific academic purposes view language ability and
competence, and highlights the importance of discipline-specific EAP instruction. Subsequent chapters provide
excellent discussion of the many research methods employed in L2 disciplinary discourse studies.
Manchón, R., & Matsuda, P. (Eds.). (2016). Handbook of second and foreign language writing. De Gruyter
Mouton.
This handbook provides a comprehensive overview of issues related to second and foreign language writing,
with chapters devoted to the theoretical orientations of L2 writing studies (Cumming), writing in higher educa-
tion (Ferris), language development in L2 writing (Polio & Park), the connections between L2 writing and SLA
theory (Manchón & Williams), and academic publishing (Lillis & Curry).

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jeap.2019.01.007

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 20
METADISCOURSE AND SECOND
LANGUAGE RESEARCH
Victor Ho

Introduction
This chapter takes on the challenge of reporting and discussing second language research and meta-
discourse, with the latter being widely regarded as a fuzzy concept that is difficult to define explicitly
and pin down easily (Nash, 1992; Swales, 1990). Continued effort has been made to address this
fuzziness to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of the concept (e.g., Ädel, 2006; Hyland,
2017; Mauranen, 1993). Despite its fuzziness, metadiscourse is regarded as a key resource for writ-
ers to interact with readers (Hyland, 2005; Thompson, 2001), and is also used as an analytical tool
for decoding writers’ intentions and communicative purposes (Abdi, 2002; Fu, 2012; Ho & Zhang,
2021). The challenge also originates from the scarcity of research into metadiscourse and second
language acquisition—while we have accumulated a sizable knowledge of metadiscourse and its use
in various genres (the academic ones in particular), our understanding of the teaching and learning of
metadiscourse in a second language context is comparatively limited.
The chapter will give a brief overview of metadiscourse (its history and definitions), followed by a
review of the studies that investigate metadiscourse and second language acquisition, a term defined
in this chapter as the teaching and learning of a second language. The review will lead us to the im-
plications for second language learning, teaching, and use. Finally, suggestions for further research
on the topic will be made.

Overview of metadiscourse

What is metadiscourse?
Not surprisingly, metadiscourse has been defined in a number of different ways, probably reflecting
its fuzziness. Williams (1981, p. 226) gave a rather all-inclusive definition which states that meta-
discourse is “whatever does not refer to the subject matter being addressed.” Vande Kopple (1985,
p. 83) highlighted the functions of metadiscourse in his more specific definition: “discourse about
discourse or communication about communication” and pointed out that it “help(s) our readers or-
ganize, classify, interpret, evaluate, and react to such material.” Metadiscourse was conceptualized
as performing both a textual function—one that helps the formation of a cohesive and coherent
text—and an interpersonal function—one that expresses writer’s/speaker’s personalities and attitude

DOI: 10.4324/9781003177579-22 255

 Victor Ho

toward the text and the readers. Vande Kopple’s (1985) definition of metadiscourse was later criti-
cized for having “wrongly characterized” metadiscourse for two main reasons (Hyland & Tse, 2004,
p. 156). First, the authors argued that textual metadiscourse not only created textual links, but also
“construed both propositional and interpersonal aspects into a linear and coherent whole” (Hyland
& Tse, 2004, p. 162). Second, they argued against the textual–interpersonal distinction and proposed
that all metadiscourse was interpersonal in nature as it “takes account of the readers’ knowledge,
textual experiences, and processing needs” (Hyland & Tse, 2004, p. 161). Following Hyland (2000),
they defined metadiscourse as “the linguistic resources used to organize a discourse or the writer’s
stance toward either its content or the reader” (Hyland & Tse, 2004, p. 157). Hyland (2005, p. 37)
continued to adopt an interpersonal approach to metadiscourse and defined it as “the cover term for
the self-reflective expressions used to negotiate interactional meanings in a text, assisting the writer
(or speaker) to express a viewpoint and engage with readers as members of a particular community.”
This definition emphasized reflexivity as in “self-reflective expressions,” text-internality as in “ne-
gotiate interactional meanings in a text,” and writer–reader interaction as in “engage with readers.”
Ädel (2006, p. 20) defined metadiscourse as “text about the evolving text, or the writer’s explicit
commentary on her own ongoing discourse,” and the use of it signaled the writer’s intention to “talk
about themselves and/or the discourse” (Zhang, 2022, p. 3).

Approaches to researching metadiscourse

There are two prevalent approaches to metadiscourse, the integrative approach and the nonintegrative
approach (Mauranen, 1993), or alternatively, the broad/interpersonal approach and the narrow/reflex-
ive approach respectively. The former sees metadiscourse as “the ways writers organize a coherent
text and convey their attitudes to what is discussed in the text,” while the latter “talks of ‘discourse
reflexivity’ and restricts its focus to the way discourse talks about the on-going discourse itself”
(Jiang & Hyland, 2018, p. 510). As we will see later in this chapter, the integrative approach, which
has probably been mostly represented by Hyland’s (2005) interpersonal model of metadiscourse, has
been the more popular one among researchers.

Hyland’s (2005) interpersonal model of metadiscourse

Probably the most representative metadiscourse model deriving from the broad approach is Hyland’s
(2005) interpersonal model of metadiscourse, represented in Figure 20.1.
According to Hyland’s (2005) model, there are two broad categories of metadiscourse, namely in-
teractive and interactional. With interactive metadiscourse, a writer can guide the reader through the
text by: (1) showing the reader the logical relations between main clauses, thus making the writer’s
line of arguments clear (with transitions); (2) spelling out the discursive acts that the writer is per-
forming or about to perform, allowing the reader to tell more readily what they can expect from the
writer (with frame markers); (3) telling the reader where in the text they should go for relevant infor-
mation that will facilitate comprehension (with endophoric markers); (4) telling the reader where the
information in question is originated from, allowing the reader to locate the source when necessary
(with evidentials); and (5) elaborating propositional meanings, providing the reader with additional
information for easy understanding (with code glosses).
With interactional metadiscourse, a writer can involve the reader in the text, interact with them,
and turn them into active participants of the discourse, thereby co-constructing the meaning of the
text. The writer can do so by: (1) withholding his/her commitment to a proposition, thereby showing
his/her awareness of the alternative positions/views held by the readers who are welcome to put forth
such positions/views (with hedges); (2) emphasizing certainty about a proposition, thereby showing

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Figure 20.1 Hyland’s (2005, p. 49) interpersonal model of metadiscourse

the reader his/her authority and confidence, building solidarity with those holding a similar posi-
tion, but at the same time fending off alternative views (with boosters); (3) expressing affective (not
epistemic) attitude to a proposition, again allowing the writer to build solidarity with the reader (with
attitude markers); (4) making explicit reference to the writer him-/herself, reminding the reader of
his/her presence in the text and highlighting the agency of the discursive action involved (with self-
mentions); and (5) drawing the reader directly into the text by making them perform various cognitive
acts such as answering a question or recalling a particular experience (with engagement markers).
Metadiscourse use—its patterns and functions—in various academic genres has been one of the
most extensively researched topics among scholars of metadiscourse and English for academic or
specific purposes for the past few decades. Research interest in its use has been particularly strong
in the academic genre of research articles (e.g., Çandarlı et al., 2015; Hu & Cao, 2015; Mur-Dueñas,
2011), university students’ academic essays and dissertations (e.g., Hyland, 2004; Lee & Deakin,
2016; Li & Wharton, 2012), and second language acquisition (e.g., Basturkmen & Randow, 2014;
Crosthwaite & Jiang, 2017; Wu & Paltridge, 2021). The rest of the chapter will highlight this connec-
tion between metadiscourse and second language use and acquisition.

Main research methods in metadiscourse and second language research

Extant research of metadiscourse and second language research has the following main objectives:

1 Evaluate the effect of explicit teaching of metadiscourse on learners’ linguistic performance in

writing, speaking, and reading.
2 Trace the developmental change in learners’ use of metadiscourse as learners advance from lower
to higher stages of academic achievement.

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3 Compare the patterns of use of metadiscourse by ESL/EFL learners of different proficiency and
performance levels.
4 Compare the patterns of use of metadiscourse by L1 and L2 writers of English.
5 Determine the role of metadiscourse in learners’ linguistic performance in reading and listening
comprehension.

To fulfill the above objectives, basically a quantitative research method employing various statisti-
cal tests is used. (Quasi-)experiments are conducted to determine whether subjects demonstrate any
significant changes as a result of some form of intervention. Alternatively, essays written by students
of L1 and L2, at different stages of their academic pursuits or of different proficiency and perfor-
mance levels, are analyzed from a corpus-based contrastive approach to determine the relationship
between these variables and the use of metadiscourse. The details of these methods and their actual
execution will be provided in the next section.

Sample studies in metadiscourse and second language research

The criteria for the selection of papers for review in this chapter are basically:

1 They are seminal studies of the metadiscourse and second language research field (e.g., Ädel,
2006; Cheng & Steffensen, 1996; Mauranen, 2003).
2 They were updated—that is, published—in the recent past (e.g., Fife, 2018; Ho & Li, 2018; Wu
& Paltridge, 2021).
3 They demonstrated clearly the adoption to the main research methods in metadiscourse and sec-
ond language research (e.g., Aull & Lancaster, 2014; Crosthwaite & Jiang, 2017).
4 They extended the main line of research by including L2s other than English (e.g., Liao, 2020;
Ryshina-Pankova, 2011).

Despite the author’s strict observance to these criteria, some studies that are equally worthy of
inclusion for review and discussion may not appear in this chapter, probably due to the author’s
oversight and the word limit constraint. The studies included in the present chapter are therefore not
exhaustive.

Effect of metadiscourse instruction on second language acquisition

Research into the effect of metadiscourse instruction on second language acquisition has mainly
adopted a quasi-experimental method: assigning learners to a control group and an experimental
group where they received differential instructions, the administration of a pre-test and post-test,
followed by a statistical computation of the differences between these two groups in terms of their
language performance. Effectively, two papers set the scene for investigating the effect of teaching of
metadiscourse on second language acquisition, namely Steffensen and Cheng (1996) and Cheng and
Steffensen (1996). Adopting a quasi-experimental design, Steffensen and Cheng (1996) and Cheng
and Steffensen (1996) reported on a seminal study they conducted, using first-year undergraduate
students of a large university in the United States as subjects. Two classes of composition, the con-
trol class (CC) and the experimental class (EC), participated in the study. Students of both classes
produced pre- and post-treatment papers. While the CC was taught to write using only the process
method, the EC was also introduced to the concept of metadiscourse through reading theoretical
articles on text analysis and metadiscourse. The teaching of metadiscourse emphasized the goal of
writing, which was to persuade readers to believe and agree with the writer, and to do what the writer

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wanted them to. Students were led to appreciate the importance of considering readers’ perspec-
tives and needs. Quantitative analysis using t-test found that the EC class scored significantly higher
grades in the post-treatment essays than the CC class, and qualitative analysis revealed that the EC
class essays showed more effective use of metadiscourse, allowing the writers to better accommodate
readers’ perspectives and needs.
Research into the effect of metadiscourse instruction on EFL learners’ writing continues. Modeled
upon Cheng and Steffensen (1996) and Steffensen and Cheng (1996), subsequent studies also adopted
a quasi-experimental design whereby homogenous participants were assigned to either the control
group or the experimental group, which then underwent differential training on writing. The metadis-
course-enriched training—during which the categories and functions of metadiscourse were taught
explicitly to the participants—for the experimental group usually made reference to Hyland’s (2005)
interpersonal model of metadiscourse. The subjects of most of these studies were EFL learners, such
as undergraduates majoring in English or a related discipline or students preparing for IELTS exami-
nation (e.g., Dastjerdi & Shirzad, 2010; Firoozjahantigh et al., 2021; Kaya & Sofu, 2020), and EFL
teachers (e.g., Abdelrahim & Abdelrahim, 2020). Both the control group and the experimental group
attempted pre- and post-training writing tasks. Participants’ performance in the task, analyzed sta-
tistically using mainly t-test, generally reflected a statistically significant difference between the two
groups with the experimental group outperforming the control group, suggesting the importance of
EFL learners’/teachers’ knowledge of metadiscourse as well as that of explicit metadiscourse instruc-
tion in academic training contexts.
The quasi-experimental method has also been used to study the effect of metadiscourse instruction
on learners’ acquisition of speaking and reading skills (e.g., Ahour & Maleki, 2014; Behnam &
Babapour, 2015; Jalififar & Alipour, 2007; Jalififar & Shooshtari, 2011). Similarly to the above stud-
ies, homogenous EFL learners (university students enrolled in associate degree or bachelor’s degree
programs, and language institute students enrolled in English language courses) were assigned to
either the control group or the experimental group, with the latter receiving explicit metadiscourse
instruction. Reading comprehension or speaking tasks, instead of writing tasks, were used in the
pre- and post-treatment tests and the results were also analyzed to determine whether the learners’
differences in performance in both tests were statistically significant. Learners who had received
metadiscourse instruction were found to perform significantly better in the reading and speaking
post-tests in both academic and general contexts, suggesting a positive effect of metadiscourse on the
learners’ acquisition of reading and speaking skills.
Methods other than quasi-experiments have also been used in metadiscourse and second lan-
guage research (e.g., Fife, 2018; Thompson, 2001). Thompson (2001) demonstrated how the effect
of metadiscourse instruction on EFL learners’ second language acquisition could be qualitatively
investigated. Students participating in the study had individual discussions with the researcher
about their essays. During the discussion, the presence of “reader-in-the-text” (Thompson, 2001,
p. 60) was brought to the students’ attention and the resources (metadiscourse in particular) that
student writers could use to bring in the reader’s view in order to later contradict it were high-
lighted, enabling students to use the Hypothetical-Real argument structure more effectively in their
academic essays.
Similar to Thompson (2001), Fife (2018) attempted to teach metadiscourse in a more personal
if less structured way. The participants in the research were required to read a number of research
articles and asked to focus particularly on metadiscourse categories that served to convey the writer’s
stance and intention to engage with readers. Discussions with the researcher were organized to facili-
tate learners’ understanding of the metadiscourse concept. Subsequently, the learners were required
to analyze their own writings and those of a scholar in their discipline to identify the metadiscourse
used to express stance. Through such intervention, students became aware of their own style of

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writing—how they expressed stance, evaluated the sources they cited, and used hedges appropriately
(in strengthening their writing by qualifying their claims) or inappropriately (by making their writing
seem weak).

Developmental changes in academic writers’ use of metadiscourse

Studies concerning the developmental changes in EFL learners’ use of metadiscourse, as we will
see in the two sub-sections that follow, were also to a very large extent writing oriented. Learners’
patterns of use of metadiscourse in their written texts produced at different stages of their learning
path were determined and compared to one another quantitatively and/or qualitatively. These studies,
predominantly corpus-based, adopted either a longitudinal approach tracking the development of the
same group of learners (Crosthwaite & Jiang, 2017; Wu & Paltridge, 2021) or a cross-sectional ap-
proach determining the metadiscourse use patterns of different groups of academic writers at different
stages of their academic career (Aull & Lancaster, 2014; Mauranen, 2003; Ryshina-Pankova, 2011).
Let us focus on some of the seminal studies in the next subsection.

Studies adopting the longitudinal approach

Two corpus-based studies with a particular focus on stance (realized through hedges, boosters, atti-
tude markers, and self-mentions) will be reported here. The data of the first study consisted of 20 MA
dissertations and 20 PhD theses written by the same 20 students (Wu & Paltridge, 2021). An MA dis-
sertation corpus and a PhD thesis corpus were created and annotated using AntConc. Quantitatively,
paired-samples t-tests were run using the normalized frequencies of occurrence of the four categories
of stance markers. Qualitatively, stance features were read manually to determine whether the stu-
dents exhibited a developmental path in the use of stance expressions. Despite the absence of statisti-
cally significant differences between the two corpora in the use of stance markers, PhD students were
found to be modestly more sophisticated in stance making in that they relied less on boosters, used a
wider range of attitude markers, and demonstrated an increased ability to assert positions.
The other longitudinal study examined undergraduate students’ academic essays and was con-
ducted in the context of a 14-week English for academic purposes course in a Hong Kong university,
where metadiscourse instruction was provided (Crosthwaite & Jiang, 2017). It differed from those
reported in the subsection above in that it was not experimental in nature. Undergraduate students re-
ceived metadiscourse instruction by reading examples of stance-related metadiscourse used in essays
and reports, first studying summaries that explained the importance of stance features to successful
academic writing and then a summary that provided supporting evidence for a stance. Three corpora
of student essays were created, coded, and analyzed using the UAM CorpusTool—the first corpus
contained essays collected in Week 1, the second those from Week 10, and the third those from Week
14. A total of 87 students contributed their essays. Statistical analysis using the Log-Likelihood test
and Kruskal–Wallis test found that students used a smaller number of stance markers overall as a
result of the EAP instruction. They were better able to present their academic arguments with the
combination of hedges and more “appropriate” boosters (Crosthwaite & Jiang, 2017, p. 104).

Studies taking a cross-sectional approach

Three studies will be reported in this subsection. The first study investigated secondary socializa-
tion in university from a developmental perspective, with a particular focus on how individuals
were socialized into reflexive discourse. More precisely, it examined how individuals embarking
on an academic career used metadiscourse at different rungs of the academic ladder—from senior

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undergraduate students to senior faculty (Mauranen, 2003). The Michigan Corpus of Academic Spo-
ken English (MICASE) corpus was searched for reflexive expressions including claim, argue, issue,
and observe to first determine their frequency of use and the speech situations in which they were
used. It was found that individuals demonstrated different patterns of use of metadiscourse as they
ascended the academic ladder, suggesting the occurrence of a socialization into reflexive discourse.
Aull and Lancaster (2014), like Mauranen (2003), examined the use of certain metadiscourse
subcategories by individuals at three different stages of the academic journey—first-year university
students, upper undergraduate and early graduate students, and scholars. Three corpora comprising
writings produced by each of the three groups were analyzed by AntConc. The first-year corpus
comprised 4,032 essays with more than 3.5 million words in total; the more advanced student corpus
comprised 615 papers with more than 1.3 million words in total; and COCA (Corpus of Contempo-
rary American English)was used as the scholar corpus comprising more than 91 million words in to-
tal. The three corpora were searched for all potential metadiscursive items, which were then manually
examined in their respective contexts—the concordance lines where they were found—to determine
whether they really performed a metadiscursive function. Comparison of the frequency of occurrence
of markers of various metadiscourse subcategories (normalized at 100,000 words) showed that four
subcategories recorded developmental changes, namely approximative hedges, approximative boost-
ers, code glosses, and adversative/contrast transitions. More advanced academic writers were able to
construct a stance that projected precision and awareness of complexity (both textual and interper-
sonal) with more use of hedges, code glosses, concessive/counter transitions, and less use of boosters.
Differing from the other studies reported in this chapter, the one by Ryshina-Pankova (2011) had
German instead of English as the learners’ L2. The study investigated acquisition of interactional
resources by analyzing foreign language (FL) book reviews written by American learners of German
at three curricular levels (from early advanced to advanced). The interactional resources in the theme
position of the clauses were identified. A total of 55 FL timed book reviews written by FL students,
German majors, and nonmajors were analyzed qualitatively to identify first the moves of the review.
The evaluation move, which normally consisted of the most interpersonal elements, was then further
analyzed qualitatively to identify the themes of the clauses. Results indicated that more advanced
learners showed a higher level of sophistication in interacting with readers as they used fewer per-
sonal pronouns referring to the author of the text, and preferred thematizing readers, which resulted
in more effective involvement of the audience and more convincing arguments for reading a book.
The above studies, both longitudinal and cross-sectional, reported changes in learners’ patterns
of use of metadiscourse in their writing as they progressed through their different learning paths,
whether these consisted of formal EAP/FL training or informal socialization processes through ex-
posure to and participation in various academic activities. All such changes suggest acquisition of
second language (metadiscourse in particular).

Patterns of use of metadiscourse by learners at different language proficiency and

performance levels
While the last subsection focuses on the metadiscourse use patterns of academic writers at different
stages of their learning path, this subsection focuses on these patterns in the case of EFL learners
who differ in their language (writing) proficiency levels. The different patterns observed, if any,
would allow us to peep into the relation between metadiscourse use and L2 writing proficiency level,
which reflects at least partially the extent of language acquisition. Five studies will be included in
our discussion.
Intaraprawat and Steffensen (1995) examined a total of 12 (the six best and six worst) out of 47
essays written by a group of ESL students enrolled in a university in the United States. The use of

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metadiscourse in these good and poor essays was identified with reference to vande Kopple’s (1985)
system of metadiscourse. The good essays were found to contain more categories of metadiscourse,
a wider range of metadiscourse vocabulary and syntactic constructions, a higher percentage of inter-
personal features, and a lower percentage of textual features.
The second study analyzed essays produced by ESL learners during the Cambridge English Gen-
eral English examinations (Bax et al., 2019). A total of 900 essays of a descriptive, expository, and
argumentative nature—300 each from the three highest levels, B2, C1, and C2—were selected for
analysis by drawing upon Hyland and Tse’s (2004) taxonomy of metadiscourse. The normalized fre-
quencies of occurrence of metadiscourse markers (per 100 words) were computed statistically using
first Kruskal–Wallis tests and then Mann–Whitney U tests. Results indicated that the more proficient
learners, when compared to the less proficient ones, used fewer but a wider variety of metadiscourse
markers, and abandoned highly frequent text connectives in favor of other markers.
Adopting a mixed-method approach, Ho and Li (2018) examined the use of metadiscourse in
181 first-year university students’ essays produced during the examination of a university language
course in Hong Kong. Quantitatively, the correlation between the scores awarded to the content,
language, and organization (and the overall total) of an essay and the frequency of use of the
various subcategories of metadiscourse was determined. Qualitatively, the ways in which meta-
discourse was used by high-rated and low-rated essays were explored. The correlational analysis
found that only hedges, attitude markers, and engagement markers had significant correlation with
the scores. The 10 highest-rated and 10 lowest-rated essays were picked for qualitative analysis.
It was found that writers of the high-rated essays outperformed those of the low-rated ones in
three ways. First, they had a larger repertoire of metadiscourse expressions, with both simple and
complex constructions, and they were more skillful at deploying such resources in a stylish man-
ner. Second, they could make effective appeals to logos, ethos, and pathos with grammatical and
appropriate metadiscourse expressions, thereby enhancing the persuasiveness of their arguments.
Third, they could more effectively manage the interaction between and reinforcement of metadis-
course markers.
The fourth study was distinct from the others in that the learners involved were native speakers
of English learning Chinese (Liao, 2020). A total of 62 timed descriptive essays were produced by
the learners at three different proficiency levels: novice, intermediate, and advanced, according to the
proficiency scale of American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. The essays were ana-
lyzed to find out learners’ metadiscourse use patterns at different proficiency levels by drawing upon
mainly Hyland’s (2005) model. Since Chinese was the language being studied, some adaptations
were made, including the noninclusion of features that were not related to the Chinese language, such
as cohesions that concerned aspect and tense. Lexical and semantic overlap, because of the absence
of a Chinese-compatible computerized tool for its analysis, was also excluded from the analysis. A
one-way MANOVA test was run to determine the statistical significance of the differences found be-
tween frequencies of use of various metadiscourse categories by the learners at different proficiency
levels. Results indicated that the more proficient learners used interactive metadiscourse more accu-
rately, applied more frame markers and engagement markers, and expressed conditional/hypothetical
meaning more frequently.
Also distinct from other studies, Lee and Deakin’s (2016) study involved a comparison not only
between ESL learners at different proficiency levels, but also between ESL learners and advanced
L1 English university students. Three corpora of untimed student writing were created and ana-
lyzed: 25 successful ESL essays, 25 less-successful ESL essays, and 25 successful L1 English es-
says. The ESL essays were written by Chinese students enrolled in a university in the United States,
and the L1 papers were extracted from the Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MI-
CUSP, 2009). Interactional metadiscourse markers were identified in these essays with reference

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to Hyland’s (2005) model. The normalized frequencies of occurrence of the various subcategories
of interactional metadiscourse markers identified in each of the three corpora (normalized to oc-
currences per 1,000 words) were then computed using a Chi-square test to determine the statistical
significance of the differences observed. It was found that the pattern of use of interactional meta-
discourse of more proficient writers (those of successful ESL essays) closely resembled that of the
more proficient L1 writers—they both used hedges more frequently than the less proficient ESL
writers (those of less-successful ESL essays). ESL writers, regardless of their writing proficiency,
were found to be more resistant to demarcating their authorial presence (i.e., the use of self-men-
tions was infrequent) in their texts.

Benchmarking ESL learners’ metadiscourse use patterns against those of

native speakers
Native speakers’ metadiscourse use patterns have been used as a benchmark for ESL learners. Three
corpus-based studies will be included in this subsection.
Crismore, Markkanen, and Steffensen (1993) conducted a cross-cultural study of metadiscourse
use by American and Finnish university students. A total of 40 persuasive texts written by 40 upper-
level undergraduate or graduate students (10 males and females from each country) within the age
range of early 20s to early 30s, with a comparable perceived level of writing competence and writing
confidence, were analyzed by drawing upon vande Kopple’s (1985) classification of metadiscourse.
The major findings indicated both cultural and gender differences in the use of metadiscourse: (1)
Finnish students and male students used more metadiscourse than American students and female stu-
dents; and (2) Finnish male students used the most interpersonal metadiscourse while the American
male students used the least.
Hyland and Milton (1997) compared the way ESL students and L1 students expressed commit-
ments and certainty in their writing. Two corpora were created and analyzed. One corpus consisted
of 900 scripts produced by Cantonese-speaking individuals during the GCE A-level Use of English
examination, and the other 770 scripts written by British school leavers of a similar age and education
level as the Cantonese-speaking individuals. A total of 75 most frequently occurring epistemic lexi-
cal items in native speaker academic writing were searched for in the two corpora to determine their
respective frequencies of occurrence. Results indicated that in an examination context, ESL learners
used a more limited range of metadiscursive expressions (hedges and boosters) for indicating com-
mitments and certainty, showed stronger commitments to propositions, and had greater problems in
indicating a precise degree of certainty.
Drawing upon the reflexive approach, Ädel (2006) compared the use of metadiscourse in three
varieties of English, namely American English, British English, and advanced-learner (with Swedish
as L1) English by analyzing three corpora of argumentative essays written by American, British, and
Swedish university students. Two corpora of native speakers’ essays were extracted from the Lou-
vain Corpus of Native English Essays, or LOCNESS (Granger, 1993). The corpus of the advanced-
learner essays was extracted from the International Corpus of Learner English, or ICLE (Granger,
1993, 1998). The study of these three corpora allowed comparisons between native and non-native-
speaker writings, and between native speakers of the two English varieties. The results revealed
that the Swedish university students who were advanced learners of English, when compared to the
two groups of native speakers, still demonstrated some degree of nonnativeness in that they heavily
overused metadiscourse. Such overuse resulted from their frequent referencing of the structure and
wording of text, and their indicating of writer/reader visibility. The results also revealed that the two
groups of native-speaking writers differed—the American students highlighted writer/reader visibil-
ity more often than the British.

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Role of metadiscourse in second language acquisition

The last category of studies to be included in this chapter concerns the role of metadiscourse on lan-
guage acquisition. More precisely, it explores how metadiscourse can affect learning in general, and
how it can facilitate listening and reading comprehension in particular.
Crismore and vande Kopple (1997) examined the role of hedges in learning (and attitude change)
using a quasi-experimental method. A total of 109 ninth-grade average junior high-school students
joined the experiment, with 74 of them assigned to the experimental group and the other 35 the
control group. Students of both groups then sat for a pre-test (Science and Social Studies Retention
Tests). One week after the pre-test, both groups read science and social studies passages on contro-
versial topics. The passages for both groups were adapted: those for the control group had all the
hedges removed, while those for the experimental group had hedging clauses added to the beginning
of targeted sentences. These added hedging clauses appeared in different ways: (1) in either personal
(e.g., I suppose that) or impersonal voice (e.g., It is supposed that); (2) in only the first/second half
of the passage or in both halves of the passage; and (3) with low or high intensity. The students then
attempted a post-test (the retention tests) afterward. Results indicated that students who recorded the
most gain in the retention post-test were those who read passages with hedges appearing in personal
voice, the second half of the passage, and low intensity.
While one can reasonably assume that metadiscourse should have a role to play in facilitating
listening comprehension, comparatively much less attention has been paid to such a role. Heshemi,
Khodabakhshzade, and Shirvan (2012) through a quasi-experiment studied the effect of metadis-
course on the listening comprehension of four groups of 30 learners of English—two advanced and
two intermediate—preparing for the IELTS test. The listening materials, monologues derived directly
from the IELTS test, were manipulated in such a way that two groups of the participants (one ad-
vanced and one intermediate) listened to the original version and the other two listened to the version
without metadiscourse. The results indicated that metadiscourse had a significant effect on facilitating
the listening comprehension of the advanced learners, but did not have the same effect on that of the
intermediate learners.
The role of metadiscourse in reading comprehension has also attracted research attention. Two
studies will be reported below (Crawford Camiciottoli, 2003; Zarrati et al., 2014). Both studies in-
volved two groups of learners reading different versions of the same text—academic texts on eco-
nomic topics with more metadiscourse in terms of both quantity and type in version 1 and with less in
version 2 in Crawford Camiciottoli (2003); and reading comprehension texts with metadiscourse in
version 1 and without in version 2 in Zarrati et al. (2014). The learners were then required to answer
reading comprehension questions afterwards. Both studies found that students who were given the
metadiscourse-enriched version of the text performed better in the reading comprehension test, sug-
gesting the importance of metadiscourse to text comprehensibility.

Implications for second language learning, teaching, and use

The brief review of sample studies of metadiscourse and second language acquisition in the previ-
ous section allows us to make the following observations, which lead to important implications for
second language learning, teaching, and use:

1 Metadiscourse instruction in general could have both positive and negative influence on second
language learners. On the positive side, learners were able to improve their language perfor-
mance—they got higher grades in writing tasks and reading/listening comprehension tests, and
accommodated readers’ perspectives better. On the negative side, it was possible that their use of

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metadiscourse would be limited in terms of the variety of metadiscourse used and the placement
of metadiscourse in a sentence.
2 Metadiscourse knowledge and competence in academic discourse can be acquired as one pro-
gresses along one’s learning path. Learners at more advanced stages of learning demonstrated
the ability to use more subcategories of metadiscourse (but not necessarily a larger number of
metadiscourse markers), and a more strategic choice of such subcategories in achieving their com-
municative goals of writing.
3 Learners of different levels of language proficiency showed different metadiscourse use patterns
in academic writing. Similar to those at more advanced stages of learning, learners of a higher
proficiency level usually demonstrated a higher level of sophistication of metadiscourse use in
terms of accuracy, appropriacy, diversity, and complexity.
4 Metadiscourse has a clear role to play in second language acquisition. Learners exposed to spoken
or written texts (taken from the economics discipline or listening and reading tests) dispersed with
metadiscourse demonstrated more thorough comprehension—they were better able to retain and
recall the information contained in the texts.
5 ESL students, when compared to their native-speaking counterparts, were less sophisticated
in metadiscourse use in that they used less variety of metadiscourse in their academic writing,
showed unnecessarily strong commitments to their propositions, failed to express a precise degree
of certainty, and did not demonstrate adequate authorial presence in the text.
6 Methodology-wise, both the quasi-experimental method and corpus-based method, coupled with
statistical analysis, appeared to be the most frequently adopted methods of investigation.

These observations have important implications for second language learning, teaching and use:

1 The tertiary (and even secondary) education sector should consider incorporating metadiscourse
in the formal curriculum of their English (for academic purposes) courses (Crosthwaite & Jiang,
2017; Ho & Li, 2018). Students can be guided to appreciate the importance of writer–reader inter-
action which can be achieved with the use of metadiscourse. Explicit teaching of metadiscourse
should aim to enable students to (a) appreciate and understand the writer’s purposes in using
metadiscourse; and (b) use metadiscourse effectively and strategically to achieve writer–reader in-
teraction and to enhance the persuasiveness of their spoken and written texts. To achieve these two
aims, metadiscourse instruction would need to involve not only classroom teaching, but also in-
depth discussion between instructors and students about the latter’s use of metadiscourse in their
actual output—oral and written. Given the differences in both the disciplinary discourse practices
and EAP instructors’ ideological beliefs, as highlighted in Harwood and Hadley (2004), it is worth
mentioning the possible approaches to metadiscourse instruction here. According to Harwood and
Hadley (2004), we may choose to present students with a prescribed way of using metadiscourse
in terms of for example, “what,” “how many,” and “where,” and require our students to follow it,
as the Pragmatic EAP approach would advocate. On the contrary, we may emphasize the students’
own preference and beliefs and encourage them to use metadiscourse in a way they regard as ap-
propriate. In other words, they would not be encouraged to follow the established academic writ-
ing norms, as Critical EAP would advocate. In between these two opposing extremes, we may also
encourage students to follow the academic norms that have been verified using a corpus-based
method, and that have been explained to and discussed by those students, as the Critical Pragmatic
EAP would advocate. Mere introduction of metadiscourse—its (sub)categories, functions, and
examples—would probably lead to mechanical and inappropriate use in texts.
2 The presence of appropriately used metadiscourse should be made one of the criteria for selecting
learning and teaching materials. Our review of the literature in this chapter indicates clearly the

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key role metadiscourse can play in enhancing learners’ comprehension of spoken and written texts
on the one hand, and in affecting their metadiscourse use patterns in their English texts produced
in the academic context, on the other. Authentic texts produced by established speakers or writ-
ers who are native speakers of English (or the target L2) may make ideal materials for teaching
and learning purposes. Use of texts with “inappropriate” use of metadiscourse like the overuse of
boosters, underuse of hedges, placement of metadiscourse markers predominantly at the sentence-
initial position, and a reliance on a limited range of metadiscourse subcategories, will likely have
a negative impact on learners (Leedham & Cai, 2013).
3 The researchers’ reliance on Hyland’s (2005) interpersonal model of metadiscourse, as we have
observed above (sections on studies taking longitudinal or cross-sectional approach and patterns
of use of metadiscourse by learners at different language proficiency and performance levels), may
turn out to be a double-edged sword. On one hand, the model’s clear categorization of metadis-
course and the basically fragmentary nature of the metadiscourse markers can make both teach-
ing and learning manageable. This fragmentary nature, on the other hand, may disallow the full
exploitation of the potential metadiscourse can offer (please see the next section for details). The
reflexive model of metadiscourse (Ädel, 2006; Mauranen, 2003), which emphasizes the functions
of metadiscourse in referring to the ongoing evolving text itself (the metatext) and in achiev-
ing writer–reader interaction, should deserve more attention from both researchers and teachers
(please also see the next section).

Future directions for metadiscourse and second language research

In contrast to the interpersonal model (Hyland, 2005), the reflexive model of metadiscourse (Ädel,
2006; Mauranen, 2003) has been drawn upon considerably less frequently in metadiscourse and sec-
ond language acquisition research. This is probably due to its way of construing metadiscourse and
labeling its various categories—functional and (thus) less fragmentary. The identification, as well as
the teaching and learning, of metadiscourse are thus less straightforward and more challenging. De-
spite this challenge, the teaching and learning of the reflexive model would allow its users to be clear
about the purpose of the writer’s discursive acts (e.g., introducing the topic, arguing, exemplifying,
appealing to the reader, imagining scenarios), making it possible for the writer to more accurately
express themselves and more effectively achieve their communicative goals, and for the reader to
understand the writer’s intention and thus the meaning of the text.
While it has just been suggested that the reflexive model of metadiscourse could be drawn upon
more often in second language research, the importance of the interpersonal model of metadiscourse
should not be compromised as a result. One area that second language researchers could delve into
is the learning and teaching of metadiscourse in a high-school context. As we have seen in this chap-
ter, university students, both undergraduates and postgraduates, have often been made the subjects
of metadiscourse studies. Their juniors, high-school students, have not yet received comparable at-
tention. Unfortunately, previous relevant studies that focused on high-school students’ learning of
metadiscourse did not approach the issue from a metadiscourse perspective (Field & Yip, 1992; Ho &
Ong, 2007). Research could investigate the effect of explicit metadiscourse instruction on the perfor-
mance of high-school students in both their production (speaking and writing) and reception (reading
and listening) of the English language. Given its clear categorization and the basically fragmentary
nature of the metadiscourse markers as conceived by the interpersonal model of metadiscourse, the
learning and teaching of metadiscourse should be manageable for both students and teachers in a
high-school setting.
In view of the ever-growing number of nonnative speakers of English and ESL students, more
work may need to be done to profile the English-use patterns of this quickly growing group of

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individuals. Considering the importance of metadiscourse to achieving writer–reader interaction and

enhancing persuasion, it may be time for the research community to profile the metadiscourse use
patterns of individuals of different cultural backgrounds using English. The research project would
essentially fall within the realm of intercultural rhetoric as it would study the “written discourse be-
tween and among individuals with different cultural backgrounds” (Connor, 2011, p. 1). The cultural
backgrounds to be considered should include both “large” and “small” culture which, according to
Holliday (1999, p. 237), refers to ethnic, national, or international culture and cohesive social group
culture, respectively. This research would very likely be able to contribute to more effective intercul-
tural communication, which could subsequently lead to a more thorough understanding of different
cultures.

Further reading
Ädel, A. (2010). Just to give you kind of a map of where we are going: A taxonomy of metadiscourse in spoken
and written academic English. Nordic Journal of English Studies, 9(2), 69–97.
This paper presents a clear taxonomy of the reflexive metadiscourse that we can use readily in our research
into both spoken and written academic English.
Ädel, A. (2017). Remember that your reader cannot read your mind: Problem/solution-oriented metadiscourse in
teacher feedback on student writing. English for Specific Purposes, 45, 54–68.
This paper demonstrates the importance of metadiscourse in allowing writers to lead readers to interpret
discourse in the way that the former intended.
Hong, H., & Cao, F. (2014). Interactional metadiscourse in young EFL learner writing: A corpus-based study.
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 19(2), 201–224.
This paper is one of the few studies that investigates the use of metadiscourse by nonuniversity EFL learners.
Jiang, F. K., & Hyland, K. (2018). Nouns and academic interactions: A neglected feature of metadiscourse. Ap-
plied Linguistics, 39(4), 508–531.
This paper testifies to the need for researchers’ continued efforts in studying metadiscourse.
Mauranen, A. (2010). Discourse reflexivity—A discourse universal? The case of ELF. Nordic Journal of English
Studies, 9(2), 13–40.
This paper allows readers to appreciate the ubiquity, and thus importance, of metadiscourse.

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 21
CLASSROOM DISCOURSE
AND SECOND LANGUAGE
ACQUISITION
Christopher Jenks and Olcay Sert

Introduction
Classroom discourse has a special place in the history and study of second language acquisition
(SLA). For example, classrooms have been a source of curiosity for many researchers and for many
decades, from the early and seminal work of Evelyn Hatch in the 1970s to current and cutting-edge
investigations of multimodal interactions. The importance of classrooms is evident in the many an-
thologies and edited collections of SLA research that have been published in recent years to which the
classroom plays a central role in theory development. Furthermore, the discourse of classrooms—that
is, the ways in which teachers and students interact, exchange ideas, inform each other, and man-
age learning activities, to name a few examples—represents the interests of researchers working in
scholarly traditions ranging from psycholinguistics to conversation analysis. Although SLA research
is broad and interdisciplinary, classroom discourse is a common empirical thread that runs through
much of what is done in this area of study.
This chapter offers an introduction to the empirical boundaries cutting through classroom dis-
course and second language studies. The introduction previews some of the key concepts and ap-
proaches that represent this growing area of research. A brief historical overview of the classroom is
provided within the context of SLA research, attending to some of the similarities that exist within the
literature but also exploring why differences in theoretical approaches have led to division within the
field. After the long and rich history of using classrooms to investigate SLA is discussed, the paper
navigates through the plurality of opinions that exists within the literature. Special attention is paid
to how psycholinguistic, sociocultural, interactional, and ethnographic research traditions approach
classroom discourse as a site for understanding second language development. The chapter offers
examples of how researchers study classroom discourse and SLA, by providing short summaries of
exemplar studies within each research approach, and ends with a discussion of future empirical direc-
tions and opportunities.

A shared history
The four approaches to classroom discourse reviewed in this paper all share a common history, which
can be traced back to the 1970s. This shared history is central to understanding the role classroom
discourse has played in researching SLA issues.

270 DOI: 10.4324/9781003177579-23

 Classroom discourse and second language acquisition

SLA research has transformed in the past five decades from a once somewhat esoteric and margin-
alized subfield into a burgeoning and interdisciplinary field of study that contributes to the classroom
discourse literature (Ellis, 2021). However, although the study of SLA now attracts the attention of
scholars working in disciplines from education to psychology, adopting methodologies ranging from
stimulated recall (Gass & Mackey, 2013) to micro-analytic approaches (Lee & Hellermann, 2014),
this was not always the case.
In the 1970s, SLA work possessed a comparatively narrow focus, which was motivated by a
strong cognitive stance on language and language development (Hatch, 1978). The works at the time
by, for example, Michael Long, Rod Ellis, and Teresa Pica focused on demonstrating that SLA occurs
within, and is best facilitated by, conversations between students and other more proficient speak-
ers, such as teachers. Although the investigations conducted by these and other (e.g., Gass, 1997;
Mackey, 2007) SLA researchers were anchored to a cognitive view of language, their work analyzed
the discourse produced by learners when completing typical classroom activities, such as tasks. For
example, Long’s (1983) interaction hypothesis is based on the observation that learner discourse
provides a window into how the brain processes input in the target language. The ultimate goal in
such research was to identify which teaching and learning approaches best facilitate second language
development (Bygate et al., 2013).
SLA researchers approached the study of classrooms by coding teacher and learner discourse that
were thought to be developmentally beneficial to learning a second language, such as clarification
requests and confirmation checks. Isolating these types of exchanges allowed SLA researchers to
explore how design features embedded in classroom activities influence learner language. For exam-
ple, classroom activities were designed and tweaked to investigate the extent to which certain task
features maximize language learning opportunities (Long, 2015).
This interest in the relationship between classroom activities and learner discourse is also
shared by discourse and conversation analysts (e.g., Hauser, 2011; Markee, 2008; Markee, Ku-
nitz, & Sert, 2021), as well as research informed by sociocultural (Ziegler & Miller, 2006) and
language socialization (Watson-Gegeo, 2004) theories. Like psycholinguists, these other more
process-oriented researchers have a history of investigating how classroom discourse aligns with
pedagogical goals (Seedhouse, 1996; 2019) and facilitates second language development (Es-
kildsen, 2018; He, 2004; Sert, 2017). These overlapping areas of interest should have led to
many exciting interdisciplinary SLA investigations. Unfortunately, research that navigates across
theoretical and methodological traditions is sparse, and is seen as challenging if not problematic
(Larsen-Freeman, 2004).
For example, although early SLA work was instrumental in generating interest in teacher and
learner discourse, some of this concern was unfortunately based on a dissatisfaction with the
cognitive traditions of the time and the methodological approaches that represented such work
(see Wagner, 1996). This dissatisfaction reached its peak much later and most concretely in a
series of articles published in 1997 and 2007 in The Modern Language Journal (Magnan, 2007).
While these widely circulated publications highlighted the fractions and differences that exist
within the study of SLA, readers with less motivation to engage in empirical tribalism could see
that the 1997 and 2007 publications largely ignored the issues that tie the field together, such as
the aim to understand how second language learning occurs within the discourse of teachers and
students.
Some of the empirical methods that are shared by SLA researchers working across theoretical
and methodological traditions include using transcripts to present qualitative observations or to re-
port quantitative findings; coding learner discourse; and tracking learning trajectories over time. Al-
though there are numerous other empirical approaches used in SLA research (Doughty & Long,
2008), capturing and analyzing teacher and learner discourse for the purpose of identifying moments

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 Christopher Jenks and Olcay Sert

of language development is foundational to researchers informed by psycholinguistics and conversa-

tion analysis, as well as scholarly approaches ranging from ethnography to cognitive theory.
Indeed, this approach of capturing, and then later making sense of, teacher and learner discourse
can be found in some of the earliest research in both the classroom discourse literature and SLA
studies. For instance, observation checklists were a common tool used in the 1970s to make sense of
teacher and learner discourse. Flanders’ (1970) FIAC checklist, which stands for “Flanders’ Interac-
tion Analysis Categories,” is a prominent example of looking at classroom discourse through the lens
of predefined teaching and learning issues (see also the “Foci for Observing Communications Used
in Settings” [FOCUS] checklist; Fans low, 1977; as well as the “Communicative Orientation of Lan-
guage Teaching” [COLT] checklist; Allen et al., 1984).
Although checklists were at the time a unique way of observing and coding classroom discourse,
they are limited to etic observations of what researchers believe to be important a priori, such as re-
sponse types that provide implicit feedback, and not necessarily what teachers and students attend to
in situ. Like the discourse methods adopted in early SLA research, checklists do not account for the
full range of contextual factors that shape why teachers and students communicate in particular ways,
nor are the researchers following these approaches concerned with such issues. These observations
are not, however, criticisms. Etic approaches that isolate discourse features are integral to testing SLA
hypotheses and understanding classrooms in relation to specific language teaching and learning is-
sues. Nonetheless, the practice of isolating discourse features led to several critiques by scholars who
were unsatisfied with viewing classrooms in such narrowly defined ways (Harrop, 1979), which was
a catalyst (along with technological advancements in recording equipment) for viewing classroom
discourse as a study in its own right.
To this end, the study of classroom discourse as it is presently known emerged in the 1970s. At
the time, however, classroom discourse research was not fundamentally concerned with tracking
second language development (e.g., Mehan, 1979a). Although early classroom discourse research
included discussions of language learning (Cazden, 2001), an emic framework based on understand-
ing the structure of entire lessons through the practice of recording, transcribing, and analyzing what
teachers and students do was the modus operandi of the time (Coulthard, 1974). For instance, the
seminal work of Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) evolved from an interest in studying the language and
structure of classrooms: lessons were shown to unfold in a somewhat rigid interactional sequence
of initiation-response-feedback (IRF). The observation that lessons are structured according to IRF
sequences demonstrated that a rich understanding of teaching and learning can be established by
looking at the discourse of classrooms (see also Mehan, 1979b).
Sinclair and Coulthard (1975), Mehan (1979b), and other discourse and conversation analysts
(Schwartz, 1977) were instrumental in advancing the methods used to study classroom discourse
(McHoul, 1978). This tradition of capturing, transcribing, and analyzing whole lessons inspired
several decades of interactional (Sert, 2015) and sociocultural (Antón, 1999) approaches, including
numerous investigations concerned with tracking second language development within classrooms
(Hauser, 2013; Markee, 2008). The process-oriented approaches to classroom discourse and SLA
represented a departure from the psycholinguistic tradition: discourse analysts, as well as sociocul-
tural researchers, established an agenda of looking at how classrooms are discursively organized as
opposed to testing what correlations can be made between classroom discourse and second language
development. Put differently, discourse and conversation analysts, as well as researchers informed
by sociocultural approaches, view classroom discourse as a process, while psycholinguists see class-
room discourse as products of cognition. Despite the shared interests in classroom discourse identi-
fied in this section, the process–product or how–what dichotomy reflects unique methodological
traditions that require further explanation.

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Main research approaches

Several research traditions exist in the study of classroom discourse and SLA, with each school of
thought adopting its own set of approaches that reflect different theoretical motivations. Although an
effort was made in the previous section to outline shared interests and opportunities for interdiscipli-
nary work, detailing some of the instances when different research traditions adopt the same methods
or tools of investigation, the study of classroom discourse and SLA is made up of investigations op-
erating within clear theoretical boundaries and carried out according to distinct research approaches.
This section offers a concise overview of four research approaches: psycholinguistic, sociocul-
tural, interactional, and ethnographic. Again, these four research approaches may adopt the same
methods or tools of investigation. Some approaches, such as interactional and ethnographic, have
been used together in classroom discourse research. Despite these similarities and overlap, the objec-
tive of this section is to highlight the unique characteristics of each research approach, helping read-
ers appreciate the plurality of opinions and approaches that exist in the study of classroom discourse
and SLA. To this end, Figure 21.1 offers a simple way of understanding where these approaches lie
in relation to four empirical perspectives: etic/emic and cognitive/social.
The main approaches to classroom discourse and SLA research can be divided into six empirical
categories: research design, learning theory, unit of analysis, classroom, discourse, and analysis. It is
important to note that the descriptions for each category within each research approach are simplified
in the following subsections in order to illustrate the differences across research approaches in an ac-
cessible, albeit somewhat superficial, way.

The psycholinguistic approach

The psycholinguistic approach, which is sometimes referred to as the (cognitive) interaction-
ist perspective for its belief that language offers window into the psychological and cognitive

Figure 21.1 Four axes of classroom discourse approaches

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 Christopher Jenks and Olcay Sert

dimensions of language (Ellis et al., 2019), is largely quantitative in nature, with researchers
controlling and replicating classroom variables for the purpose of measuring discourse features
(Mackey et al., 2013). This framework allows researchers to make correlations between class-
room discourse and SLA.
Markee (2015, p. 23) characterizes the psycholinguistic approach as “an etic (researcher-centric),
theory-driven, hypothesis-testing and experimental (i.e., statistically based) research tradition that
seeks to make large-scale generalizations about cause and effect relationships in instructed language
learning.” Researchers adopting the psycholinguistic approach have a long history of investigating
SLA, offering numerous cognitive-based hypotheses that contribute to a better understanding of the
mind as manifested in the discourse of teaching and learning.
The psycholinguistic approach possesses the following research characteristics.

1 Research design Research is indifferent to faithfully capturing and depicting teachers and
learners in their “natural” environment. Studies are often experimental, short-
term, and cross-sectional.
2 Learning theory Researchers adopt exogenous theories, which are mostly based on the view
that second language learning is an innate process.
3 Unit of analysis Analytic observations are based on discourses that are believed to be critical
to language learning, such as communicative exchanges that deal with mean-
ing construction.
4 Classroom Researchers view classrooms as a set of variables that can be controlled and
manipulated in order to test an exogenous theory or hypothesis. Some re-
searchers create experimental conditions within classrooms that mimic class-
room activities.
5 Discourse Discourse is a mental representation. Aspects of discourse are isolated and
treated as dependent variables that can be measured.
6 Analysis Researchers make use of a diverse set of analytic tools, which are mostly
statistical computations based on coding discourse features.

Example study
Sato, M., & McDonough, K. (2019). Practice is important but how about its quality? Contextualized
practice in the classroom. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 41(5), 999–1026.

The researchers adopt a psycholinguistic approach by examining the influence that the practice of
using correct and incorrect language has on declarative knowledge and speech production. Using re-
gression models, the researchers demonstrate that declarative knowledge does not accurately predict
the extent to which learners are fluent and accurate.

The sociocultural approach

The sociocultural approach (Lantolf, 2000), which is often used alongside language socialization
theories (Duff, 2019; Watson-Gegeo, 2004), is largely qualitative in nature, with researchers view-
ing the language learning process in classrooms as a mediation between learners and more proficient
interactants (Lantolf & Pavlenko, 1995). Scholars working with sociocultural theories are influenced
by the works of Vygotsky and his research associates (Lantolf, 2006), but are comparatively more
theoretically pluralistic than the other three approaches. Like ethnographic and conversation analytic
approaches, the sociocultural approach is interested in how language develops in and through social

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contexts (Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986). For socioculturalists, what this interest often entails is looking
at how language learning is embedded within participatory frameworks, such as when a student com-
municates with their teacher while receiving feedback.
The sociocultural approach possesses the following research characteristics.

1 Research design Research is often faithful to capturing and depicting teachers and learners in
their “natural” environment. Studies may be short or long term.
2 Learning theory Researchers adopt exogenous learning theories, which are often based on the
view that second language development is situated within the interactions of
teachers and students.
3 Unit of analysis Analytic observations are based on exogenous theories. For sociocultural
researchers, this may include participatory frameworks, scaffolding, and
activities.
4 Classroom Researchers view classrooms as salient to how language is used and learn-
ing develops. However, some research creates experimental conditions within
classrooms that mimic classroom activities.
5 Discourse Language learning is viewed as a social practice, and therefore discourse is ex-
amined as a resource that teachers and students use during learning activities.
6 Analysis Researchers make use of a diverse set of analytic tools, which may include
discourse analysis or ethnographic observations.

Example study
Li, D., & Zhang, L. (2020). Exploring teacher scaffolding in a CLIL-framed EFL intensive read-
ing class: A classroom discourse analysis approach. Language Teaching Research, 26, (3),
333–360.

The researchers adopt a sociocultural approach by analyzing how teachers help students in their
learning through scaffolding practices. Using discourse analysis and drawing from Vygotskian no-
tions of development, the researchers show that dialogic inquiry and incidental feedback are devel-
opmentally beneficial for students’ language and cognition.

The interactional approach

The interactional approach, which includes multimodal research (Jacknick, 2021), discourse analytic
methods (Rymes, 2016), and conversation analysis (Sert, 2015), is largely qualitative in nature, with
researchers viewing language learning as a social practice. Observations of classroom discourse are
often emic, focusing on how the interactants themselves make sense of, and engage in practices re-
lated to, second language development (Kasper, 2006). The interactional approach is typically based
on micro discursive features, but can also incorporate critical issues, such as native speakerism (Park,
2007). With the exception of conversation analysis, the interactional approach is largely open to in-
corporating different research traditions (Rampton et al., 2002).
The interactional approach possesses the following research characteristics.

1 Research design Research is faithful to capturing and depicting teachers and learners in their
“natural” environment. Historically, studies have been short term, focusing
on single stretches of communication, though longitudinal investigations are
becoming more common.

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2 Learning theory Researchers do not typically adopt exogenous learning theories, though there
is some variation across the different interactional approaches. For conversa-
tion analysis, there is debate over whether exogenous theories are commen-
surate with its methodological principles. The general rule of thumb is that
exogenous theories can be used after the researcher completes an “unmoti-
vated” analysis, which allows the data to first speak for themselves.
3 Unit of analysis Analytic observations are based on the adopted methodological apparatus. For
conversation analysis, a unit of analysis may be actions in repair sequences,
explicit corrections, and word choice, to name a few.
4 Classroom Context and setting are important in so far as they are demonstrably relevant
to how teachers and students manage their interactions with each other. The
exception to this principle is critical discourse analysis.
5 Discourse Language learning is viewed as a social practice, and therefore discourse is ex-
amined as a resource that teachers and students use during learning activities.
6 Analysis The analytic tools used by researchers are limited to the adopted methodologi-
cal apparatus. For conversation analysis, analytic observations are limited to,
for instance, next-turn proof procedure and turn-taking rules.

Example study
Sert, O., & Amri, M. (2021). Learning potentials afforded by a film in task-based language classroom
interactions. The Modern Language Journal, 105(S1), 126–141.

The researchers adopt an interactional approach by examining video-recorded interactions of Eng-

lish as a foreign language (EFL) classrooms in Sweden. Using multimodal conversation analysis, the
study examines how students co-narrate scenes from a film during a discussion task and explores how
these discourses represent opportunities for language learning.

The ethnographic approach

The ethnographic approach offers the most holistic understanding of classrooms out of the four ap-
proaches reviewed in this section; this is because ethnographers are not chained to specific analytic
methods (Watson-Gegeo, 1997; see also Okada, Chapter 14 in this volume). but are rather con-
cerned primarily with understanding all of the potential social and cultural dimensions that may
shape language teaching and learning, from the micro discursive features that occupy the attention of
conversation analysts (Kunitz & Markee, 2017) to the macro issues that represent the work of critical
discourse analysts (see Jenks, 2020). Classroom ethnographies are primarily qualitative, utilizing a
mixed-methods approach to investigating second language development (Davis, 2012), for example
by incorporating discourse analysis, interviews, and classroom observations. Ethnographic descrip-
tions of classroom language learning are emic, drawing from the resources and practices that are used
by teachers and students as they engage in the learning process.
The ethnographic approach possesses the following research characteristics.

1 Research design Research is faithful to capturing and depicting teachers and learners in their
“natural” environment and over longer periods of observation, such as an aca-
demic semester or year.
2 Learning theory Researchers are theoretically pluralistic, adopting learning theories that best
represent what naturally occurs in the classroom.

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3 Unit of analysis Analytic observations are based on the methodologies used by the researcher
(e.g., repair sequences if conversation analysis is adopted).
4 Classroom Context and setting are important to how learning is understood. Researchers
do not view classrooms as experimental settings.
5 Discourse Language learning is viewed as a social practice, and therefore discourse is ex-
amined as a resource that teachers and students use during learning activities.
6 Analysis Researchers make use of a diverse set of analytic tools, which may include
narrative analysis, critical theories, and reflective practices.

Example study
Wang, W., & Curdt-Christiansen, X. L. (2019). Translanguaging in a Chinese–English bilingual edu-
cation programme: A university-classroom ethnography. International Journal of Bilingual Edu-
cation and Bilingualism, 22(3), 322–337.

The researchers adopt an ethnographic approach by investigating bilingual classrooms. Using ob-
servation tools, interviews, and fieldwork notes, the researchers uncover the different translanguag-
ing practices used by university students.

Future directions
The study of classroom discourse and SLA attracts the attention of scholars working in a number of
disciplines, including applied linguistics, education, psychology, anthropology, and sociology. What
lies ahead in this exiting and growing area of research will vary according to disciplinary traditions.
With that said, there are a number of empirical issues that will influence how classroom discourse
and SLA research moves forward.
Technology is at the heart of future directions in classroom discourse and SLA research (see also,
Tudini & Liddicoat, Chapter 23 in this volume). It is widely accepted within and across the four re-
search approaches that classrooms are not just physical spaces where person-to-person teaching and
learning takes place. Video-mediated virtual exchanges between language learners (e.g., Çimenli, Sert,
& Jenks, 2022), as well as new forms of online teaching that allow learners and teachers to use com-
plex multimodal resources, are two classroom environments that require further empirical attention.
Specifically, the multimodal dimensions of classroom discourse are not limited to what is com-
monly understood as “nonverbal” learning, such as teaching materials and student gestures; future
research must attend to the multimodal aspects of screen sharing, annotation, and the numerous other
collaborative activities afforded by Zoom, Teams, and other familiar video-conferencing platforms.
Classroom discourse and SLA researchers should address how these aspects of technologies and
multimodality shape the language learning process.
Scholarship has witnessed new ways of presenting, disseminating, and publishing classroom
discourse research in the last decade, and this trend will continue in subsequent years. Initiatives
like the Corpus of English for Academic and Professional Purposes (CEAPP) allow researchers
and teachers to view annotated and transcribed classroom videos. Future research must utilize
such resources, and seek ways to incorporate them into teaching practices. Put differently, acces-
sible and online classroom discourse corpora will fuel more research at the intersection of class-
room discourse and SLA, while bridging the research–practice gap. Technological advancements
in video data production will also lead to different forms of analytic and dissemination practices,
such as mobile tagging tools (Seedhouse, 2021; Sert, 2021a), automatic transcriptions, and teach-
ing and learning analytics.

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 Christopher Jenks and Olcay Sert

Dissemination practices in classroom discourse research will transform publication traditions.

Journals are now increasingly linking published findings with online records of raw classroom
data. Such practices will change how research is conceptualized, managed, and of course, shared
(see Willemsen et al., 2020). These developments will facilitate much needed discussions regard-
ing open access, data privacy, and research ethics. Furthermore, the availability of classroom
videos together with their transcriptions will create a dilemma between more accessible tran-
scriptions and transcriptions that are heavily annotated using complex notation systems (Housley
et al., 2019).
Issues of accessibility and dissemination are, however, bound to the political and hegem-
onic nature of English-centric publication expectations. As argued by (Sert, 2021b), classroom
discourse research has a language bias with most studies coming from English-speaking coun-
tries or focusing on English as a second language. Additional studies from other languages
and regions, including the Global South, are clearly needed. To this end, many studies are now
exploring the extent to which translanguaging classroom discourse (Wei & Lin, 2019) provides
opportunities to rethink what multilingualism means for the study of, and the institutional poli-
cies associated with, SLA.
Methodological design and innovation are two important pillars of development in any scientific
field. In terms of design, there is a clear need for more longitudinal classroom discourse and SLA
research. Studies must document the complex interactional history of language users both within
(Kunitz et al., 2021) and beyond the borders of formal instruction (Hellermann et al., 2019) over
different periods of time. Longitudinal research can easily accommodate, and is perhaps best con-
ducted using, mixed-methods approaches, such as conversation analysis and corpus linguistics (Sert,
2019a; Walsh et al., 2011). In the same vein, classroom discourse research that incorporates diverse
methodological principles is equipped to better address the needs of practitioners in the field (e.g.,
Bozbıyık et al., 2021).
In recent years, classroom discourse research has increasingly adopted an understanding of in-
teractional competence (IC) to investigate second language learning, as evidenced by a growing
number of articles in special issues (e.g., Pekarek Doehler, 2018; Roever & Kasper, 2018) and
edited volumes (Salaberry & Kunitz, 2019), as well as numerous publications on classrooms (Wata-
nabe, 2017), second language teaching (e.g., Huth, 2021; Waring, 2018), language teacher education
(Sert, 2019b; Walsh, 2013), and proficiency assessment (e.g., Lam, 2018). IC in a second language
encompasses the methods used by learners to organize their participation in classrooms (Pekarek
Doehler & Berger, 2018).
Furthermore, IC is a growing area of interest for teacher education research. Such research
informs an understanding of second language learning in two ways. First, an understanding of IC
is a concrete way of training language instructors to design communicative language lessons that
facilitate second language development (see Kunitz & Yeh, 2019). Secondly, an understanding of
IC can be used by novice researchers and teachers to observe classroom practices (Sert, 2019b;
Walsh, 2013 see also Biggs, 1996). The study of IC within teacher education has also been used
to track the development of teacher practices over time (Bozbıyık et al., 2021; Carpenter, 2023;
Sert, 2019b). To this end, future research can investigate how teachers, in classrooms, change their
interactional practices over a semester or academic year to allow for more student engagement or
“acquisition-rich” learning environments. This line of research has great potential to document
what kind of interaction leads to better learning opportunities. That is, if researchers can identify
and track the interactional practices of teachers and students (e.g., feedback, question types, evalu-
ation, and gestures), then this analytic focus can aid in designing learning materials and training
future language instructors (Sert, 2021a).

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Further reading
Jenks, C. J. (2020). Researching classroom discourse: A student guide. Routledge.
In this practical guide to doing classroom discourse research, the author introduces a number of research
skills needed to investigate the language of teaching and learning. Chapters are organized around three stages of
research: planning, analyzing, and understanding and reporting. The book is an essential read for anyone learning
how to research classroom discourse.
Kunitz, S., Markee, N. & Sert, O. (2021). Classroom-based conversation analytic research: Theoretical and ap-
plied perspectives on pedagogy. Springer.
This edited collection explores the many ways in which classroom discourse can be investigated from a
conversation analytic perspective. Although the chapters do not all examine second language development, con-
tributions attend to issues directly relevant to learning, such as pedagogical decisions and testing practices. The
book is helpful for readers looking for a broad overview of conversation analytic investigations of classrooms.
Lantolf, J. P., & Thorne, S. L. (2006). Sociocultural theory and the genesis of second language development.
Oxford University Press.
Although this book does not strictly focus on classroom discourse, the chapters provide a comprehensive ac-
count of sociocultural theory. Readers interested in the works of Lev Vygotsky and his theory of mental functions
will benefit from reading this book.
Leow, R. P. (2015). Explicit learning in the L2 classroom: A student-centered approach. Routledge.
The book introduces readers to the cognitive dimensions of learning in second language classrooms. Chap-
ters are organized around five dimensions of research: theoretical, empirical, methodological, pedagogical, and
model building. The author proposes a cognitive model for second language development, which is helpful for
readers interested in research design issues.
Seliger, H. W., & Long, M. H. (1983). Classroom oriented research in second language acquisition. Newbury
House Publishers.
The contributions in this seminal collection of early classroom discourse and SLA research cover a range of
empirical topics from diary studies to error feedback. Although the book was published over four decades ago,
the chapters provide informative examples of how classroom discourse can be approached from different theo-
retical perspectives. The book is a necessary read for anyone wanting a glimpse into early classroom discourse
and SLA research.
Sert, O. (2015). Social interaction and L2 classroom discourse. Edinburgh University Press.
This book is an introduction to L2 classroom discourse research from a conversation analytic perspective. The
book introduces CA methodology and presents close analysis of epistemic, multilingual, and multimodal practices
in language classrooms. The author provides research-informed implications for teaching and teacher education.

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 22
MULTILINGUAL DISCOURSE AND
SECOND LANGUAGE RESEARCH
Tarja Nikula and Anne Pitkänen-Huhta

Introduction
The focus in this chapter lies in exploring how multilingualism and multilingual discourse have
featured in second language research. The chapter begins by an overview of how the connections
between multilingualism, multilingual discourse, and second language use and learning have been
addressed over the years. This has involved a shift in focus from monolingually oriented language
acquisition perspectives to socially oriented multilingual discourse perspectives. The latter entails
approaching language as a dynamic resource rather than as a fixed system, languages as social con-
structs with fluid rather than clear-cut boundaries, and language use as a set of multilingual social
and discursive practices rather than as compartmentalized and language-specific skills of comprehen-
sion and production. This overview is followed by a discussion of the key concepts that have been
used in studies adopting multilingual discourse perspectives to second language research. Different
methodological approaches to explore multilingual discourse and its role in and for second language
learning will also be introduced and further illustrated by a selection of sample studies. The chapter
concludes by discussing the research implications for second language learning, teaching, and use,
and by contemplating future research directions in the area. Throughout this chapter, we will use the
concept second language (L2) as an overall term to cover the learning and use of languages other
than the first language.

Overview of the connections between multilingualism, multilingual discourse,

and second language research

The emergence of multilingual and discourse perspectives in second

language research
Even though second language learning always implies the presence of more than one language, the
relationship between second language acquisition (SLA) and multilingualism and multilingual dis-
course has not been straightforward. From early on, there have been concepts in SLA seeking to
account for the relationship between learners’ different languages. Starting from the concepts of
interlanguage (Selinker, 1972), transfer and interference (Gass & Selinker, 1993; Laroche, 1981),

DOI: 10.4324/9781003177579-24 283

 Tarja Nikula and Anne Pitkänen-Huhta

the connection between the learners’ first language and the target language of learning has been
theorized. However, there has been a tendency to see this connection in negative terms as the first lan-
guage interfering with the learning of the second language, and the underlying setting has been that
of a monolingual learner learning or acquiring a second language. Cross-linguistic influence (Golden
et al., 2017; Jarvis & Pavlenko, 2008; Odlin, 2003) is another term that has been used to describe the
influence that the knowledge of one language has on an individual’s learning or use of another lan-
guage. Multilingualism features in cross-linguistic influence research in terms of its interest in how
multilinguals learn additional languages and how their linguistic background affects learning. Factors
that have been found to play a role in cross-linguistic influence include the typological distance, the
status of L2, and age of learners (e.g., Cenoz, 2001).
In the context of bilingual education, other concepts theorizing the connections between learn-
ers’ languages have emerged. One such example is linguistic interdependence hypothesis by Cum-
mins (1979). It argues that despite surface differences between languages, they draw on a common
underlying proficiency, pertaining especially to conceptual and academic proficiencies that can,
accordingly, be supported through both languages. Despite such acknowledgement of the presence
and influence between languages, the focus in SLA research has tended to lie on the learning pro-
cess and matters of production and comprehension, often investigated in controlled test situations
rather than by exploring learners’ multilingual discourse. In the words of Cenoz and Gorter (2019,
p. 130), the second language acquisition focus has been ‘on the target language rather than on the
learner’s repertoire and his/her experience with different languages’. Moreover, this target language
perspective has predominantly been connected, explicitly or implicitly, with the ideal of the native
speaker, despite the emergence of terms such as linguistic multi-competence (Cook, 2012; 2016)
to highlight learners as L2 users in their own right rather than as ‘the shadows of native speakers’
(Cook, 2016, p. 4).
As regards discourse perspectives on SLA, they have grown in popularity due to several turns that
have urged SLA research to broaden its perspective from purely cognitive, linguistic, and monoglos-
sic viewpoints. Firth and Wagner’s (1997) sociocultural critique of SLA for its failure to account for
‘the interactional and sociolinguistic dimensions of language’ (p. 285) paved the way for what has
been called the social turn in second language acquisition (Block, 2003). Increasingly influenced by
sociolinguistics, there have also been calls for SLA to be more attuned to the diversity of language
practices in societies and communities and with individuals. A prime example of this is the multilin-
gual turn (Conteh & Meier, 2014; May, 2014; Van Avermaet et al., 2018), which has directed atten-
tion to the need for second language research to better take account of the existing and increasing
multilingualism and linguistic diversity that is often strengthened by such societal processes as mi-
gration and growing opportunities for cross-cultural and multilingual encounters through technologi-
zation. The multilingual turn in research on educational contexts has shown particularly clearly in the
attention to migrant or minority students’ multilingual linguistic repertoires and how those are taken
into account in classrooms (e.g., Duarte, 2019; Marshall & Moore, 2013).
Recent years have also shown evidence of attempts to reframe the whole SLA endeavour in ho-
listic and transdisciplinary terms that account for micro, meso, and macro approaches and practices.
The model by the Douglas Fir Group (2016) has been a particularly influential opening in this. Other
research developments that have paved the way towards more holistic orientations to second lan-
guage learning are ecological (van Lier, 2004) and complexity systems theory perspectives to SLA
(Larsen-Freeman, 2011). Hult (2010) even uses the term ‘complexity turn’ when referring to the
benefits that applying complexity theory brings for seeking connections between the individual and
the social, the local and the global, and for viewing these connections as multilayered rather than
hierarchical.

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Key concepts in multilingual discourse perspectives on second language research

There are nowadays a plethora of terms in use to signal that ‘understandings of bi-/multilingualism
have moved from the view of languages as separate, autonomous systems based on discourses of
complete competencies to a view that recognises hybridity and varying degrees of competence be-
tween and within languages’ (Marshall & Moore, 2018, p. 21). Despite the multitude of terms availa-
ble for depicting the fluidity and hybridity of multilingual language practices, such as polylanguaging
(Jørgensen, 2008), heteroglossia (Blackledge & Creese, 2014), or metrolingualism (Pennycook &
Otsuji, 2015), we will here focus on those concepts that have been particularly central in the explora-
tion of second language learning from discursive perspectives. The first term meriting attention is
code-switching (CS), which has gained significant attention in interaction analysis and sociolinguis-
tics, both as regards its functions in organizing discourse and in serving as an index of social identity
in bi- and multilingual talk (e.g., Auer, 1984, 1998). As regards code-switching in second language
classrooms, there are studies based on conversation analysis (e.g., Liddicoat, 2007), which have, for
example, shown how learners’ code-switching manifests their conception of the classroom as a bilin-
gual space (Liebscher & Dailey-O’Cain, 2005), indicates alignment with the teachers’ pedagogical
focus (Üstünel & Seedhouse, 2005), and serves as a strategy with which learners can quickly and
effectively come to a mutual understanding and resume the institutional work (Lehti-Eklund, 2013).
These studies have thus focused on the interactional role of CS in classrooms. There are only few
studies combining a discourse and interaction perspective with attention to how CS may contribute
to the process of second language acquisition (e.g., Tian & Macaro, 2012). However, there are signs
of growing recognition—beyond specific focus on CS—of the potential of bilingual approaches to
benefit rather than hinder language learning and teaching (Hall & Cook, 2012; Turnbull & Dailey-
O’Cain, 2009).
The last decade has shown burgeoning interest in exploring multilingual practices through the
lense of translanguaging, another key term for multilingual discourse perspectives to second lan-
guage research. The origins of the term lie in the educational setting of Wales, where the term traws-
ieithu was coined in the 1980s by Cen Willams in an unpublished thesis. The term refers to deliberate
alternation between languages in Welsh–English bilingual classrooms (Baker, 2006; Lewis et al.,
2012). In bi- and multilingualism research, the adoption of a translanguaging perspective has been
closely tied to conceptions of language as a set of fluid, diffuse, and interconnected multilingual
resources rather than as separable entities (e.g., Creese & Blackledge, 2010; Garcia & Li, 2014; Li,
2018).
In educational settings, translanguaging approaches have been particularly widely used to study
classrooms with a high number of migrant or minority-background students. Typical for those studies
has been a strong emphasis on the transformative and empowering potential of translanguaging as
a means to provide legitimacy to bi- and multilingual practices, easily deemed problematic in edu-
cational contexts (e.g., Cenoz & Gorter, 2017; Duarte, 2019; Garcia, 2009; Garcia & Leiva, 2014).
The emphasis has thus mainly resided on understanding what role translanguaging practices have in
supporting learning in general terms rather than on language learning per se.
As regards SLA research and the area of second language learning and teaching, both the learn-
ers’ first language and the target language have always been present in teaching practices and learn-
ing materials (for overviews, see Hall & Cook, 2012; Shin et al., 2020). There has thus always
been acknowledgement of the co-existence of languages visible, for example, in translation activities
(Källkvist, 2013). However, the understanding of the languages present in these practices has been
radically different from that of translanguaging. The target of learning has been framed by the ideal
of native speakers, the L1 of the learners has pointed towards a linguistically homogenous learner

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group, and the languages in question have been considered as separate entities rather than forming
a single multilingual resource. However, multilingual repertoire views are also emerging in SLA
research, reflected in such terms as plurilingualism and plurilingual competence to highlight indi-
viduals’ repertoires, resources, and agency in different languages, the context-dependent enactment
of plurilingual competence, and plurilingual users as social actors (Marshall & Moore, 2013; Moore
& Gajo, 2009). Thus, perspectives that steer away from reified conceptualizations of multilingualism
and clear-cut divisions between the social and the individual are gaining ground.
As the discussion above indicates, translanguaging and engagement in multilingual practices has
been shown to be a typical feature of bi- and multilinguals both in classrooms and outside of them.
This recognition has paved the way for development of multilingual pedagogical orientations, re-
flected, for example, in terms such as pedagogical translanguaging, translanguaging pedagogies, or
plurilingual pedagogies (e.g., Juvonen & Källkvist, 2021a; Lau & Van Viegen, 2020). As Juvonen
and Källkvist (2021b, p. 1) note, a key feature of such terms lies in ‘the intentional and planned use
of student multilingual resources’. There is thus, overall, a widespread recognition that incorpo-
rating languages productively into instruction can support learning. Research has pointed towards
favourable effects of translanguaging pedagogies, especially for learners’ metalinguistic awareness
and engagement in and attitudes towards learning (for discussion, see e.g., Cummins, 2021; Shin
et al., 2020). However, the research base concerning the efficacy of translanguaging practices for the
processes of language learning is still rather narrow and a unified picture is lacking. Some studies
have shown positive effects of multilingual pedagogies for learners’ content learning (Surmont et al.,
2016) or on more specific aspects such as vocabulary learning (Busse et al., 2020), while Hopp et al.
(2021) found in a six-month intervention study that translanguaging pedagogies neither boost nor
impede the general second language development at group level. They argue that this discrepancy in
research outcomes may be due to differences in short-term and long-term effects of translanguaging
pedagogies, an issue which merits further research attention.

Main research methods in multilingual discourse and second language research

As discussed in the previous section, the connection between second language research and multilin-
gual discourse has evolved from research on language contact between L1 and the target language to
research on multilingualism, where SLA is seen in broader sociocultural, ecological, and dialogical
terms. In terms of the research methods used, these two strands of research can be seen as two ends
of a continuum. At one end, there is research which has taken as the starting point the multilingual
competences of individuals in examining the processes and outcomes of second language learning,
making use of the quantitative methods and measurements that are most common in traditional SLA
research. At the other end, there is research that has attempted to reframe SLA to reflect and respond
to the diversity of learners, language use, and learning environments and has examined learners,
learning environments, and pedagogies by employing the qualitative methods that are more typical
in discourse studies. In between there are studies that have made use of mixed methods, that is, a
combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, for example placements tests and interviews. In
the following, we describe the methods used at both ends of the continuum but focus mainly on the
latter, where multilingual discourse approaches meet second language research.
In the studies with an SLA focus, multilingualism is primarily seen as the background against
which the individuals’ second language learning is examined. These studies are mostly quantitative
and/or experimental, thus following the well-established and tested methods used in mainstream SLA
research. The focus in these studies has often been on a specific aspect or area of second language
learning, such as lexical transfer between languages (e.g., Burton, 2013), orthographic competence of
multilingual learners (e.g., Weth, 2015), a specific grammatical structure in bilingual and multilingual

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learners’ products (e.g., Pfenninger, 2014), or overall proficiency of monolingual and multilingual
learners (e.g., Mady, 2014). The methodological approach has mostly been quantitative and experi-
mental, and the methods used include tests, oral and written production (sometimes complemented
with interviews), questionnaires, or diaries. One especially large group of studies has focused on
third language acquisition or learning, often comparing second and third language acquisition by
measuring learning outcomes. These studies have also often examined specific areas of language
learning, such as lexical cross-linguistic transfer (Efeoglu et al., 2020), phonology (Chen & Han,
2019), or literacy proficiency (Bérubé & Marinova-Todd, 2012). However, they have also examined
broader issues related to multilingualism, such as the language practices of trilingual children (Choi,
2019). These studies have often used mixed methods, for example, a combination of interviews and
proficiency tests.
The more socially and discursively oriented studies have taken the multilingual learners, multilin-
gual learning and teaching contexts, or multilingual pedagogical practices as a starting point for ex-
amining their interplay with second language learning. These studies often arise from sociocultural,
ecological, and dialogical frameworks and the methodological approach has mostly been qualitative,
drawing more on discourse studies than SLA research. Many of the studies in this group are case
studies, of individuals, groups, and communities or other contexts of language learning. For an over-
view and examples of case studies related to second language learning, see Duff (2008).
In terms of methods, the discursively oriented studies can be grouped in three groups. Sample
studies will be presented in the next section, ‘Sample studies in multilingual discourse and second
language research’. Firstly, there is a large group of studies that have focused on multilingual class-
room discourse, either oral or written discourse. In addition to classroom discourse studies interested
in the structures and patterns of classroom discourse, there have been studies focusing on bi- and
multilingual classroom practices, explored through both the concept of code-switching and more
recently that of translanguaging. The core of the studies on code-switching and translanguaging have
been based on classroom observation and (video-)recordings of language use in the classroom. The
focus can be on the teacher’s or the learners’ use of different languages in the learning situation, that
is, the focus is on describing how multiple languages and language resources are present in learners’
and teachers’ practices and what kinds of functions they serve. On the other hand, the aim can also
be to develop the pedagogical practices of the language classroom in order to foster inclusion and
social justice. This expanding group of studies focuses on pedagogical translanguaging and reports
on various kinds of experiments in translanguaging practices in the classroom (see e.g., Juvonen &
Källkvist, 2021a).
Secondly, there are studies that have examined the connections between multilingualism and
second language learning by exploring the experiences, perceptions, or beliefs of the multilingual
learners and their teachers. The data in these studies are typically interviews or questionnaires and
the analytical methods include (thematic) content analysis, narrative analysis, or discourse analysis.
More recently, also visual methods have been used. The visual methods include drawings, collages,
or photographs produced by the research participants and these are most often complemented by
verbal descriptions of the images or interviews relating to those images. The analysis then focuses
both on the visual and verbal data.
Thirdly, there are studies that have adopted ethnographic approaches in order to examine the
bi- or multilingual learning contexts, typically classrooms but also everyday language learning en-
vironments. There are long-term school ethnographies or studies employing ethnography more as a
method, with some key aspects of ethnography included. These include sustained contact with the
research context and its participants and a combination of observation, interviews, and collecting
artefacts, for example. A specific strand of research related to ethnography is research on the lin-
guistic landscape (schoolscapes) of various educational contexts. These studies focus on the material

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constellation of the formal learning environment and how that relates to learners’ multilingual identi-
ties and language learning (e.g., Tjandra, 2021).
The discursive orientations have enriched the area of second language research in many ways. The
most evident benefit is the broader palette of methods that has been used to examine the complexities
of language learning of multilingual individuals in multilingual environments. Both quantitative and
qualitative data are needed to understand how languages are learnt. Discursive methods also bring
along emic approaches to language learning, which has made it possible to bring forth the voices of
the learners and teachers to enhance learner agency and to improve inclusive pedagogical practices.

Sample studies in multilingual discourse and second language research

In the following, we present five empirical studies that represent both theoretically and meth-
odologically different discursive orientations to researching second language learning and use.
They represent studies that, firstly, use the concepts of translanguaging, plurilingualism, and code-
switching to approach the practices of language use in institutional learning contexts, to understand
how learners make use of their multilingual competence and practice and to examine how inclusive
pedagogical practices can help second language learners. Secondly, they represent studies that
have focused on learners’ experiences of second language learning to explain the processes and
practices of learning.
The first example of a study using the concept of translanguaging is the one by Mkhize (2016)
on isiZulu–English bilingual learners in rural South Africa, and the methodological approach is eth-
nographic. The aim of the study was to examine how bilingual children use their everyday literacy
practices to learn English and to access knowledge in English. Mkhize (2016, p. 227) identifies as
one of the current challenges of schools that of helping bilingual students to acquire proficiency and
access knowledge in the second language while at the same time valuing and making use of their
everyday linguistic resources. The fourth-grade classroom in focus was located in a rural school
near a township in South Africa. The majority of both teachers and students were mother-tongue
speakers of isiZulu, but both were also constantly switching between isiZulu and English in class.
Four focal learners between the ages of 11 and 12 and their teacher were selected for closer contact.
The data collected included classroom observation notes (52 lessons), video-recorded lessons (35
recordings), interviews at the beginning and end of the study, and informal conversations. The data
were analysed thematically. The findings showed that allowing learners to draw on their everyday
multilingual language resources even within rigid pedagogical practices makes them more engaged
in learning. It also became evident that translanguaging supports the students’ ability to process the
content of learning more deeply despite limited skills in English, thus suggesting that ‘translan-
guaging connects cognitive processes of learning to sociocultural practices, and to affective factors’
(Mkhize, 2016, p. 238).
Another take on translanguaging is presented by Rosén and Lundgren (2021) in their qualitative
study on pedagogical translanguaging in a classroom of adult immigrants learning Swedish as a
second language. Their starting point was to challenge the monolingual norms in second language
education by exploring how students’ experiences, their language backgrounds, and their everyday
language use can be used as resources in language learning. The study was a part of a larger develop-
ment programme, the aim of which was to develop Swedish-for-immigrants education in collabora-
tion with teachers and school leaders. The data analysed consisted of group interviews with teachers
in five schools, and the interviews focused on two activities, photographs and mind maps produced
by the teachers. The group interviews were analysed as interaction between the teachers and the re-
searchers against three orientations to linguistic diversity in schools: language-as-problem, language-
as-right, and language-as-resource.

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According to the results, teachers saw the linguistic diversity of the classroom both as a re-
source and as a problem. The teachers seemed to struggle between the benefits of students us-
ing all their linguistic resources, that is, translanguaging, and the aim of learning the majority
language, Swedish, as fast as possible. Learning the majority language was seen as a right, as it
opened access to participation in society and the use of other languages could lead to inequality
among students.
The concept of plurilingualism formed the premise of the ethnographically oriented study by
Marshall and Moore (2013). They focused on plurilingualism and plurilingual competence in their
longitudinal study of transnational students at a university in Vancouver, Canada. Their study broad-
ened the framework of second language research as they argued that TESOL educators in higher
education ‘face continual challenges brought about by globalization, such as the changing nature of
time and space, evolving patterns of migration and diaspora, the complex development of new com-
munication media and forms of meaning-making, new Englishes, and new forms of inter-meshing
multilingualism’ (Marshall & Moore, 2013, p. 472). The focus in the article was on students in a
first-year literacy course at the university, and the selected data from a larger study spanning over
three years included semi-structured interviews with students, students’ writing samples, research-
ers’ ethnographic field notes during classroom observation, and recorded interactions of group work.
The findings showed, firstly, that students have complex multilingual repertoires and that they see
their plurilingualism as a social and educational asset. The findings ‘challenge the view that English,
or academic English, is necessarily the sole conduit to success for participants at the expense of the
other languages’ (Marshall & Moore, 2013, p. 480), as the students actively used their plurilingual
competence when producing academic texts.
Code-switching is a concept that has been used widely in studies examining classroom interaction.
One example of such studies is by Liebscher and Dailey-O’Cain (2005), who examined code-­switching
between first language and second language in a foreign language classroom in the analytical frame-
work of conversation analysis. They approached the classroom as a community of practice and argued
that if the classroom is seen by the students and the teacher as a bilingual space, the code-switching
in the class follows the patterns of code-switching found in research on non-classroom data. The
classroom in focus was a seminar for advanced learners of German at the university in Canada.
The participants were 12 students with advanced but varying competences in German, and the data
consisted of 11 recordings, each 45 minutes in length. Code-switching in the classroom had both
participant-related and discourse-related functions. The former mainly addressed the roles of students
and teachers in the class, but the latter were clearly similar to bilingual practices in non-institutional
settings. The authors conclude that when students and teachers share an understanding ‘that, in ad-
dition to learning the subject matter, one of the main goals is L2 use, permission to use the L1 can
be granted without fear of jeopardizing the language learning endeavour through overuse of the L1’
(Liebscher & Dailey-O’Cain, 2005, p. 245).
In addition to examining language use in the learning context, discourse-oriented studies of mul-
tilingualism and second language learning can orient to examining learners’ and teachers’ beliefs (or
experiences/perceptions). Chik (2018) is an example of research on learner beliefs that makes use of
visual and narrative methods in the context of foreign language learning. In her study, language learn-
ing was understood as socially and culturally situated both in formal institutions and informal set-
tings. Chik collected visual and multimedia narratives from language learners (children and adults)
in Sydney, Berlin, and Hong Kong. The language backgrounds of the students were, accordingly,
English, German, and Chinese. The visual narratives were complemented with discussions and blogs,
for example. The findings showed that both the learners’ beliefs and their practices varied depending
on the language being learnt. For example, learners of English extended their learning beyond the
language classroom and they learnt and used the language at the same time, as ‘they appeared to have

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a better sense of what learning English might involve’ (Chik, 2018, p. 326), whereas learners of Asian
languages seemed to think that one needs to first learn the language in the classroom and only later
use it in real-world situations.

Implications for second language learning, teaching, and use and for future
research directions
As the discussion in the prevoius section indicates, recent years have shown growing research at-
tention to the intersection of multilingual discourse and second language research. Typically, this
research has been driven by broadening conceptualizations of language and the relationship between
languages and by a growing recognition of the need to engage more thoroughly with the experiences
and perceptions of learners themselves, which has the potential to enrich our understanding of the
nature of second language learning and teaching. For example, treating multilingual language use as
a communicative resource rather than a problem can enhance language teaching through the design
of pedagogical practices that support all learners and take into account their linguistic backgrounds
(e.g., Busse et al., 2020). Additionally, a more versatile understanding of multilingualism can enrich
the way in which familiar practices, such as translating (Kramsch, 2020), can be used in language
teaching to attend to not only linguistic equivalence but also matters of functional and cultural con-
vergence and diversity.
As regards second language learning and development, a recent study by Hopp et al. (2021) sug-
gests that research evidence of the favourable impact of multilingual language use is not conclusive,
at least not in terms of long-term effects on second language development. Yet from the affective
perspective, learners’ acknowledgement of truncated and partial multilingual repertoires as natural
and normal, as well as a focus on language as a practice rather than a system to be eventually attained
‘completely’ and in a native-like manner, may help reduce learners’ anxiety in the face of learning
new languages. However, as Ortega (2019, p. 35) notes, SLA is still faced with the challenge of need-
ing ‘to figure out how to investigate language learning in ways that do not undo the complexities of
multilingualism and do not leave social justice at bay’.
Even though the knowledge base concerning the intersection of multilingual discourse and sec-
ond language research keeps increasing, there are also areas meriting future research. The first one
concerns taking multilingualism more strongly on board in the theorization of SLA. As Ortega
(2019, p. 24) maintains, multilingualism has been erased from linguistic-cognitive SLA due to the
bias associated with the monolingual ideology of nation states as well as native-speaker bias. In
sociolinguistic research geared towards understanding multilingual language use, such biases have
been more often addressed and critiqued, and the same applies to socioculturally oriented second
language research, which has unravelled much about the nature of second language leaners’ multi-
lingual repertoires. Yet the dialogue between these research areas and research on learning processes
and second language development has not yet been extensive. This points towards a gap between
cognitive and sociocultural research orientations that may not be easy to bridge (for discussion,
see Huljstin et al., 2014). Nevertheless, blurring dichotomies and bringing SLA and multilingual
discourse studies more closely together could prove useful for a better understanding of second lan-
guage learning in the context of present-day complex realities. This also relates to the combination
of research methodologies: currently, there is a divide between emphasis on quantitative methods
in linguistic-cognitive SLA research and qualitative (and often case-study) methods in sociocultur-
ally oriented second language research. In order to come to a better understanding of the nature and
emergence of multilingual proficiencies, a systematic use of mixed methods would be a fruitful
direction for further research.

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While the proliferation of translanguaging studies has succeeded in raising awareness of types and
functions of multilingual language use in classrooms, there is still room for more research on the im-
plementation of translanguaging pedagogies to help teachers utilize multilingual resources in their
classrooms (but see Juvonen & Källkvist, 2021a; Lau & Van Viegen, 2020). Given the context-bound
nature of multilingualism in education, the description of such pedagogical strategies should be flexible
enough to cater for different situations and types of multilingual learners. This view is evident also in
Meier’s (2017, p. 152) contention that ‘more research is urgently required to inform the development of
user-friendly pedagogic guidance as part of more critical, cross-curricular, context-sensitive and flexible
multilingual pedagogies’. Moreover, the development of multilingual pedagogies would benefit from
drawing together insights from types of classrooms that have usually been treated separately in research
literature (e.g., basic education, higher education, immersion, content and language integrated learning
(CLIL), mainstream education with increasing linguistic and cultural diversity) but that share similar
concerns at the level of classroom realities with regard to the use of multilingual resources.
Finally, it is worth bearing in mind that a more widespread recognition of multilingual practices as
an inherent part of second language use and learning does not automatically translate into successful
outcomes. Therefore, it is also important to attune to and understand the challenges involved. For
example, in their study based on interviewing different stakeholders about their views on translan-
guaging (education researchers, teachers, and multilingual learners), Ticheloven et al. (2021) report
on the interviewees’ feelings of discomfort and confusion and their uncertainties relating to the goals
of translanguaging and its impacts on learning the language of schooling, sentiments which suggest-
that the relationship between theory and practice is far from straightforward. In a similar vein, Kubota
(2020, p. 308) draws attention to the ‘gap between plurality in scholarly discussions and singularity
imposed by real-world practices’ and argues that there is a need to move beyond celebratory ap-
proaches to critical ones that recognize the need to explore the power hierarchies involved and how
language preferences are historically, socially, politically, discursively and ideologically shaped and
with what consequences. According to her (p. 318), we need to critically examine when it is more
important ‘to recognize all languages as valid, legitimate and essential for human rights and human-
ity’ than to make linguistic boundaries blurred and fuzzy.

Further reading
Juvonen, P., & Källkvist, M. (Eds.). (2021). Pedagogical translanguaging. Theoretical, methodological and
empirical perspectives. Multilingual Matters.
This edited volume provides theoretical perspectives on translanguaging and multilingualism as well as em-
pirical studies on pedagogical translanguaging and multilingual practices in various learning contexts. The con-
texts examined include mainstream and immigrant education, primary schools, upper-secondary schools, and
adult education.
Li, W., & Lin, A. M. Y. (Eds.). (2014). Special issue: Translanguaging in classroom discourse: Pushing limits,
breaking boundaries. Classroom Discourse 10(3–4).
This special issue addresses translanguaging in a variety of sociolinguistic, economic-political, and educa-
tional contexts across the globe. With the focus on translanguaging practices in classrooms, the articles point
towards tension between monoglossic language policies and classroom realities.
Turnbull, M., & Dailey-O’Cain, J. (Eds.). (2009). First language use in second and foreign language learning.
Multilingual Matters.
Drawing on educational research, second language acquisition, and sociolinguistics, this volume addresses
the use of the first language in language classrooms, covering a variety of languages, countries, and educational
contexts. The volume calls for a recognition of the benefits that principled first language use can have for both
learning and communication.

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 PART III

Areas of use
 23
TECHNOLOGY-MEDIATED
DISCOURSE AND SECOND
LANGUAGE RESEARCH
Vincenza Tudini and Anthony J. Liddicoat

Introduction
Technology-mediated discourse—interaction between human beings through technological arte-
facts—has become an established part of everyday life in both social and institutional contexts
since the introduction of the telephone in the late 1800s. Synchronous digital interaction became
possible in the 1970s when written interaction, also known as text chat, was introduced at the Uni-
versity of Illinois, where it was known as Talkomatic (Grubbs, 2004), with asynchronous interac-
tion (email) starting at around the same time (Gibbs, 2016). Email and chat interaction shifted the
focus in technology-mediated teaching and research from interaction with computers to interaction
through computers (Warschauer, 2003). Second language (L2) teachers and researchers saw the
potential of technology-mediated interaction to provide learners with opportunities to interact with
and learn from expert speakers of the target language, outside the classroom, in authentic social
contexts. Participants in these digital exchanges were mostly geographically dispersed. However,
as various technologies became widely available, researchers of L2 learning began to examine
digital interaction from various methodological and theoretical perspectives, based on previous
research on L1 (first language) and L2 learning and interaction, and adapted to the new digital
L2 contexts of interest. This research spawned various new L2 learning journals that provided
technology-mediated L2 learning researchers with a public scholarly outlet for their work. These
include, in order of establishment, System (1973), CALICO (1983), ReCALL (1989), and Computer
Assisted Language Learning (1990) as well as the highly regarded public access journal Language
Learning and Technology (1997).

Overview of technology-mediated discourse and second language research

A range of technologies and digital spaces have been investigated as suitable contexts for L2 learning
and use. These discourse contexts may vary significantly from an interactional perspective, based on
the number of participants, the features of the mediating technology, and how it is used. However,
they provide a major project for applied linguists to understand how L2s are used and learned in
these unique, ubiquitous, and evolving discourse environments. Specifically, research on technology-
mediated L2 discourse needs to take into account multiple interactional variants, in consideration of
the type of technology and how it is used.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003177579-26 297

 Vincenza Tudini and Anthony J. Liddicoat

Firstly, the number of participants changes interaction according to whether it is occurring one to
one, in a small group, or in a large group, due mainly to the impact on turn-taking and participation
(Sullivan & Freishtat, 2013). In group chat, this requires participants to adapt linguistically—for ex-
ample, by naming interlocutors to allocate turns. Mode of interaction also impacts on that interaction.
For example, text chat, voice chat, and video talk have very different interactional requirements for
the achievement of understanding between participants; when used in combination with other modes,
text chat, for instance, may provide a written scaffold for L2 teaching and learning due to its ‘visual
saliency’ (Pellettieri, 2000) and reviewability (Tudini, 2010). This is because text chat generally
leaves a permanent record of interaction, with the exception of software such as Snapchat. While this
record of the online conversation scaffolds L2 understanding in text chat, voice and video chat are
characterized by rapid fade, which requires additional conversational work to promote understanding
(Jenks, 2014).
L2 discourse will also vary according to how posts or turns are timed, and this affects the organiza-
tion of conversational sequences. Options include synchronous (voice and video chat), asynchronous
(e.g., some text chat, email, blogs), and quasi-synchronous (text chat) interaction. Text chat requires
users to reconstruct the conversation through reading (Zemel & Çakir, 2009), as adjacency pairs may
be disrupted and not posted where intended. This may require L2 users to adapt to this medium, for
example, by using conversational repair strategies to achieve understanding. Access to the composi-
tion process is another factor that impacts turn-taking and text chat discourse. Specifically, while
real-time voice and video chat provide access to conversational turns-in-progress, not all text chat
provides access to posts-in-progress, which facilitate turn-taking. WhatsApp is one exception, as
the software indicates when another user is composing a message, which can promote more orderly
turn-taking and sequencing of online conversation. Technical distortions also impact on L2 use and
learning, which may be hindered when voice or video interaction is unclear.
As already noted, conversational repair is a key interactional resource for participants to achieve
understanding in technology-mediated contexts. Digital resources which support online L2 use and
interaction are an affordance of digital interaction, which for some users, compensate for its many
constraints. These resources vary in type and range across chosen platforms. For example, there may
be only limited access to emoticons and emojis as an integral part of the software in some email and
chat platforms, while others provide a variety of options. And in video interaction, for example, an
essential resource for turn-taking such as the ‘raise hand’ function may be easier to access in some
platforms than in others, which affects individuals’ ability to take turns and achieve understanding.
Physical distance also affects technology-mediated L2 discourse. For example, while many video-
game users may choose to interact in the same physical space, and are thus co-located, they may also
be geographically dispersed, which may alter the interactional language, norms, and discourse. Most
technology-mediated interaction and discourse in fact occurs between geographically dispersed us-
ers, with global connectivity being of particular interest for L2 use and learning.
A feature of multiplayer video games is the requirement for interactional multitasking. Specifi-
cally, when played in company, video-game users interact both with the game system and co-players,
which requires L2 users to juggle multiple interactional tasks under time pressures (Tudini, forthcom-
ing). The consultation of L2 resources on mobile devices to support speech production in real-life
contexts is also completed under time constraints. L2 users therefore adapt to the constraints of these
contexts, which changes the interactional structure and language of L2 discourse (Eilola & Lilja,
2021). Technology-mediated interaction increasingly occurs on mobile devices rather than fixed ones
(e.g., desktop computers). This results in more accessible resources for L2 use and learning, includ-
ing in outdoor and out-of-class contexts, to support both written and spoken discourse in the L2.
Multimodality is enacted differently in face-to-face and technology-mediated contexts. All spo-
ken discourse is known to be multimodal, as it is supported by physical context, gaze, and other

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resources which promote understanding. Researchers of technology-mediated L2 interaction have

begun to examine its unique multimodalities and affordances. For example, researchers differentiate
between off-screen and on-screen language and discourse during video conferences (Suzuki, 2013),
or interaction related to managing video-game software as opposed to social interaction with other
players (Mondada, 2012). This research contributes to providing a more complete picture of the vari-
ous interactional resources involved in pursuing understanding between users during various types of
technology-mediated multimodal interaction.
While there is a great deal of variation in how technology-mediated L2 discourse is produced,
the newly found connectivity between human beings has provided some continuity. Early research
on technology-mediated discourse focused especially on text chat for the opportunities it provided
to promote real-time L2 use and learning through negotiation of meaning and conversational repair,
which had only been previously possible in face-to-face contexts. The fact that the predominantly
written or text-based format of technology-mediated discourse left a record of L2 learner interactions
facilitated research on L2 learning in these new discourse contexts. In particular, the main theoretical
concepts and methodological trends that researchers applied to understand L2 technology-mediated
discourse in written and, more recently, spoken digital contexts were drawn from second language
acquisition (SLA) and neighbouring fields and disciplines, conversation analysis (CA) for SLA (Firth
& Wagner, 1997; see also Hasegawa, Chapter 2 in this volume), intercultural communicative com-
petence (Byram, 1997; Kramsch, 1993), and neighbouring fields and disciplines. These approaches
were developed in face-to-face contexts in the broader fields of applied linguistics and sociology.
The next section considers some of the most prominent concepts in technology-mediated research
on L2 learning, especially negotiation of meaning (Varonis & Gass, 1985) and conversational repair
(Markee, 2000), to provide a historical overview of research in this field.

Main methodological concepts in technology-mediated L2 research:

An historical overview

Negotiation of meaning
Some of the first research studies of L2 learning discourse in technology-mediated contexts focused
on online text chat because of its similarities to spoken interaction (e.g., Beauvois, 1992; Negretti,
1999). Beauvois’s (1992) study in fact proposed that text chat was conversation in slow motion,
despite the fact that users are unable to access interactional resources such as voice, gaze, and other
non-verbal components of interaction. Early technology-mediated interaction researchers also con-
sidered chat’s potential for negotiation of meaning (Tudini, 2003). Long (1996) defines negotiation
of meaning as

the process in which, in an effort to communicate, learners and competent speakers provide and
interpret signals of their own and their interlocutor’s perceived comprehension, thus provoking
adjustments to linguistic form, conversational structure, message content, or all three, until an
acceptable level of understanding is achieved.
(p. 418)

This definition includes overt correction of speakers’ language, which was found to be common in
text chat between learners and expert speakers due to its ‘visual saliency’ (Pellettieri, 2000). Negotia-
tion of meaning is a fundamental concern in SLA research because it is considered to promote inter-
language development, especially in classroom spoken interaction or in other naturalistic contexts
such as study abroad. Therefore, online text chat’s similarities to spoken interaction, including its

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informal language and real-time delivery, prompted researchers to investigate it as a possible out-of-
class opportunity to gain the reported benefits of negotiation of meaning. Form-focused instruction
(Long, 1991) was found to be a spontaneous feature of L1–L2 learner chat interactions (Iwasaki &
Oliver, 2003; Toyoda & Harrison, 2002; Tudini, 2004), due to the L1 speaker’s (or user’s) regular
feedback on grammar; however, Pellettieri’s (2000) study revealed that despite grammatical gains,
the naturalistic discourse context did not always provide learners with the opportunity to incorporate
modified language into their interactions after correction. Smith’s (2003) study involved task-based
rather than naturalistic text chat and found that learners consistently negotiated for meaning when-
ever there were communication problems, especially during decision-making tasks.
Later research was not limited to form-focused negotiation of meaning. Numerous researchers
considered technology-mediated L2 pragmatics learning (e.g., González-Lloret, 2008), which em-
phasizes appropriate rather than accurate use of the target language. For example, González-Lloret
(2008) investigated pragmatic repairs in text chat by examining the role of L1 speakers’ explicit con-
versational repair in promoting L2 learners’ awareness of social rules concerning formal and informal
forms of address in Spanish. Given the role of explicit feedback and correction made evident in text
chat, these features led researchers in later CA-for-SLA research to identify L1-L2 chat interaction as
hybrid social-pedagogical discourse (Liddicoat & Tudini, 2013).

CA-for-SLA
From the late 1990s, CA researchers began to investigate technology-mediated L1 (e.g., Garcia &
Jacobs, 1999; Hutchby, 2001) and later L2 discourse data (e.g., Negretti, 1999; Tudini, 2010) as
interaction. In an influential article published in The Modern Language Journal, Firth and Wagner
(1997) argued that researchers working with second language acquisition (SLA) theory which has
been reconceptualized through conversation analysis ‘will be better able to understand and explicate
how language is used as it is being acquired through interaction’ (p. 768). In seeing language as pre-
dominantly a cognitive phenomenon which is the product of an individual’s brain, prior SLA research
tended to overlook language and conversation as a social phenomenon which both native speakers
and L2 speakers construct collaboratively (Markee, 2000). Rather than seeing L2 learners as deficient
communicators, CA provides evidence that they successfully deploy communicative resources which
they have in common with L1 speakers through conversational structure (see also Hasegawa, Chapter
2 in this volume). This is possible because talk is organized on a turn-by-turn basis, which provides
both L1 and L2 participants in conversations with a resource which Schegloff (1992) terms a ‘pro-
cedural infrastructure of interaction’ (p. 1338), which is common to all languages. CA methodology
was thus able to shed light on the diverse conversational resources that are available and deployed by
users in unique interactional environments such as online text chat.
Following Hutchby’s (2001) definition, chat’s affordances and constraints for L2 acquisition were
considered in many CA studies of technology-mediated discourse. For example, researchers high-
lighted chat’s constraints due to lack of non-verbal resources such as prosody and facial expression,
which suggested that this medium should be viewed as a unique interactional environment—to be
examined on its own terms rather than according to its similarities to or differences from spoken
conversation (Tudini, 2015). Furthermore, L1 researchers (Giles et al., 2015) suggested that rather
than transferring CA knowledge and techniques from spoken to written conversation environments,
researchers needed to develop distinctive ‘digital CA’ techniques. For instance, the role of emoti-
cons in mitigating potentially face-threatening corrective feedback was highlighted as a unique affor-
dance of written interactional environments such as L2 chat (González-Lloret, 2015; Tudini, 2010).
These findings point to emoticons’ affordances for politeness, and hence their pragmatic functions,
in an otherwise constrained L2 discourse environment. Mitigation of corrective feedback through

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emoticons performs an important social function in chat between L1 and L2 speakers, where exposed
correction is common, though it is socially dispreferred and therefore rare in spoken conversation
(Schegloff et al., 1977).
Jenks’s (2014) book-length study instead focused on interactional and educational aspects of
multiparty voice-based chat rooms for L2 speakers of English and found that management of turn
construction and transition depends on how vocal cues, including intonation, are produced and coor-
dinated during voice chat. Unlike dyadic text chat, which is reviewable and thus provides a scaffolded
L2 learning environment, multiparty voice chat interaction presents unique learning constraints due
to its rapid-fade and turn-allocation issues. Suzuki’s (2013) CA study focused on a student’s vocaliza-
tion of off-screen language during a Japanese class offered via audio software. These vocalizations
constituted ‘private turns’ as they were produced off-screen and were inaudible to other adult partici-
pants. Suzuki’s research indicates that this form of talk is likely to promote L2 learning during online
interaction via audio in educational settings. Sert and Balaman’s (2018) research on multiparty video
chat provides a CA perspective specifically on negotiation of meaning and L2 development, which
they considered to be best framed conceptually as an interactional rather than a cognitive phenom-
enon, the approach which had dominated previous SLA literature (e.g., Varonis & Gass, 1985).

Main research methods in technology-mediated discourse and second

language research

Analysis of online discourse for second language acquisition

In research to date on online discourse in second language acquisition, one methodological approach
has been to identify the features of discourse that support language acquisition. Such research stud-
ies have usually employed research methods drawn from discourse-focused SLA, which has focused
on the ways that interaction provides opportunities for language input and/or output. This research
has not focused primarily on the online nature of the discourse but rather has sought to identify
how online contexts replicate face-to-face forms of interaction as resources for language acquisition,
and mainly employing quantitative methodologies and carrying out linguistic analyses of learner
language.
SLA-focused studies of technology-mediated environments have focused on topics such as the
nature, quantity, and quality of second language production (Chen et al., 2015), acquisition of vo-
cabulary and language structures (Akiyama & Saito, 2016; Canto & Ondarra, 2017), development of
second language reading and writing (Lee, 2020; Paul & Friginal, 2019) and improved motivation
for learning (Bailey et al., 2021; Lamb & Arisandy, 2020). These studies have thus focused primarily
on topics that are central to (traditional) SLA, with online discourse providing the context in which
language acquisition happens, and with the discourse itself often understood in terms of opportunities
for input, output, or language practice.
In addition to these more conventionally focused SLA studies, there has also been an increase of
research focusing on how language learners who participate in online interactions develop resources to
participate in discourse. The acquisition of pragmatics has been a particularly fruitful area of research.
Online discourse provides opportunities for language learners to engage in meaningful interaction
and to experience communication across and in languages and cultures, and research has considered
how such online discourse can support the learning of culturally contexted language. Several studies
have investigated the ways in which engagement in online discourse has a positive effect on learners’
ability to use pragmatic features to develop their pragmalinguistic abilities over time (e.g., Del Bono
& Nuzzo, 2021; González-Lloret, 2019; González-Lloret & Ortega, 2018). Other studies have looked
at participation in everyday social settings, specifically video-game contexts, to examine affordances

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for L2 learning in interactions between co-present L2 speakers. For example, Piirainen-Marsh and
Tainio’s (2009, 2014) research identified the role of L2 speakers’ voice repetition of game characters’
English utterances as a significant L2 learning and collaborative gaming resource. Horowitz (2019)
found that online multiplayer video games contribute to language acquisition by providing safe spaces
for learners to practice their language communicatively in an authentic context, which may also reduce
communication anxiety. This body of research shows that engagement in online discourse is not just an
opportunity to communicate in the language but also affords creative possibilities for developing one’s
ability to use the language and adjust to new pragmatic norms.

Analysis of online second language acquisition as discourse

An alternative methodological approach in studying online discourse in SLA contexts is to consider
how online communication works as discourse. In these research approaches, the emphasis is placed
primarily on discourse-related questions rather than specifically SLA-focused questions, although
SLA concerns may also be present. This research may adopt either a comparative perspective in
which online discourse is compared with face-to-face discourse to identify differences in how dis-
course is realized, with a specific focus on elements of discourse that have been shown to be salient
for SLA, or it may adopt a more purely discourse-focused perspective and consider the nature and
conduct of online discourse in contexts where a second language is used.
Comparatively oriented research on online discourse has examined differences in patterns of in-
teraction in online modalities and has compared these to face-to-face interactions. Such research has
investigated the differences in the ways that online communication is organised, especially in written
online environments (Tudini & Liddicoat, 2017). One particular focus of such research in online
discourse in SLA has sought to identify features of interaction in online contexts that are known
to support language acquisition, with the aim of discovering whether online environments provide
the same possibilities for acquisition as more conventional interactions. These studies often adopt a
quantifying approach to studying online discourse, identifying whether certain interactional phenom-
ena are present or not, and if present, to what extent. It has often taken on a comparative focus and
has compared how different modes of communication influence learning opportunities. For exam-
ple, Loewen and Wolff (2016) have compared face-to-face and oral synchronous computer-mediated
communication and written synchronous computer-mediated communication. They investigated the
occurrence of forms of language that involve negotiation of meaning (e.g., confirmation checks,
clarification requests, comprehension checks, recasts, language-related events) and discovered that,
while oral discourse did not show differences across modes, written discourse contained fewer com-
prehension checks and language-related events. They conclude that differences in modality are as-
sociated with differences in learners’ interaction and that oral modes promote different forms of
interaction from written modes and thus provide different opportunities for negotiating meaning. In a
similar vein, Rouhshad and Storch (2016) found that online oral interactions in groups are organized
differently from face-to-face interactions and seem to be associated with different ways of enacting
tasks. They found that learners were more likely to collaborate in face-to-face mode and to cooper-
ate more superficially in computer-mediated mode, and that it was only when learners collaborated
that they engaged extensively in discussions about language. The different modes are therefore as-
sociated with different types of interaction and so constitute different learning contexts. Ziegler and
Phung (2019) examined the interactions of advanced L2 speakers with L2 learners in four chat modes
(audio, video, text, and multimodal) to explore different features of interaction, including feedback.
Their results showed that there was more feedback work done in multimodal chat than in other modes
and argued that multimodal chat had greater potential for facilitating L2 learning. Dao, Duong, and
Nguyen (2021), in their study of EFL learners, similarly found that more peer feedback occurred in

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video chat than in text chat for a range of different feedback types (recasts, clarification requests, and
explicit correction). They argue that various characteristics of text chat may constrain the learners’
willingness to provide feedback, including the slow pace of interaction because of the time needed to
type compose messages, time pressure, and the lack of visibility of visual cues. Such studies reveal
interaction is modified in online contexts and that these modifications have consequences both for
how interaction happens and what interaction affords in terms of second language acquisition. They
suggest it is important for second language researchers to understand the nature of interaction that
occurs in online environments and to develop a nuanced understanding of what online interaction
provides in terms of both language use and language learning.
Discourse-oriented studies of online second language use have usually adopted more discourse-
analytic approaches to data analysis and have placed the primary research focus on the discourse.
Some studies have investigated the discourse structures of online communication and considered
how the features of the online mode create issues for understanding the coherence and sequencing
of online interactions. For example, the phenomenon of split adjacency (Tudini, 2010) in which the
first pair parts and second pair parts may be separated by other turns, disrupts the coherence of in-
teractional sequences and so produces potential problems for constructing sequences. However, the
relative permanence of written interactions provides a resource for reconstructing sequences because
it allows online communicators to move between present and past contributions. Such studies reveal
that online interactions present learners with different affordances and constraints in interaction that
have an impact on both the quality and quantity of their language use and their opportunities for
language learning.
Studies have also considered how discourse phenomena in online interactions provide affordances
for acquisition. One particular focus has been on repairs in interaction. Tudini (2010) has argued
that instances of repair constitute micro-moments in which language development is observable. For
example, other-initiated self-repair, that is, repair that is initiated by a recipient orienting to some
trouble source and repaired by the original speaker, pushes output by requiring learners to refor-
mulate their language production and modify their output towards target-language norms. There is
also evidence that online discourse may have different norms from other forms of discourse. Tudini
(2010) finds that other-initiated other-repair, that is, correction, is more common in online interac-
tions between L1–L2 dyads than in everyday conversation, where speakers of a problem item are
usually given the opportunity to self-repair (see Schegloff et al., 1977).
Findings that show differences between the norms of online discourse and face-to-face discourse
point to a further line of research in online interaction in language acquisition contexts; that is, the
study of interaction as a social phenomenon in which social identities and positionings are played out.
Such studies indicate that interactions between language learners and native speakers are not simply
environments of language learning but also sites of social (re)production of unequal and minoritiz-
ing power relations and ideological positions. For example, Hanna and de Nooy (2003) have shown
that language learners may not be considered legitimate participants in online discourses that are not
designed as learning environments and so may not be able to participate either as social actors or as
language learners. Liddicoat (2016) and Liddicoat and Tudini (2013) have shown that participants in
online dyadic interactions may use language in ways that enact native speakers’ power and reinforce
discourses of native speakers’ legitimacy as arbiters of language forms and language use. They see
this enacted in what they call native speakers’ didactic voice—that is, when native-speaker par-
ticipants reproduce language that reflects teacherly ways of talking: evaluating language production,
correcting errors, and providing explanations. These studies reveal that, although online communica-
tion may allow for interactions across space and time that provide new opportunities for language
learning and language use, these are not neutral communicative environments and the sociality of
online second language acquisition also needs to be an important focus of study.

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A further body of research has investigated online discourse as intercultural communication and
has sought to identify how language learners engage in and learn from their online experiences (see
also Kecskes, Chapter 24 in this volume). Studies of online intercultural interactions have often
shown that the interactions themselves may not always lead to language learners developing intercul-
tural understanding. Many studies have shown that interactions that have been set up for intercultural
learning may be fact-oriented and remain essentialized, sometimes with stereotypical representations
of the target culture. They have also shown that critical reflection may be rare (Angelova & Zhao,
2016). In fact, it may be the case that online interactions lead to intercultural communication break-
downs that could exacerbate problems rather than resolve them and entrench essentialized views of
the other (Ware & Kramsch, 2005). Studies suggest that engagement in intercultural interactions
are not enough in themselves to support intercultural learning, but that such interactions need to be
integrated into classroom teaching to support learners in developing a critical stance towards their
participation that leads to reflection and deeper insight (O’Dowd et al., 2020).

Sample studies in technology-mediated discourse and second language research

While there are many research studies in this area that merit attention, most of the selected studies ap-
ply an appropriate methodology, that is multimodal CA, to some of the most widespread technological-
interactional L2 learning contexts. For example, mobile devices and video games are a ubiquitous part
of both children’s and adults’ lives, but they require multimodal analysis to gain a complete picture of
how interactions with these artefacts promote L2 learning and use. This is because the process of inter-
action to produce L2 discourse, whether mediated by technology or not, is embodied (Goodwin, 1980;
Mondada, 2012; see also Atkinson et al., Chapter 11 in this volume), so it involves interaction on- and
off-screen due to the role of both language and the body. Hence, the focus in the selected studies is on
the discourse of mobile, video-mediated, and video-game interaction for L2 learning.

Mobile L2 learning
The multimodal CA methodology chosen by Eilola and Lilja (2021) yields new insights into L2
discourse mediated by technological artefacts, some of which have only recently begun to be in-
vestigated. Their case study contributes to our current understanding of the role of mobile technol-
ogy in L2 learning and provides evidence of how experiential pedagogy supports language learning
as a social activity. The researchers do this by using multimodal CA to investigate how one adult
Syrian student with emerging literacy, who is completing an integration training course in Finland,
uses his smartphone to support his use and learning of Finnish as L2 during everyday out-of-class
interactions. Their detailed multimodal conversation analytic account of the student’s actions while
interacting with people and his phone illustrates how he orients to the smartphone as an interactional
resource. This mobile technological artefact provides affordances for him to formulate recogniz-
able social actions, despite his emerging L2 literacy. The authors argue that use of the smartphone
enhances this learner’s social participation rather than hindering it, and that it should be considered
a natural part of interaction and learning. The authors further assert the smartphone is a ‘cognitive
artifact’ (p. 294) and a scaffold which supports L2 speakers in their language learning and use in real-
life contexts, and that it should be encouraged as a valuable interactional resource.

Video-mediated L2 discourse and learning

L2 discourse mediated by video-conferencing software on both mobile and fixed devices, has re-
cently become an omnipresent part of modern-day digital interaction, and the consequences for L2

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learning require greater research attention. Video-conferencing discourse involves spoken and writ-
ten talk, which is produced by participants in their interactions, but also language generated by the
computer or other device. While it is a multimodal form of technology-mediated interaction, where
facial expressions and gestures are accessible, these are constrained and altered in this context. For
example, while platforms such as Zoom permit L2 students to access real-time language classes,
Malinowski and Kramsch (2014) point out that the computer screen ‘fixes the user in disembodied,
spectatorial relation to a removed “scene” on the other side’ (p. 159), which limits interactional pos-
sibilities. Even though gaze is essential for the coordination of turn-taking in face-to-face interaction
(Goodwin, 1980), it is only available indirectly in the video-conferencing context, which may cause
communication difficulties, especially when an L2 is being used. According to Tudini (2021), rec-
ognition of individual participants’ voices is also constrained in the Zoom context, especially where
there are multiple participants, unless the ‘raise hand’ button is used prior to speaking, or the voice
of an individual participant is distinctive and known. This is because the physical location of the per-
son’s voice is indistinguishable in video-conferencing software, as each participant’s voice is relayed
via a single speaker from the L2 teacher’s device. Teachers rely on the availability of participants’
names on the relevant window of the screen, which is an affordance for smooth turn allocation and
turn-taking, despite the difficulties in matching a voice to each participant. Access to body language
is also limited as only the top half of the body of interlocutors is visible, which diminishes the role of
the body in meaning-making during interaction.
Video-conference interaction between teacher and student is quite fixed, with little interaction be-
tween students, as might occur in face-to-face classes, unless breakout rooms or other teaching strate-
gies are used. Figure 23.1 provides a visual representation of how this interaction is likely to unfold.
Figure 23.1 shows that the structure of Zoom interaction for teaching L2s occurs mainly between
the L2 teacher and one student at a time, with turn-allocation control firmly in the hands of the
teacher. This promotes the IRF (teacher initiation, student response, teacher feedback) interactional
pattern (Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975) rather than the variety of naturalistic, informal types of inter-
action which are required for L2 use. Despite these constraints, Canals (2021) found that online
interactions in video-based interaction may involve embodied conduct and multimodality to foster
negotiation of meaning and that learners draw on the affordances of multimodality and translanguag-
ing to enhance activities such as noticing, self-repair, and comprehension work, all of which are
relevant for promoting language acquisition.

Figure 23.1 Typical video-conference interaction between L2 teacher and students (adapted from Tudini, 2021)

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Video-game interaction for L2 learning

In video-game interaction, the on-screen interactions generally involve two types of interaction:
(a) interaction with the game software, and (b) interaction with other players. However, Mondada
(2012) has noted that where interaction with other players is concerned, two types of interaction are
enacted: the game-mediated interactions which are focused on managing the game actions, such as
directives, and more conversational interactions described as a side activity, such as evaluations of
gameplay. This study of game interaction in French as an L1 has implications for understanding
game-based L2 learning and use. The language generated during gameplay may be spoken and/
or written by users, but also generated by the computer or other gaming device. Thorne, Fischer,
and Lu’s (2012) study of World of Warcraft (WOW) environments, however, reminds us that L2
gamers do not just play the game; they also engage with other game-related resources. Where L2
learners are concerned, these resources provide them with access to quest texts within the game
and external WOW-related websites. Thorne, Fischer, and Lu’s (2012) analysis suggests that these
environments are lexically sophisticated and diverse, with a significant proportion of structurally
complex sentences. These findings are likely to extend to other game environments, which require
further investigation.
Piirainen-Marsh and Tainio’s (2014) longitudinal study explores two children’s recreational
video gaming over two years, with a focus on the epistemic organization of L2 interactions, in
English, in various instalments of Final Fantasy. Their analysis shows progression on the part of
the less knowledgeable participant, who displays growing expertise both in their ability to play
the game and in their language skills over time. Specifically, the analysis shows that the children
initially orient to various types of epistemic asymmetries which relate both to the language and
features of the game. For example, at the start of the gaming period, the inexperienced player often
displays trouble by initiating repair or asking questions, while the experienced gamer orients to their
epistemic primacy by providing responses which display epistemic access to relevant information.
Over two years of regular gameplay, these asymmetries change, as the inexperienced participant’s
interactional competence develops from that of a learner to that of an equal gaming partner. The
authors thus conclude that epistemic changes in the language and gaming activities should be seen
as a ‘learning event’.
Raffone’s (2022) study of digital game-based language learning found that participation in online
games had positive impacts on students’ learning. The study examined a narrative-based game, The
Story of Wordland, produced especially for language learning and used with secondary school learn-
ers of English in Italy. The study showed that participation in interactive storytelling in the game not
only improved students’ language but also positively influenced their engagement and reduced their
fear of failure. Raffone demonstrates that video gaming is not only a form of out-of-class learning but
can be integrated into more conventional forms of teaching and learning.

Implications for second language learning, teaching, and use

Effective use of online discourse for SLA requires an awareness of both the discourse dimensions
of online interaction and the SLA potential of such interaction. Online discourse is not simply mun-
dane (i.e., everyday) discourse moved into an online context, but rather various forms of discourse
with their own specific features. The discourse dimension needs to be attended to because the dis-
course of online interaction is organized in distinctive ways that have both positive and negative
implications for language learners’ participation in online interactions. It is only by understanding
online discourse as discourse that teachers, learners, and users can fully recognize and address the
affordances and constraints of technology-mediated environments for second language learning and

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use. Similarly, in online contexts it is important to understand the nature of the language learning
that is both supported by and required for participation in online communications. In particular,
there is a need to recognize the need for an expanded view of language learning that moves beyond
developing a command of language structures to include the teaching and learning of culturally
contexted ways of making and interpreting meaning. It is therefore important to recognize that in
online contexts, language learners are not simply learners but are also users of the language and that
these roles are not easily disentangled (Kern & Liddicoat, 2008). As this indicates, further research
attention is urgently required to better understand and take advantage of the sociality of online sec-
ond language acquisition.

Future directions for technology-mediated discourse and second

language research
Future research in this area is dependent on the adequacy of resourcing to permit the kinds of sophis-
ticated multimodal analyses which are required to enrich our understanding of how L2 discourses are
enacted, learned, and navigated in technology-mediated contexts, including in emerging technologi-
cal contexts with the emerging social interactions they foster both in social and classroom contexts.
For example, the role of mobile interaction and learning has only just begun to be explored, despite
the dominance of mobile devices and applications for L2 learning. Related to mobile learning is the
increased use of machine translation, which also requires focused research attention as a key compo-
nent of mobile L2 learning and discourse. The impact of artificial intelligence-powered systems and
robotics on L2 language and discourse also need to be investigated as they become more prevalent.
Additionally, our increased reliance on video-conferencing for-L2 teaching and learning in recent
times indicates that further research in this area is urgently required, taking into account both off-
screen and on-screen, formal and informal L2 contexts. Despite research efforts so far, systematic
research is still required to explicate the positive impacts of technologies on the nature of learning—
for example, on affect, engagement, and motivation. Much research to date has reported on one-off
interventions, where the novelty effect is likely to be a factor. An additional neglected area in research
on L2 technology-mediated discourse is children’s L2 learning, despite the occasional study on L2
learning through video games. Therefore, an increased research focus on children’s technology-me-
diated L2 learning and discourse is crucial to support multilingualism globally, from the early years,
especially in countries where English is the dominant language. This is true also of older learners,
given the ageing population and evidence that L2 learning may reduce cognitive decline. Learners
with a disability also require research attention, as access to technology has the potential to support
their L2 learning in unprecedented ways.

Further reading
Tudini, V. (2010). Online second language acquisition: Conversation analysis of online chat. Continuum.
This book-length exploration of L2 text chat interaction uses CA to provide insights into how language learn-
ers use repair and other online conversational resources to make the most of social chat’s affordances in order to
use and learn the target language collaboratively with native speakers.
Ziegler, N., & González-Lloret, M. (Eds). (2022) The Routledge handbook of second language acquisition and
technology. Routledge.
This handbook is a comprehensive collection of chapters which discusses the impact of technology on L2
learning from a variety of methodological perspectives and in multiple digital contexts. It contributes to our
understanding of the efficacy of technology-mediated learning and SLA processes in digital environments, with
suggestions for further research.

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 Vincenza Tudini and Anthony J. Liddicoat

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 24
INTERCULTURAL PRAGMATICS,
DISCOURSE, AND SECOND
LANGUAGE RESEARCH
Istvan Kecskes

Introduction
This chapter explains how the fields of intercultural pragmatics and second language acquisition
(SLA) are intertwined, what the key issues are that each seeks to investigate, and how an intercultural
pragmatics perspective on discourse can contribute to second language research. The difference be-
tween the two fields mainly derives from the fact that SLA primarily deals with the acquisition and
development of a second language, while intercultural pragmatics investigates how the second (L2)
or additional (Lx) language is put to use in various types of social encounters by people who have
different L1s and represent different cultures (Kecskes, 2010, 2014). The communicative process in
these interactions is synergistic in the sense that prior pragmatic norms and emerging, co-constructed
temporary norms are both present in their discourse. As this chapter will show, an intercultural prag-
matics approach to discourse and interaction offers new insights for understanding and investigating
L2 users’ competence in action.

Overview of intercultural pragmatics: Clarifying the territory

Intercultural pragmatics, interlanguage pragmatics, and cross-cultural pragmatics

Intercultural pragmatics emerged as a field of inquiry at the beginning of the 2000s to distinguish
research on intercultural interactions from research on interlanguage and cross-cultural pragmat-
ics, which have been considered by many as subfields of SLA. In contrast, intercultural pragmatics
has developed as a subfield of pragmatics with a multilingual focus. Interlanguage pragmatics con-
cerns itself with the acquisition and use of pragmatic norms in a second language—how L2 learners
produce and comprehend communicative acts, and how their pragmatic competence develops over
time (e.g., Kasper & Rose, 2002; Taguchi & Roever, 2017). Cross-cultural pragmatics (e.g., Boxer,
2002; Wierzbicka, 1991), on the other hand, takes a comparative approach, describing cross-cultural
similarities and differences in linguistic realizations of various communicative acts. The focus of this
subfield is on speech acts rather than interaction. Although each of these three disciplines has its own
aims and identity, there is some conceptual and analytical overlap, which is a natural consequence of
having common issues that each field addresses from its own perspective.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003177579-27 311

 Istvan Kecskes

Despite the general distinctions among interlanguage pragmatics, cross-cultural pragmatics, and
intercultural pragmatics noted here, many scholars still tend to use these three terms interchangeably,
which continues to create confusion and misunderstandings concerning their paradigmatic origins
and practical utility. To help resolve some of this confusion, in the following section I explain the
significant programmatic and paradigmatic differences between these three concepts and advocate
for intercultural pragmatics as an approach that can bridge discourse and SLA research.

Interlanguage pragmatics
Interlanguage pragmatics deals with the acquisition and use of pragmatic norms in the L2. It focuses
on L2 learners’ ability to produce and comprehend communicative acts, how such ability develops
over time, and what factors—individual and contextual—affect L2 development (e.g., Kasper &
Rose, 2002; Taguchi & Roever, 2017). According to Kasper and Dahl’s (1991) original definition, in-
terlanguage pragmatics explores “nonnative speakers’ comprehension and production of speech acts,
and how their L2-related speech act knowledge is acquired” (p. 216). The definition and scope of
interlanguage pragmatics continues to evolve, following developments in the field. With the growing
number of cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, mainly with a focus on developmental patterns,
individual variation, teaching, and assessment of L2 pragmatic competence, interlanguage pragmat-
ics has become an established area of inquiry in the field of second language acquisition.

Cross-cultural pragmatics
Cross-cultural pragmatics represents the positivist research endeavors of the 1980s and 1990s with
the principle of “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” In order for the L2 user to act according to
this perspective, they have to be familiar with the similarities and differences in language behavior
between different cultures. For these reasons, the major goal of researchers working in the cross-
cultural pragmatics paradigm has been to investigate salient aspects of language behavior involving
speakers from different language and cultural backgrounds, primarily with an eye to understanding
and preventing pragmatic failures.
In a way, interlanguage pragmatics subsumes cross-cultural pragmatics (e.g., Wierzbicka, 1991,
2003), although there are some differences between the two fields. Wierzbicka (1991) defines cross-
cultural pragmatics in the following way:

In different societies and different communities, people speak differently; these differences in
ways of speaking are profound and systematic, they reflect different cultural values, or at least
different hierarchies of values; different ways of speaking, different communicative styles, can
be explained and made sense of in terms of independently established different cultural values
and cultural priorities
(p. 69).

Hence, cross-cultural pragmatics considers that “individuals from two societies or communities
carry out their interactions (whether spoken or written) according to their own rules or norms, often
resulting in a clash in expectations and, ultimately, misperceptions about the other group” (Boxer,
2002, p. 151). Cross-cultural pragmatics studies mainly focus on speech-act realizations in different
cultures and the pragmatic failures that arise from different realization patterns. Because some lin-
guistic behaviors considered polite in one language may not be polite in another, many studies have
used a comparative approach to reveal the different cultural norms reflected in such language use
(e.g., House, 2000; Spencer-Oatey, 2000; Thomas, 1983; Wierzbicka, 1991, 2003).

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Intercultural pragmatics
The concerns of intercultural pragmatics differ sharply from those of interlanguage pragmatics and
cross-cultural pragmatics. The focus of intercultural pragmatics is intercultural communication in
interactions among people from different cultures, rather than cross-cultural communication that in-
volves a comparison of interaction patterns between people from the same culture and those from
another culture. The distinguishing features of intercultural pragmatics can be summarized as fol-
lows. First, the theoretical foundation of intercultural pragmatics is a sociocognitive framework (to be
explained in the next section). Second, the focus of intercultural pragmatics research is the nature and
characteristics of real-world language use—the actual process of interaction in context rather than
abstract or theoretical notions of pragmatic competence, transfer, or acquisition. Finally, intercultural
pragmatics focuses on intercultures that get co-constructed in the interactional process rather than on
a priori assumed or static cultures.
Intercultures involve both normative and emergent components (Kecskes, 2011). In intercultural
communication, speakers rely on relatively definable cultural models that represent the speech com-
munities to which they belong. However, these L1-based cultural models and norms are never fully
represented in intercultural interactions. The L1-based norms constantly shift depending on the dy-
namics of conversation, emergent intentions of individual speakers, and situational elements during
the process of common-ground-building. Hence, norms in intercultural communication are emergent:
interactionally and socially constructed in the course of communication.

Intercultures
Intercultures are usually ad hoc (i.e., temporary) creations. They are developed in interaction in which
cultural norms and models brought from speakers’ prior experience blend with features created in the
interaction in a synergetic way. The result is intercultural discourse in which there is mutual transfor-
mation of knowledge and communicative behavior rather than transmission. The following excerpt,
Excerpt 1, illustrates the process of creating an interculture. The participants are students from Brazil,
Columbia, and Hong Kong.

Excerpt 1

B: Have you ever heard about au pair before?

Col: No, what is au pair?
HK: It’s a French word.
B: … we come as an exchange to take care of kids.
Col: What kids?
B: Kids in the host family. We live with the host family.
HK: By the way, how about the kids? How do you know what to do with them?
B: We have to go to training.
Source: Albany Corpus of Intercultural Communication.1

In this conversation, the speakers represent three different languages (Portuguese, Cantonese,
Spanish) and use English (their L2) as a lingua franca. They bring their prior knowledge to this
communicative activity, but they create an interculture, which belongs to none of them and emerges
in the course of interaction. The interactants here have a relatively smooth conversation about the
French term au pair, which is used to denote a job in the United States. Not all speakers have prior
knowledge of this term. Yet, no misunderstanding or pragmatic/cultural “breakdown” occurs in the
interaction because each speaker cooperates in using semantically transparent language to support
their mutual understanding and shared communicative goals.

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An intercultural pragmatics perspective and the concept of intercultures help L2 researchers rec-
ognize various factors that affect intercultural interactions differently than L1 interactions, such as
L2-based conventions, norms, and contextual effect. Relying only on traditional pragmatic theories
or norms may prevent researchers from noticing or investigating the dynamic collaborative work that
takes place in intercultural interactions. The next section will examine in more detail the theoretical
and discursive frame of intercultural pragmatics and how it informs SLA research.

The theoretical basis of intercultural pragmatics: The sociocognitive approach

Sociocognitive views in SLA and intercultural pragmatics

Intercultural pragmatics adopts a sociocognitive approach (SCA) to pragmatics that takes into ac-
count both societal and individual factors, including cooperation and egocentrism, but does not treat
them as antagonistic phenomena in interaction (Kecskes, 2008, 2010, 2014). In SCA, speakers are
considered as social beings searching for meaning with individual minds embedded in a sociocultural
collectivity. Matsuoka and Evans (2004, p. 8) discussed this phenomenon in a very simplified but still
powerful way:

When I learned the word “behave” long time ago, I wondered if this word was made up from
“be” and “have.” The “be” is an intrinsic factor or what we are and the “have” is an extrinsic
factor or what we have. So “behave” is the result of “be” and “have.” If the “be” is related
to the cognitive and the “have” is related to the social, “to behave” itself is related to the
socio-cognitive.

Of course, the sociocognitive approach is much more complex than Matsuoka’s example, as we
will see in the section “Main tenets of SCA.”
In SCA, language use and language acquisition are both social and cognitive phenomena. This
fact is also recognized in SLA. Atkinson (2002, 2014) and other scholars (Harare, 2016; Matsuoka
& Evans, 2004) have promoted a sociocognitive approach to SLA (see also Atkinson et al., Chapter
11 in this volume). However, the starting point and main tenets of their approach and those of SCA
are different. While Atkinson and his followers rely mainly on Vygotsky’s (1986) and Gee’s (1992)
views, SCA originates from Bandura (1977, 1986). The Vygotskian approach resulted in two lines
of research in SLA. One is sociocultural theory, developed mainly by Lantolf and colleagues (e.g.,
Lantolf, 2000; Lantolf & Appel, 1994), and the other is Atkinson’s sociocognitive approach to SLA
(see also Ohta, Chapter 10 in this volume).
Both Lantolf’s and Atkinson’s work rely on Vygotsky (1986), who postulated that the thinking
process can be explained not based on the internal structure of mind but on the interaction between
thinking bodies (humans) and objects. Vygotsky emphasized the importance of mediation between
the internal and external world and claimed that the primary symbolic tool for mediating our mental
activity is language. The notion of “mediation,” which is the key concept of Vygotsky’s theory, has
been incorporated into SLA (Lantolf, 2000). The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) is another
key notion in Vygotsky’s theory. The ZPD refers to the domain of knowledge or skill that a learner
is not yet capable of independently achieving but can accomplish if given relevant support from the
outside world.
The emphasis in the Vygotskian approach (and its subsequent adaptation to SLA) is on language
acquisition and language teaching, while in Atkinson’s framework the emphasis is on interaction.
Atkinson (2014, p. 468) argued that participants align cognitively, so they become “intercognizers.”
That means that they use their well-developed skills of shared intentionality, common knowledge,

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and theory of mind (i.e., moment-by-moment insight into what the other is thinking), whereby fluent
social activity is enabled to take place without significant interactional breakdowns.
In contrast to sociocultural theory or Atkinson’s framework, the sociocognitive approach in inter-
cultural pragmatics builds on Bandura’s (1986) reciprocal determinism, a model composed of three
factors that influence human behavior: the environment, personal factors, and the behavior itself.
Bandura believed that an individual’s behavior influences and is influenced by both the social world
and individual personal characteristics. Reciprocal determinism represents that behavior is controlled
or determined by the individual through cognitive processes, as well as by the environment through
external social events. Building on Bandura’s view, in SCA, human beings are viewed as both ego-
centric (as individuals) and cooperative (as social beings). “Egocentrism” in SCA refers to attention
bias coming from individuals’ prior experiences with cultural frames, norms, and conventions, which
leads to the use of specific registers and language use (utterances, lexical units, grammatical struc-
tures, etc.). When coming to a new social situation, speakers activate and bring up the information
that is most salient to them based on their prior experience as they construct meaning with their inter-
locutors. In the case of L2 speakers, salient information is affected by a range of factors beyond just
their L1, including L1-based sociocultural experience, limited L2-based sociocultural experience,
and interpretation of the actual, emerging situational experience.

Main tenets of SCA

Focus on speaker and hearer

Traditional pragmatic theories are hearer-centered and pay less attention to the speaker’s perspective
(Grice, 1975; Sperber & Wilson, 1995), while in SLA the focus is mainly on the speaker rather than
the hearer or recipient. The sociocognitive approach, however, considers both perspectives as equally
important in the analysis of the communication process. Interlocutors both produce and comprehend
meaning, while relying on their most accessible and salient knowledge (based on prior experience)
during production and comprehension. However, their goals and functions are different when acting
as a speaker or as a hearer. Consequently, only a holistic interpretation of the utterance, both from
the perspective of the speaker and the hearer, can give us an adequate understanding of the meaning
of an utterance. In SCA, interlocutors are considered as individuals with their own cognitive states,
having different commitments and interpretations of the same information and the actual communica-
tive situation. Because of these different cognitive states, the same information (even in the linguistic
form) may mean different things to different individuals. These individual differences are made espe-
cially visible and salient when the L2 is used as a medium of communication.

View of “underspecification”
One of the main differences between traditional pragmatic theories and SCA is that there is no as-
sumption of an “impoverished” or deficient L2 speaker in SCA. The underspecification of speaker
meaning is one of the major debates in pragmatics. It means that the encoded speaker meaning is
considered vague or insufficient and is therefore in need of contextual support and/or pragmatic en-
richment. In contrast, the SCA view is that speaker meaning as produced has pragmatic enrichment
in itself and must be evaluated in its own right and in relation to the interactional context in which it
is produced. The utterance reflects the speaker’s intention, preferences, and goals in expressing their
commitment and egocentrism (in the cognitive sense). The proposition expressed by the speaker is
“underspecified” only from the hearer’s perspective because s/he needs to rely on extralinguistic
factors to fully understand the utterance; but it is not underspecified from the perspective of the
speaker—who does consider extralinguistic factors when formulating the utterance.

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Individual and social traits

Communication is characterized by the interplay of two sets of traits—individual and social— that
are inseparable, mutually supportive, and interactive, as illustrated in the following contrasts:

Individual traits Social traits

prior experience actual situational experience

salience relevance
egocentrism cooperation
attention intention

Individual traits (prior experience → salience → egocentrism → attention) interact with social
traits (actual situational experience → relevance → cooperation → intention). Each trait is the con-
sequence of the other. Prior experience results in salience, which leads to egocentrism, which drives
attention. Intention is a cooperation-directed practice that is governed by relevance, which (partly)
depends on actual situational experience. Communication is the result of the interplay of intention
and attention motivated by the sociocultural background that is privatized individually by interlocu-
tors. The sociocultural background is composed of the environment (actual situational context in
which the communication occurs), the encyclopedic knowledge of interlocutors deriving from their
“prior experience” tied to the linguistic expressions they use, and their “current experience,” in which
those expressions create and convey meaning.

Blending
In intercultural pragmatics there is a unique way in which the individual and social traits interact. It
happens through “blending”; considered the main driving force of intercultural interactions, this is
more than just a process of co-construction of meaning. It combines the speakers’ prior experience
and world knowledge with the actual situational experience in interaction, which creates a blend that
is more than just a merger of two types of experience. In blending, the constituents (prior and situ-
ational experience) can be both distinguishable and indistinguishable from one another. Blending in-
corporates the dynamic interplay of crossing constituents (when constituents are distinguishable) and
merging constituents (when constituents are indistinguishable). Depending on the dynamic moves in
the communicative process, either crossing or merging becomes dominant to some extent.
The following conversation2 (Excerpt 2) illustrates how blending can shape intercultural interac-
tions. In this setting, a French and a Russian student are finishing their lunch and getting ready to pay
the bill:

Excerpt 2

French: The food was really good.

Russian: I liked the shchi. It was tasty.
French: What is that? You ate cabbage soup.
Russian: Yes, it was similar to shchi.
French: Is shchi some Russian soup?
Russian: Yes, it is. But Russian shchi has sour cream in it.
French: Ok, shall we go Dutch?
Russian: What do you mean?
French: Split the bill?
Russian: Oh, you mean that. OK, no problem.

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The two students represent different sociocultural backgrounds (L1 Russian–L2 English and L1
French-–L2 English), but at the same time they both have differential access to (American) English
sociocultural knowledge. They both use English (their L2), but they (and we as researchers) do not
know how much common ground they share. How familiar are they with English restaurant vocabu-
lary, idiomatic expressions, and speech acts? What knowledge do they share about social situations
(related to food) in the (American) English speech community? Then, what common ground and
shared knowledge do they have? Most likely, the speakers rely on their individual knowledge of the
English language system (grammar, semantics), because this is what they share. It gives them the
structure and logic around which they can build their utterances. In the first part of their encounter,
these interactants talked about cabbage soup without mentioning the name of the soup on the menu.
Based on his prior experience, the Russian student related the soup to a similar soup in his culture
(shchi). This is what L1 salience triggered for him. Showing cooperation, the French student sought
to clarify their shared understanding of the cabbage soup. We can witness the dynamic interplay of
crossing constituents (when constituents are distinguishable) in their exchange as the Russian student
explains the difference between the two types of soup. The French student then blends his knowledge
about cabbage soup with the information his Russian interlocutor given to him. Another issue occurs
in the second part of the exchange. Minor nonunderstanding occurs when the French student uses a
typical English idiomatic expression “go Dutch,” which was not part of their shared English vocabu-
lary knowledge, and so meaning co-construction became necessary. When the French student then
used a metaphoric but compositionally processable expression, the Russian student had no difficulty
understanding it.
As the above example illustrates, blending functions as the driver of intercultural interactions and
builder of intercultures. This leads us to intersubjectivity, an essential concept in research both in
SLA and intercultural pragmatics.

Intersubjectivity in intercultural interactions and in L2 use

Intersubjectivity (Rommetveit, 1992) refers to the development of shared attention and understand-
ing of particular elements of a communicative process among speakers. It is the understanding and
sharing of affective, perceptual, and reflective experiences between two or more interlocutors. It is a
mediation between two or more individuals’ minds, which reflect their own private experiences. In-
tersubjectivity serves as a basis for common-ground-building and mutual understanding. The concept
is important both in intercultural pragmatics and SLA because it treats L2 use as a dynamic social
phenomenon. It is also useful in understanding learning in SLA that occurs when students and teach-
ers interact in second language classes, because it allows researchers to focus on the micro processes
through which minds are coordinated in joint activity (e.g., Matusov, 2001; Ortactepe & Okkali,
2021; Toth & Gil-Berrio, 2022).
Intersubjectivity in intercultural interaction is governed by what has been called the “not sure”
approach (Kecskes, 2014). This means that speakers have some kind of predisposition toward their
interlocutors, but they are not exactly sure what they can expect from them. The origin and nature
of the “not sure” approach differs between communication among nonnative (L1) speakers alone
and communication between native (L1) and nonnative (L2) speakers. For nonnative speakers in
intercultural communication, the “not sure” approach derives from the fact that they share limited
common ground and can rely on the meaning-specifying function of actual situational context less
than in L1 communication. In the L1, context plays a selective role. It specifies the meaning of lexi-
cal items and utterances—which of the possible senses of a lexical item comes to the fore in a given
situation. Context can do that because members of a speech community have common ground and
shared knowledge. They are familiar with contextual frames that help them figure out the meaning of

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linguistic units. This contextual effect, however, is missing or is present in a limited degree in inter-
cultural interactions, such as English-as-a-lingua-franca communication where interlocutors belong
to different English-speaking communities: L1 French–L2 English, L1 German–L2 English, L1 Chi-
nese–L2 English, and so on. This problem occurs both in nonnative–nonnative and native–nonnative
interaction.3 Since L2 speakers are not sure that they can count on the factors that facilitate mutual
understanding (i.e., common ground, collective salience, language proficiency, relatively similar un-
derstanding of actual situational context) to the extent that they can do this in their L1 communica-
tion, they need to monitor their communication closely by anticipating and pre-empting problems.
The following encounter (Excerpt 3) demonstrates this issue. Here, a native speaker of English is
having a conversation with a Thai female student. He wants to know whether she likes sports or not.
The Thai student initially says she likes “football” and then immediately replaces that with “soccer.”

Excerpt 3

(NNS: Thai woman; NS: American man)

NS: … So do you like sports?
NNS: I love sports.
NS: What sports do you love?
NNS: I love football … Op- in here we call soccer.
NS: Oh okay.

As we can see, in replacing “football” with “soccer,” NNS probably wanted to provide NS with an
accurate identification of the sport she liked. According to collective salience of her culture, the Thai
woman used the right label (soccer). However, she realized that that label might not work in the ac-
tual situation context for the American man. In addition, she likely anticipated that if NS understood
her to be identifying American football, he might ask follow-up questions that NNS would be unable
to answer. In the NNS’s mind, “football” is the label that has priority based on her L1 experience.
However, she realized that for the American the label has another, more salient meaning (i.e., Ameri-
can football). In order to avoid any misunderstanding, the Thai female changed the word to “soccer”
to match the actual situational context and her interlocutor’s understanding.
In communication between native and nonnative speakers, the “not sure” behavior is a general,
top-down phenomenon that is associated with language proficiency issues of nonnative speakers.
A native speaker’s expectations and assumptions in a conversation with a nonnative speaker differ
from those of an interaction with another native speaker. The following excerpt (Excerpt 4) shows
this very clearly.

Excerpt 4 (A Japanese (J7) and an American student (A7) are talking.4)

J7: So, what’s your, …what’s your hobby?

A7: U::m, I like to read a::nd I like to play tennis and golf.
J7: A tenni-
A7: I like sports.
J7: Tennis?
A7: Hmm?
J7: Hm.
A7: What did you say?
J7: S- sorry sorry. Please say again? ((smile))
A7: I said, uh. I like to u:m play tennis? You know what tennis is?
J7: Ah, playing tennis? ((smile))

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The Japanese student starts with a question about hobbies, and the American student gives a sim-
ple answer. However, J7 has a problem with understanding the word “tennis.” She wants to make
sure that she understands properly what the American said. First, she repeats the word, then uses it
in a question. This completely confuses the American student who is “not sure” what the problem is
since the Japanese student repeated the word. So, he asks “What did you say?” to understand what the
problem is. The Japanese student asks the American student to repeat his utterance to make sure she
understands the word properly. The situation appears to be quite typical; however, the native speaker
does not appear to recognize what the source of the problem is. For her part, the Japanese student is
aware of the problem but is not quite sure about the word (tennis) that the American pronounced, so
she uses several attempts to avoid and resolve the interactional trouble.
Native speakers usually do not formulate this “not sure” feeling for themselves but behave ac-
cordingly with the nonnative speakers, generally subconsciously and automatically, as the following
excerpt (Excerpt 5) demonstrates. (A typical substantiation of the “not sure” approach is italicized.)
This conversation takes place between a Korean student and a Chinese student and shows how non-
native speakers may be aware of this “not sure” approach and attitude of native speakers.

Excerpt 5

K: And then language problem. Sometimes I obviously look like a foleign. foreign person
… foreigner here… so they assume I don’t speak English so they sometimes … I don’t
know … they sometimes don’t understand what I’m saying … even though I’m speaking
English. It hurts me a lot … I don’t know.
Ch: Could you follow them?
K: Of course.
Ch: But they find it hard to follow you?
K: Mhmm I don’t know why. I think it’s because of my … how I look like you know. I
don’t know it hurts me a lot.
Ch: I don’t think it matters very much because just for your physical appearance. Did you try
slowing down your space?
K: Yes eventually they understand I can speak English but still in their mind they have strong
strategy … I mean … I’m sorry … stereotypes prejudice like … you look foreign.
Ch: Foreigner.
K: And you probably don’t speak English, so they don’t even bother themselves to speak to me.

The “not sure” approach in native and nonnative speaker’s communication is usually not directly con-
nected with the speakers’ prior experience (although it may be). It is more likely the result of a general
perception a native speaker has about a person who does not speak his/her language as a first language. It
is important to note that the “not sure” approach does not necessarily lead to negative outcomes, because
communication is also supported by paralinguistic cues such as gestures, facial expressions, tones, and
various communication strategies (e.g., confirmation checks, clarification requests, repetitions). As Lüdi
(2006, p. 30) claims in the following quote, the manifestation of an outsider status (e.g., being a nonnative
speaker) can generate particular attention and willingness to help from an insider:

The interlocutor knows s/he cannot take for granted that the speaker will adhere to usual com-
portment norms, which are inherent to the group membership. If somebody addresses me with
the familiar “Du” in German where the formal “Sie” would be appropriate, I’ll perceive this
behaviour as impolite. But if s/he has a strong foreign accent, I’ll debit this behaviour to her/
his lack of language control and local rules and accept it. As it is, translinguistic markers are
usually interpreted as indicators of lack of competence in the exolingual situation.

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As illustrated in Excerpt 5, the “not sure” approach helps define the nature of intersubjectivity in
intercultural communication, which leads to different handling of the language system than in the
L1. In L2 interaction there is usually less L2-based metaphorism, more down-to-earth language use,
preference for literalness, and co-interpretation of the actual situational context. These differences
have significant implications for research both in intercultural pragmatics and second language ac-
quisition, as we will see in the next section.

Methodological insights of intercultural pragmatics for SLA research

There are several unique features of intercultural communication that differentiate it from L1 com-
munication. It is not that these features are absent in L1 discourse, but they may function differently
(e.g., context sensitivity). The investigation of these features helps advance research both in intercul-
tural pragmatics and SLA, particularly around the basic concepts of cooperation, common-ground-
seeking, context sensitivity, and role of prior context, among others (Kecskes, 2014). It also brings
together discourse approaches with SLA that have been included in several studies in recent decades
on classroom interaction, identity, and language socialization (e.g., Boxer & Zhu, 2017; Hopkinson,
2021; Ortactepe & Okkali, 2021). In this research endeavor, the role of a sociocognitive approach
(e.g., Atkinson, 2002; Kecskes, 2014), as illustrated through Excerpts 1–5, is especially important.
This approach takes an ecological perspective to integrate cognitive and social perspectives. It views
language as a tool for social action and learning as developing alignment with the environment. SCA
uses multimodal interaction analysis (see also the chapters by Hafner and Atkinson et al., Chapters 3
and 11 in this volume respectively) emphasizing process, integrativeness, variation, present and prior
experience, and extended cognition, and considers action as interaction.
The following research advice is proposed under the framework of SCA for both intercultural
pragmatics and SLA:

• Place less emphasis on target language cultural norms, conventions, and beliefs as fixed and
static constructs and instead focus on co-constructed and emergent norms in the discourse and
interaction.
• Avoid assuming core common ground as a pre-existing phenomenon among speakers and instead
examine the process of common-ground-seeking and -building during communicative activities.
Examine how the emergent common ground supports the relationship between interlocutors and
their language use.
• Reconceptualize “cooperation” in intercultural communication and second language use. Interloc-
utors cooperate not just because this is what human beings are expected to do in communication
(as Gricean pragmatics claims); they cooperate consciously and eagerly to avoid communication
problems and to establish mutual understanding. Consequently, researchers should focus also on
speakers’ various communication strategies such as negotiation of meaning, repair, and rapport
building.
• Attend to the critical role of individual, emergent frames in intercultural discourse and commu-
nication. Larger social frames do not necessarily influence interactants in a “top-down” manner
in L2 use as in L1 communication, because they may not share a common understanding of these
frames. Instead, in intercultural discourse, interactants assemble most of their shared social frames
in a “bottom-up” or emergent manner. As discussed above in the section “Intersubjectivity in
intercultural interactions and in L2 use,” intersubjectivity is less a matter of a shared “common
sense” than it is one of intensive and collaborative common-ground-building.
• Recognize that context sensitivity works differently in intercultural and L2 communication than
in L1 communication. In intercultural pragmatics we recognize the two sides of context: prior

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context and actual situational context. Prior context refers to individuals’ previously built experi-
ence with linguistic signs, cultural frames, and situations, while actual situational context refers to
the emergent contextual effects in the course of interaction, including the environment, disposition
of speakers, applied strategies, and so on. Shared meaning is therefore the result of the interplay of
these two sides of context (although sometimes in intercultural interactions individuals may rely
more on prior contextual knowledge than on the actual situational context).
• Recognize that the use of formulaic language and ad hoc generated language is different in inter-
cultural or L2 communication than in L1 communication. In intercultural discourse and interac-
tion, interlocutors tend to generate more ad hoc language and rely less on prefabricated language.

In the next section I will review some representative studies that show these research agendas in
action.

Studies with a mutual interest in intercultural pragmatics and SLA

The gradual development of a relatively coherent theoretical framework in intercultural pragmatics
has resulted in a body of studies that has brought the new field together with other disciplines such
as Gricean pragmatics, politeness and social identity research, translation, SLA, and others (Ke-
cskes, 2022; Kecskes & Assimakopolous, 2017; McConachy & Spencer-Oatey, 2021; Moeschler,
2004, 2022). The most important driving force in this research has been that intercultural pragmatics
encourages a move beyond the traditional focus on utterance-based meaning to a broader focus on
meaning as it is accomplished in interaction. The issues that have been addressed in the research to
date represent the multifaceted nature of explorations in the field, including context (e.g., Fetzer &
Oishi, 2011; Maguire & Romero-Trillo, 2013; Romero-Trillo & Maguire, 2011), vague language
(e.g., Cutting, 2015; Zhang, 2015), formulaic language (Baider, 2013; Kecskes, 2007), language
and identity (Romero-Trillo, 2013), indirect complaints (Crawshaw et al., 2010), service encounters
(Félix-Brasdefer, 2015), and connection between intercultural pragmatics and SLA (McConachy, 2019).
There are several studies that have addressed issues of relevance for researchers both in intercul-
tural pragmatics and SLA. Due to space limitations, I will mention only a handful, focusing mainly
on some innovative approaches, lingua franca, and studies on corpora, business, and language teach-
ing. Crawshaw (2017) argued for adapting the sociocognitive approach to pragmatic research that
intercultural pragmatics favors by showing analyses of certain pragmatics-oriented phenomena, such
as “determinacy,” “distance” and “intensity,” which are essentially negotiated between speakers dur-
ing a conversational exchange. She illustrated how real-life data and metalinguistic commentary
provided by interlocutors can reveal idiosyncrasies of intercultural communication. Nolan (2022)
published an intriguing paper about linguistic differences between human–machine interactions and
human–human conversations. He revisited theoretical frameworks that conceptualize interactional
language use and investigated to what extent they still apply to technology-mediated interactions.
He explored whether Kecskes’ sociocognitive approach (Kecskes, 2014) applies to human–machine
interaction. He examined how well an SCA focusing on asymmetric interactions (e.g., between in-
terlocutors of different language backgrounds) applies to the asymmetry of human–machine inter-
actions. Relying on Kecskes’s idea on the altered role of cooperation in intercultural interactions,
he argued that in human–machine interaction, cooperation also gains a new meaning, as conscious
cooperative efforts surface in seeking emergent common ground and in recipient design. In SCA it is
argued that both recipient design (cooperation) and salience (egocentrism)5 shape utterance produc-
tion. This duality was also evidenced in Nolan’s data: initially more egocentric speakers exhibited
more cooperative behavior and engaged in more recipient design, which was manifested in adjust-
ments and repairs as the dialogues unfolded.

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Lingua franca communication is one of the main targets of research both in intercultural pragmat-
ics and SLA. Mustajoki (2017) seeks to account for the observation that miscommunication takes
place more often in everyday than in lingua franca conversation. After outlining the account of com-
munication that he takes as his starting point and describing each of the two types of verbal interac-
tion that he is interested in, he moves on to systematically categorize their differences on a number of
grounds, motivating in this way his support of this observation. In their paper, Baider and Constan-
tinou (2017) pinpoint the emergence of a lingua franca, which they call “(extreme)-right newspeak,”
among supporters of extreme-right political ideology, through the analysis of their avatars and nick-
names, as well of as the communicative strategies that individuals who comment on YouTube videos
related to the Greek far-right political party Golden Dawn use to sustain and strengthen their collec-
tive identity against nonsupporters of the party. Kecskes (2019) discusses the phenomenon from an
intercultural perspective. According to his definition, English as a lingua franca (ELF) is a way to put
a variety, or several varieties, of English to use in interactions among speakers whose L1 is other than
English. ELF is not a language, nor is it a normative phenomenon: it is a temporary “community of
practice”—a “language use mode” (Kecskes, 2007)—that may develop into a variety only if it is used
for a longer period of time in a relatively definable speech community.
Intercultural pragmatics penetrates into business communication research as well. In her paper,
Crawford Camiciottoli (2017) engages in an analysis of teleconferencing interactions among financial
analysts working for European and Asian companies. Her in-depth analysis shows that the discus-
sants’ professional goals, as well as the technology-mediated setting of the relevant interactions, can
override the effect that their cultural values are expected to have on relational aspects of interaction.
In another paper by Decock and Spiessens (2017), the authors offer a discursive analysis of company
refusal and customer (dis)agreement strategies in French and German, through an investigation of the
level of directness and the use of internal and external modifiers in the relevant emails collected in an
authentic corpus of a multinational company’s customer service correspondence.
Corpus pragmatics is its own separate research paradigm; however, several studies in intercultural
pragmatics use corpus databases for their analyses. For instance, Schröder (2017) embarks on a qualitative
analysis of videotaped conversational data from a group of Brazilian and a group of German students and
shows how the meaning of basic concepts that are commonly used in evaluations of their own and the
other culture is effectively negotiated and co-constructed during interaction, in this way providing support
for the emergent approach to meaning that research in intercultural pragmatics also favors. In her paper,
Schauer (2017) cross-examines the perception of impoliteness among native speakers of British English
and German, in a study that underlines the usefulness of metalinguistic commentary in accounting for the
cultural differences that underlie distinct evaluations of the same situation by different cultural groups.
Connecting intercultural pragmatics with language teaching, McConachy (2019, p. 167) argued
that “one of the important issues in intercultural pragmatics is how conceptual, theoretical, and em-
pirical developments in this field can be used to help reconstitute the teaching and learning of second
languages as an intercultural endeavor.” His paper focuses on pragmatics awareness, which he con-
siders an important notion when explaining what it means to know and use languages for intercultural
communication. The paper uses data from an English-language classroom in Japan to demonstrate
some of the ways in which collaborative meta-pragmatic reflection in the classroom makes it possible
to explore various cultural assumptions that are drawn from the L1 and L2.

Future directions
Intercultural pragmatics and SLA have a common focus: the second language. However, as we have
seen, the perspectives of the two fields are different (language development and language use, respec-
tively). But they can inform and support each other for their mutual benefit. There are still several

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unanswered questions about the theoretical frame of intercultural pragmatics and applications as
well, where SLA approaches may be useful. Here are some areas in which greater cooperation be-
tween the two fields would prove mutually beneficial:

1 Researchers in both fields should investigate whether there is a separate L2 pragmatic competence
or whether language learners have a pragmatic competence that is flexible and dynamic and en-
compasses the L2 users’ entire linguistic repertoire (as translanguaging and multilingualism schol-
ars argue). There are numerous studies (e.g., Ifantidou, 2014; Soler, 2012; Taguchi, 2009) that
focus on L2 pragmatic competence and few (e.g., Kecskes, 2015; Mao & He, 2021) that represent
a more expanded view. However, the nature of intercultural interactions in which language users
rely on a repertoire of pragmatic skills and strategies warrants further investigation.
2 Negotiation of meaning in SLA and co-construction of meaning in intercultural pragmatics appear
to cover similar processes. But are they really the same or are there significant differences between
them? This question is certainly worth investigating.
3 In SLA there are several studies that focus on implicature processing by L2 speakers (e.g., Anto-
niou & Katsos, 2017; Bouton, 1994; Köylü, 2018). However, these studies use the same criteria
and expectations for L2 learners as for L1 speakers, which should be called into question if we
accept what was said above about how contextual effects and target language conventions and
norms operate in intercultural interactions (see also Kecskes, 2021).
4 Sinclair’s idiom principle (1991) is worth revisiting. According to the idiom principle, most text
is constructed from prefabricated chunks, ready-made expressions, which illustrates a natural
tendency to economy of effort (Sinclair, 1991, p. 110). This means that in communication we want
to achieve more cognitive effects with less processing effort. Sinclair also argued that the idiom
principle is the default processing strategy. Analytic processing, the open choice principle in Sin-
clair’s terminology, is invoked only when the idiom principle fails. But how about L2 use and/or
lingua franca communication? How does formulaic language use in L2 differ from L1 formulaic
use? Several studies have pointed out that the use of formulaic language is much lower in the L2
than in the L1. But does this mean that the idiom principle does not work in the L2? More studies
are needed to answer this intriguing question.

Notes
1 The Albany Corpus of Intercultural Communication (ACIC) is under development and is not available for
public use yet.
2 The conversation took place in a restaurant in the United States. The researcher noted down what was heard.
3 I am familiar with the debate about who a “native speaker” is. Whatever the definition, the problem described
above still exits. People living in a relatively definable speech community naturally share more common
ground with members of that speech community than with people belonging to different speech communities.
4 The excerpt is from Kamiya (2019, p. 30).
5 Egocentrism here is understood as it is in cognitive psychology. In the SCA it refers to attention bias that is
the result of an individual’s prior experience. It means that interlocutors activate and bring up the most salient
information to the needed attentional level during utterance construction (by the speaker) and comprehension
(by the hearer). So there is nothing negative about “egocentrism” if used in this sense.

Further reading
Kecskes, I. (Ed.). (2022). Cambridge handbook of intercultural pragmatics. Cambridge University Press.
Bringing together a team of internationally recognized scholars, this Handbook provides an authoritative
overview of intercultural pragmatics and its connection to related fields, including second language acquisition.
Chapters are grouped into five thematic areas: theoretical foundation, key issues in intercultural pragmatics

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research, the interface between intercultural pragmatics and related disciplines, intercultural pragmatics in differ-
ent types of communication, and language learning. The Handbook addresses key concepts and research issues in
intercultural pragmatics, and triggers fresh lines of enquiry and generates new research questions.
McConachy, T., & Liddicoat, A. J. (2021). Teaching and learning second language pragmatics for intercultural
understanding. Routledge.
This collection of papers argues for the need to promote intercultural understanding as a clear goal for teach-
ing and learning pragmatics in second and foreign language education. The chapters emphasize that intercultural
understanding is not an “add-on” to language learning but is central to the learner’s ability to understand and con-
struct meaning with individuals from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Studies in the volume analyze
teachers’ and learners’ ways of making sense of pragmatics, how their assumptions about social relationships
impact their perceptions of language use, and how reflection on pragmatic judgments opens up possibilities for
developing intercultural understanding.

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 25
IDENTITY, DISCOURSE, AND
SECOND LANGUAGE RESEARCH
Elizabeth Miller

Introduction
Nearly thirty years have passed since Norton Peirce (1995) first urged second language acquisition
(SLA) scholars to regard identity and discourse as foundational to understanding language learning
processes and outcomes. Research on language learner identity since then has quickly gained momen-
tum, and it is now commonplace to comment on the abundance of this research in SLA (Klimanova,
2021; Miller & Kubota, 2013). This chapter discusses some of the most common conceptualizations
of discourse and language learner identity that have been adopted in SLA research over the past three
decades. In doing so, it identifies how this now wide-ranging body of research has developed more
nuanced and complex understandings of learner identity and expanded the types of methodologies
and analytic approaches used. And, finally, it comments on some implications for language teaching
and on future directions for SLA research.

Conceptual overview of language learner identity and discourse in SLA research

The earliest research that explored the interconnections between identity and discourse and that ar-
gued for the centrality of these concerns for SLA research can be traced to Bonny Norton’s (Peirce’s)
(Norton, 2000; Norton Peirce, 1995) ethnographic study with immigrant women learning English
in Canada. Up until then, language learner identity had typically been treated as a “collection of
stable social categories” (Klimanova, 2021, p. 187; see also Block, 2007) that influenced learners’
cognitive capacities and individual motivations to learn an additional language. In contrast, Norton
regarded language learner identity as dynamic, emergent, a site of struggle and as constituted in
and by discourse. Her views on language learner identity were influenced by feminist poststructur-
alist theories (Weedon, 1987) and other emerging perspectives on discourse (e.g., Bakhtin, 1981;
Bourdieu, 1977; Fairclough, 1992; Foucault, 1972). In drawing on these varied perspectives, Norton
contributed to developing a new conceptualization of discourse for SLA and applied linguistics re-
search more broadly. Departing from the traditional linguistic notion of discourse as language units
that are larger than a sentence, Norton (2000, p. 14) understood discourse as “complexes of signs and
practices that organize social existence and social reproduction.” In addition to viewing discourse as
an all-encompassing set of meaning-making practices, Norton regarded it as always entangled with
power relations which may constrain the kinds of practices that are possible for language learners to
participate in and the identities that they can claim and inhabit.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003177579-28 327

 Elizabeth Miller

While poststructuralist-influenced perspectives on discourse and identity have remained the pre-
ferred theoretical approach adopted by language learner scholars (see Block, 2022), at around the
same time that Norton’s early work was gaining attention, McNamara (1997) argued that SLA schol-
ars, including Norton, should recognize the important contributions that Tajfel’s (1978) social iden-
tity approach can contribute to our understandings of learner identity. Tajfel conceptualized identity
as developing through social psychological processes in response to one’s membership in a social
group and through negotiating intergroup relations. Though relatively limited in comparison to the
quantity of research studies adopting poststructural perspectives, most of the subsequent SLA re-
search drawing on Tajfel’s social identity theory focus on cultural, ethnic, and/or heritage language
identities (e.g., Ellinger, 2000; Souza, 2016; Te Huia, 2017).
For example, Te Huia (2017) explored how motivation to learn the te reo Māori language among
Māori in New Zealand connects to their beliefs about group membership and authentic Māori iden-
tity. Even as Te Huia (2017, p. 300) acknowledges that there are many ways to identify as Māori,
she found that the Māori themselves often believe that there is “a set of criteria” by which they “can
claim ingroup membership,” and one of these criteria is knowing te reo Māori. In this way, a more es-
sentialized theory of identity has been useful for understanding how ingroup and outgroup dynamics
across contexts influence individuals to align with particular kinds of identities, which can lead them
to invest in learning particular languages. While language plays a central role in these SLA-focused
studies drawing on Tajfel’s social identity theory, the notions of discourse described earlier in con-
nection to Norton’s work tend not to be used.
The approaches to discourse adopted in SLA studies that focus on language learner identity tend
to align with one of two conceptualizations (and sometimes both): (1) discourse as broad, complex
social systems of meaning-making, such as “racializing discourse,” and (2) discourse as language use
in context, such as “classroom discourse.” As an example of the first conceptualization of discourse,
McKay and Wong (1996) explored the powerful role of dominant discourses on ESL students’ iden-
tity constructions. The discourses that they considered included “colonialist/racialized discourse,” a
“model-minority discourse,” and “school discourses: social and academic,” among several others.
The authors demonstrated how the young students in their study invested in identities that aligned
with and/or resisted the dominant discourses operating in their school context, and showed how those
investments contributed to these students” (lack of) advancement in their ESL classes.
McKay and Wong’s (1996) study, and the many others that orient toward discourse as broad,
complex social systems of meaning-making, most often follow Norton (Norton, 2000; Norton
Peirce, 1995) in adopting poststructural theories of language learner identity, and view identity as
constructed through discourse (e.g., Chao & Kuntz, 2013; Ibrahim, 2008; Kato & Kumagi, 2020;
King, 2008; Lam, 2000; Moore, 2021; Nelson, 1999; Pomerantz, 2010; Qin, 2020; Ros i Solé, 2007).
Furthermore, even though many studies do not explicitly identify poststructural theories as informing
their approach to discourse and learner identity, they still typically orient to identity as performed, as
dynamic, and as both enabled and constrained by the power relations that constitute dominant institu-
tional and social discourses, pointing to the continuing influence of Norton’s early work (e.g., Coffey
& Street, 2008; Guerrettaz, 2020; Jiménez, 2007; Kanno, 2000; King, 2013; Lee, 2005; Liddicoat,
2009; Menard-Warwick, 2004; Miller, 1999; Ngyuyen & Yang, 2015).
In studies which orient to the second conception of discourse, that of language use in context,
researchers often refer to “located” discourses or particular discursive activities, such as “classroom
discourse,” “family discourse,” “oral discourse,” or “digital discourse” (e.g., Brown, 2016; King,
2013; Mori & Hasegawa, 2009; Nguyen & Kellogg, 2005; Park, 2007; Vasquez-Calvo et al., 2020).
For example, Nguyen and Kellogg (2005) treat language learner identity as negotiated and con-
structed through discourse but with a more localized focus on students’ online classroom-based dis-
course. They analyzed how students interacted with each other in the target language via an electronic

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bulletin board and contend that this kind of online medium provides language learners with a unique
space for negotiating and constructing new identities in a second language (on technology-mediated
discourse, see also Liddicoat & Tudini, Chapter 23 in this volume). In this case, the authors contend
that the written mode of online bulletin board interactions enables students to focus on trying out new
language forms and speech acts while also trying out and constructing new identities in the target
language.
Over the past decades, the identities that SLA researchers have focused on have become more
complex. The need to account for such complexity was recognized by Firth and Wagner (1997) al-
ready in the 1990s. They lamented that for SLA researchers of the time, the only identity that seemed
to matter was the “language learner” identity, even though this is “only one identity from a multitude
of social identities” (p. 292). However, even as SLA researchers began to unpack the complexity of
learner identity, they often considered—and still consider—language learner identity in tandem with
other more enduring social categories. Gender is one of the most frequently studied identity catego-
ries (McKay & Wong, 1996; Menard-Warwick, 2004; Miller, 1999; Norton, 2000; Norton Peirce,
1995). Relatedly, and now gaining more momentum, is research on sexual and/or queer identities
(Brown, 2016; King, 2008; Liddicoat, 2009; Moore, 2021; Nelson, 1999, Qin, 2020). Along with
growing attention to intersectional gendered identities (Diao & Wang, 2021; Kubota & Lin, 2009;
Paiz & Coda, 2021), SLA research has very recently expanded to include trans and nonbinary gender
identities (Knisely & Paiz, 2021). As an example of research investigating more complex gendered
identities, Nguyen and Yang’s (2015, p. 230) study focuses on a Korean transgender student in a
university-level ESL classroom in the United States and the student’s shifting gender identity claims.
They write that the student’s “queer identity was the primary impetus for her investment in learning
English” and that “learning English was very much a part of the transition to explore her queer and
immigrant identity in new social environments” (p. 225). Nguyen and Yang contend that their partici-
pant’s claimed identity positions in classroom activities were indicative of her investment in gaining
access to queer communities of practice. Although the focal student appears to have missed many
opportunities for improving her English due to her resistance to completing many of the classroom
assignments, she exploited opportunities in the classroom discourse and elsewhere for performing
her queer and immigrant identities, thereby improving her English language practices in the particu-
lar gendered discursive domains that were important to her.
Numerous studies have also focused on heritage language learner identity (He, 2006; Oriyama,
2010; Pozzi & Reznicek-Parrado, 2021; Te Huia, 2017). Heritage language identities have long been
regarded as slippery and contested constructs (Lee, 2005) and have sometimes been criticized as a
top-down identity assigned by school administrators and language researchers rather than an identity
that language learners claim for themselves. However, Lee’s (2005, p. 558) research demonstrates
how some African American university students in the United States chose to learn Yoruba or Swa-
hili in order to connect to their “heritage” and to “find meaning” in their racial/ethnic identities
even though they did not know whether their enslaved ancestors, who were forcibly moved from
Africa to North America, ever spoke those languages. Her study points to the power of contempo-
rary discourses about Africa in constructing diasporic Black identities (Kanneh, 2002), including
in the choices African American students in the United States make when choosing which foreign
languages to study.
Race and racialized identities are increasingly being studied by SLA researchers (Anya, 2016;
Ibrahim, 2008; Kubota & Lin, 2009; Michael-Luna, 2008; Von Esch et al., 2020). The complexity
of racial and linguistic identities is vividly demonstrated in Quan and Menard-Warwick’s (2021)
recent study of a Vietnamese American student learning Spanish while participating in a three-month
Study Abroad (SA) program in Guatemala. The authors undertake thematic analysis of their varied
data sources in following the student’s (Terry’s) growing awareness of her racial, transcultural, and

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multilingual identities and how they intersected with dominant social discourses. They write that “the
process of learning Spanish and Guatemalan culture abroad positively reinforced Terry’s relationship
with her home languages and helped her better understand the multiple and hybrid identities that form
part of who she is and who she wishes to become” (p. 366). It seems that in the process of learning
a new language in a new context, this student came to value her heritage language more and gained
new insights into how dominant discourses in the United States had shaped her prior negative views
of her own racialized identity. This study further illustrates the importance of giving attention to
the intersection of multiple and hybrid identities in terms of understanding how particular language
learners regard their linguistic repertoires.
Bilingual or multilingual identities have long been of interest to SLA scholars (Kanno, 2000) and
continue to receive attention (Preece, 2019), but much of the recent research has reframed this work
as explorations of translingual identities (Kato & Kumagai, 2020; Kiernan, 2019; Quan & Menard-
Warwick, 2021). For example, drawing on her three-year ethnographic study at an urban high school
in California whose students were primarily Latinx, de los Ríos (2020) focuses on one English class-
room, populated by 31 Latinx immigrant students. She explores how these students are too often
assigned negative identities by “hate-saturated” and “xenophobic” social discourses and how their
classroom teacher, Mr. Miranda, worked with the students to resist such damaging discourses and dis-
empowering identities. She contends that Mr. Miranda was able to nurture critical resistance among
students through a carefully planned podcast project which introduced students to translingual texts
and critiques of “linguistic colonization and racism” (p. 6). In response, students engaged in translan-
guaging while crafting their podcasts and drew on multimodal resources, including popular music,
to “express authentic multilayered identities” that enabled them to “decenter whiteness and English
monolingualism” (p. 12). In this study, the only time de los Ríos uses the term “language learner” is
when she references how they were labeled within the school district. In reframing and relabeling
“language learners” as students with “translingual identities,” de los Ríos sought to avoid position-
ing them as students with linguistic deficiencies, a stance supported by other SLA identity scholars
(Seltzer, 2022; Von Esch et al., 2020).
The growing body of SLA research that is conducted in online contexts has contributed to the
increasing complexity attributed to language learner identities as well. Already in the early and mid-
2000s, SLA researchers recognized the need to consider how learner identities were shaped in the
discourses that comprise online sites (Black, 2006; Lam, 2000; Nguyen & Kellogg, 2005). In the
past decade, this research has rapidly increased along with new technologies, social media platforms,
and online teaching and learning sites (see Darvin, 2016; de los Ríos, 2020; Klimanova, 2021). For
example, Vazquez-Calvo, Elf, and Gewerc (2020) conducted a study with three Catalan teens living
in Barcelona who were active in uploading videos to YouTube of their online gaming activities. The
researchers conducted interviews with the teens and analyzed screen shots of their activity online as
well as nearly 160 of their YouTube videos. They considered a range of identity markers, such as the
teens’ online avatars, online nicknames, profile pictures and backgrounds, and the kinds of personas
these teens constructed through their communication practices and language choices—both oral and
written—on YouTube. Of relevance to SLA concerns, the researchers found that the teens, whose
native language was Catalan and who were also fully proficient Spanish users, actively learned and
used English in order to reach a broader, even global, audience for their YouTube posts. This mostly
informal, self-taught learning of English developed in a “fluid manner,” the authors argue, as the
teens engaged in “authentic and meaningful contexts” (p. 274) in their separate gaming communities
and in promoting their YouTube personas. The authors conclude that the importance of identity in
motivating these teens to improve their English should inform language teachers to consider focus-
ing on “language development in the spaces where communication actually occurs” (p. 275) among
young language learners. What we can learn from Vazquez-Calvo et al.’s (2020) study is that even as

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language learner identity remained a key focus for the researchers, by expanding their range of data
sources and research sites, they were able to use new tools and gain more complex understandings of
how learner identities develop through discourse.

Methodological approaches in identity and discourse research

In the first decade of identity and discourse SLA research, scholars almost always adopted ethnographic
or case study methods. This research typically involved longitudinal studies that collected many types
of discursive data such as observations of natural interactions, field notes, interviews, artifacts, and so
on. Interestingly, these early studies generally did not identify specific discourse-analytic approaches
used for making sense of their discursive data. For example, Norton’s (Norton, 2000; Norton Peirce,
1995) research with immigrant women in Canada extended over 12 months and included diary entries
written by the women, discussions on these entries in the women’s ESL classes with the researcher,
questionnaires, interviews, and home visits. Norton (2000, p. 34) describes her qualitative analytic
work, informed by Wolcott (1994), as proceeding from “systematic comparisons and contrasts among
the data,” which involved multiple rounds of collating data into narrative chapters and then comparing
different aspects of her participants’ experiences. Her published analyses carefully integrate salient
information from her varied data sources with short verbatim excerpts from the women’s diaries or
interviews, presented as supporting evidence for the interpretations that she derived from synthesizing
the data. However, she does not identify a discourse-analytic method per se.
While ethnographic and case study methods have continued to be used in research on language
learner identity in the decades since the 1990s (e.g., Guerrettaz, 2020; Qin, 2020), SLA scholars
began diversifying their methods and overtly identifying their analytic approaches in the 2000s. This
change points to the growing acceptance for qualitative methods in SLA research and a subsequent
expansion of analytic approaches. For example, Menard-Warwick (2004) uses a narrative approach
(Cortazzi, 1993), through which she creates identity portraits of her interviewees. Another narrative-
based analytic approach can be found in Coffey and Street’s (2008) study, in which the researchers
categorized the identity types and/or themes that emerged in the accounts provided by their research
participants, drawing on Bruner’s (1986) notion of narratives as a means of constructing reality.
Other scholars have analyzed how research participants construct narrative accounts of language
learning, examining their word choices, narrative structures, and reported speech, among many other
discursive tools to investigate how these narrative constructions position language learners as inhab-
iting particular identities (e.g., King, 2013; Pomerantz, 2010; Ros i Solé, 2007), often drawing on the
work of other applied linguists who have promoted the effectiveness of narrative analysis (e.g., De
Fina, 2003; Pavlenko, 2007; see also Warriner & Pomerantz, Chapter 4 in this volume).
In addition to narrative analysis, many SLA scholars have elected to conduct close analysis of the
turn-by-turn development of talk in their discursive data. Though still varied, these discourse-analytic
approaches allow researchers to analyze the highly dynamic, moment-by-moment processes of iden-
tity construction and social positioning (e.g., King, 2008; King, 2013; Pomerantz, 2010; Qin, 2020).
Some of these interaction-focused analyses have drawn on positioning theory and analysis (Davies &
Harré, 1990) in interpreting language learners’ identity constructions (e.g., Kato & Kumagai, 2020;
Nguyen & Yang, 2015; Pomerantz, 2010; Ros i Solé, 2007). Others have used critical discourse anal-
ysis (Fairclough, 2003; Gee, 2014) in order to overtly incorporate power relations in their discourse-
analytic approaches (e.g., Guerrettaz, 2020; Jiménez, 2007; Michael-Luna, 2008). Yet other scholars
have adopted conversation analysis (see Hasegawa, Chapter 2 in this volume), often incorporating
membership categorization analysis, and sometimes aligning with discursive psychology (see Prior,
Chapter 9 in this volume) in exploring language learner identity (e.g., He, 2006; Mori & Hasegawa,
2009; Park, 2007; Prior, 2011).

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Sample studies focusing on identity and discourse in second language research

I’ve elected to explore in greater detail two recent studies that demonstrate some of the persistent in-
terests and methods that can be found in research on discourse and identity among language learners
over the past three decades, but that also introduce new and adapted methods, collect additional kinds
of data, include a variety of online contexts and practices, and pursue more complex understandings
of language learner identities.
The first study that I will examine (Seltzer, 2022) is based in an 11th-grade English language
arts classroom. In her year-long study, Seltzer worked with Ms. Winters, a high-school English lan-
guage arts teacher, to select materials and plan activities for these classes. She observed four of Ms.
Winter’s English language arts classrooms, producing field notes and memos, transcribing audio
recordings of the whole-class and small-group talk, and collecting student-created artifacts (written
and visual texts) as well as the teacher’s PowerPoint slides and handouts. In analyzing this rich set of
discursive data, which also included interviews with the teacher and students and recordings of her
work sessions with Ms. Winters, Seltzer adopted a thematic approach based on iterative inductive
and deductive coding (Saldaña, 2015). These data collection and analytical practices are similar to
those adopted in earlier ethnographic studies (i.e., from the 1990s and 2000s) focusing on discourse
and identity. What is different is Seltzer’s close involvement in developing the content of the teach-
ing materials. Seltzer does not position herself as an unobtrusive participant-observer in this English
language arts classroom, but rather as a collaborator with the classroom instructor to create a trans-
lingual teaching approach with a clear social justice agenda.
Seltzer uses the term “raciolinguistic ideologies” (p. 48) rather than “discourses,” but her discus-
sion of these ideologies is similar to how earlier identity researchers treated discourses—as broad
meaning-making systems that are entangled with unequal power relations. In this case, Seltzer dis-
cusses how raciolinguistic ideologies are fundamentally informed by white supremacist perspec-
tives which regard “the language practices of racialized communities as inherently deficient” (Flores,
2019, p. 53, cited in Seltzer, 2022, p. 48). In resisting this kind of identity construction, Seltzer
and Ms. Winters included published translingual writers in their course materials, framing them “as
mentors for students’ own writing and metalinguistic thinking” (p. 45) with the goal of countering
“deficit-based ideologies” (p. 51). To further this effort, Ms. Winters discussed translingual strategies
of code meshing and the use or nonuse of translation as well as the role of images and other multi-
modal features of these texts with the students.
In discussing the effects of these efforts, Seltzer focuses on the language practices of one 12th-
grade student in her article. This student was labeled as an “English Language Learner” by the school
district and was repeating her 11th-grade English language arts class so that she could graduate with
her peers. Rather than refer to her as a “language learner” however, Seltzer uses the label “language
architect” to foreground the student’s agentive capacity to engage in complex language practices.
Seltzer also refers to her as a “language-minoritized student of color,” an identity label which fore-
grounds how this student is positioned by dominant ideologies or discourses. Seltzer’s use of these
identity labels points to an increasing trend among SLA scholars to avoid relying on the simplistic
“language learner” label when referring to SLA research participants (Firth & Wagner, 1997) and to
avoid assigning deficit identities to such students. Seltzer concludes by urging language (arts) teach-
ers to “reimagin[e] the classroom writing process so that it centers students’ translingual sensibilities,
their dynamic translingual writing practices, and their sophisticated conversations about navigating
those ideologies that obscure those sensibilities and practices and position them as deficit” (p. 61). It
is clear that Seltzer adopts an overt social justice position and actively participates in and intervenes
in the classroom communities where she conducted her research, an approach that is strongly encour-
aged by many SLA researchers, given the continuing and growing inequities of the world that affect
language learners (Von Esch, et al., 2020).

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The second study that I will introduce in some detail focuses on how East African refugee students
at a high school in Minnesota use “social media to engage in social, academic, and identity work”
(Vanek et al., 2018, p. 237). This study is based on a four-day language arts unit that the researchers
taught with support from the regular classroom teacher in an “ESL newcomer class.” The research-
ers’ stated goal was to gain an understanding of the kinds of language learning opportunities that
can emerge in social media contexts (Facebook, in this case) and how this knowledge could inform
classroom work with refugee students. The scholars regarded these young students’ ways of crafting
identity claims online and in the classroom as aspects of discourse, which they defined as “as socially
constructed ways of knowing and representing aspects of reality” (p. 238). The researcher-designed
workshop used a private Facebook group to encourage interaction among students outside of class.
As part of their participation in the workshop, students were asked to critically analyze social media
and their own involvement in it. They were invited to provide their responses in class or on Facebook
and could choose to do so in English or in one of the other languages that they knew. The researchers
then analyzed the class Facebook site, videotaped classroom interactions, created field notes, and col-
lected student reflections produced in informal interviews. Because of including Facebook posts in
their study, Vanek et al.’s analysis of discourse and identity claims required them to include students’
use of images and other nontextual practices. As an example, one page of their published article
includes a color image taken from a student’s profile page in Facebook, a second image copied from
one of the student’s Facebook posts, and an excerpt of classroom interaction from when this student
gave a presentation to the class about her Facebook activity.
The researchers describe their analysis of these multimodal data as an iterative process of coding
students’ identity claims or assertions and how or whether those were legitimated by other students,
such as by “liking” or commenting on other students’ posts. Vanek et al. argue that in the practice of
posting aspects of their identities in the Facebook group site, the students “became legitimate partici-
pants in the group and supported the legitimation of others, contributing overall to interaction in Eng-
lish and facilitating authentic purposes for communication” (p. 241). In fact, the regular classroom
teacher commented that he “had not previously seen such voluminous or complex writing from the
students” (p. 250). In accounting for a range of communicative modalities (images, text, and class-
room talk) as well as interaction in both face-to-face and online contexts, the researchers not only
came to better understand the identities that these students imagined and promoted for themselves,
but also contend that because of the eager engagement they saw among the students in the workshop,
other language teachers should consider “incorporating well-designed, social media interaction into
discussion of traditional texts” (p. 251). The researchers further contend that this practice “could pro-
vide opportunities for even beginning-level language learners to participate and make contributions
(e.g., image posts) in ways that advance analysis of text and build their [social presence]” (p. 251).
Although this study was conducted over a relatively short time frame, the researchers were able to
gain clear insights about how language learners’ identities influence their language learning practices
by designing an online space for their students. While the focus on language learner identities in
Vanek et al.’s study reflects research foci from previous decades, its inclusion of these individuals’
participation in online discourse shows how current research is expanding the contexts and discursive
modalities that contribute to our understanding of identity and discourse in SLA.

Implications for identity and discourse in second language learning and teaching
As the selection of studies included in this chapter demonstrates, attention to identity and discourse in
SLA research can provide deep insights into why individuals choose to learn specific languages and
why their learning success can be so variable and highly particular— such as one student’s progress
in learning English that focuses on transgender issues but not in general classroom language (Nguyen
& Yang, 2015). While identity and discourse-focused SLA studies have long been concerned with

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the role of power and inequitable relations and how those can affect language learning (McKay &
Wong, 1996; Norton Peirce, 1995), researchers such as Seltzer (2022) actively work to infuse change
in their research sites, sometimes intervening in rather than only observing them, in order to achieve
greater social justice for the minoritized individuals they are studying. Part of such change can in-
volve a reorientation to how the “language learner” identity itself is used in research publications.
Seltzer abandons that identity label, using the term “language architect” instead. Relatedly, de los
Ríos (2020) chose to use the term “translingual identities” instead of “language learner identities.”
In making these choices, Seltzer and de los Ríos position their research participants as “languaging”
individuals with rich language repertoires, not deficient ones. Such studies also show how language
(arts) teachers and curricular content can be powerful forces in changing how language learning
individuals perceive and learn to embrace their own complex identities and the value of their hybrid
language repertoires (e.g., Quan & Menard-Warwick, 2021).
The growing body of research focusing on online contexts also holds implications for language
teachers. This research indicates that students are often far more engaged in learning the target lan-
guage when language teachers incorporate familiar online sites and social media platforms into class-
room activities (Nguyen & Kellogg, 2005; Vanek et al., 2018; Vazquez-Calvo et al., 2020). This
focused engagement occurs not merely because learners find these sites enjoyable, but also because
they often find that their language identities can be “validated” by other users (Vanek et al., 2018; see
also Black, 2006). While these studies indicate that language classrooms are already incorporating
digital resources into their curriculum, many language teachers will benefit from professional devel-
opment and further training on how to use these resources in ways that best support their students’
complex identities and that draw on their broad repertoires of discursive knowledge (Lee, 2022).

Future directions for identity and discourse in second language research

While it is true that research focusing on discourse and language teacher identities has increased
rapidly in the past decade (Barkhuizen, 2021; Varghese et al., 2016), research focusing on language
learner identities in relation to social discourses and local discursive practices shows no signs of
abating. It seems likely that the attention given to exploring the incredible complexity of identities,
including hybrid and intersectional identities and/or transnational and translingual discourses and
identities, will continue to grow. It also seems likely that the attention to discourse, identity, and
language learners in postcolonial contexts who are using and learning nondominant languages (De
Costa & Norton, 2017; Te Huia, 2017) will continue to increase. The number of studies that examine
discourse and identity with language learners in out-of-classroom contexts, online and hybrid class-
rooms, online communities, and in new forms of social media will most certainly increase. In pursu-
ing this research, researchers will need to develop and employ better multimodal discourse-analytic
practices in order to account for the contributions of images (photos and graphics), sounds and music,
videos, text, colors, and formatting to meaning-making and identity construction.
At the same time, the recent rise of new materialist and posthumanist approaches in SLA research
which decenter the human individual and discourse pose challenges for future identity research. For
example, working from a new materialist perspective, Toohey (2019, p. 940) contends that “humans
and nonhuman things do not have separable identities,” and that SLA scholars working in this tra-
dition seek to “trouble the concept of individual identities in general.” As these approaches gain
momentum, it is possible that language learner identity will be backgrounded in future research.
Our understandings of the language learning individual will almost certainly undergo change. That
said, Canagarajah (2021, p. 223) acknowledges that identities continue to play a role in SLA research
because of their “ideological reality” even if they have no “ontological” reality from a new materialist
perspective. Similarly, in arguing for a posthumanist approach, Appleby and Pennycook (2017, p. 252)

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insist that the “aim is not to get rid of humans and language but to reorganize them, put them … not
always so much at centre stage but rather in the periphery, as a part of a larger understanding of semi-
otics and politics.” As SLA researchers remain attentive to emerging theories, pay careful attention to
actual social and political realities, and work to augment their efforts toward social justice and equity
concerns, the field will likewise gain new insights into the role of discourses and learner identities,
introducing—one hopes—positive changes in the world itself.

Further reading on identity, discourse, and second language research

Block, D. (2022). Innovations and challenges in identity research. Routledge.
This book provides a rich historical exploration of identity theories and how they have informed identity
research to date. The author promotes a Marxist approach to identity and concomitantly gives greater attention
to material structures, thereby decentering discourse. That said, in advancing the use of positioning theory for
identity research, Block provides theoretical grounding and methodological and analytical guidelines for inter-
preting identity in narrative discourse.
Klimova, L. (Ed.). (2022). Identity, multilingualism and CALL. Equinox.
This volume addresses contemporary research interests in translingual learners who engage in plurilingual
activities that develop in computer-mediated language learning (CALL) sites and practices—from TikTok to
video-mediated telecollaboration to virtual exchanges (VE). It provides an excellent introduction to very cur-
rent research and will stimulate SLA researchers to consider new sites, research practices, and learner identities.
Preece, S. (Ed.). (2016). The Routledge handbook of language and identity. Routledge.
This 37-chapter handbook provides comprehensive coverage of research that addresses the role of language
and discourse(s) as they connect with a range of identities and contexts. While only a handful of chapters focus
on language learner identities, the breadth of coverage in this Handbook provides SLA researchers with rich
insights into the many contexts and related identities that they may encounter and should consider when working
with language learners.

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 26
GENDER, SEXUALITY,
DISCOURSE, AND SECOND
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
RESEARCH
Susan Ehrlich and Tommaso Milani

Introduction
It might sound like a cliché to begin a chapter on second language acquisition, gender, and sexuality
by acknowledging that both of us have been passionate about learning new languages throughout our
personal and academic lives. While such a “desire” for language (see also section “Desire, gender,
and sexuality” below) has led to the development of very different linguistic repertoires between the
two of us, we do share the experience of learning Hebrew in Israel. The reasons underlying such a
desire for Hebrew are, of course, very different. Susan took Hebrew language classes as part of a kib-
butz volunteer program in the late 1970s. This was a way to learn more about her Jewish heritage and
(re)connect to Jewish cultural traditions and her extended family in Israel. Tommaso attended a one-
month intensive Hebrew language course at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2019. Because of
his extended research field trips in Israel/Palestine, he felt the need to develop some basic knowledge
of Hebrew in order to read written texts and to have conversations with research participants.
But where do gender and sexuality fit into our experiences of learning Hebrew? On the one hand,
as a young, heterosexual, North American Jewish woman, Susan, as well as other foreign women on
the kibbutz, became the object of desire of two male constituencies: Israeli residents, who saw the
possibility of having some noncommittal fun with women who worked as seasonal volunteers; and
Jewish Russian learners of Hebrew, for whom Israel was only the first leg in a longer migration jour-
ney from the (then) Soviet Union toward North America. For them North American women became
proxies for the possibility of a new life they were aspiring to. On the other hand, through innumer-
able exercises involving aba (“dad”), ima (“mom”), and ahava (“love”), Tommaso was reminded of
the rather mundane faces of heteronormativity, that is, “those structures, institutions, relations and
actions that promote and produce heterosexuality as natural, self-evident, desirable, privileged and
necessary” (Cameron & Kulick, 2003, p. 55). In the light of this heteronormative framework, it was
no small surprise when the teacher in Tommaso’s class said one morning: “aba veaba gam ahava”
(“dad and dad is also love”) followed by “ima veima gam ahava” (“mom and mom is also love”). In
this way, the teacher went against the grain, momentarily puncturing the heteronormative assump-
tions that had underpinned the Hebrew language class until then.
These personal narratives are brief accounts of the ways in which gender and sexuality can be
imbricated in the teaching and learning of a second language. In no way do we wish to suggest that
gender and sexuality are exclusively salient in the acquisition of Hebrew. Rather, it is the aim of this

DOI: 10.4324/9781003177579-29 339

 Susan Ehrlich and Tommaso Milani

chapter to present a selection of studies demonstrating how gender and sexuality, as well as their
nexus points with other forms of social categorization, are key to second language learning in a va-
riety of contexts, having an effect on SLA outcomes, trajectories, and experiences. Before delving
into the historical development of the field, we first want to clarify what we mean by discourse and
second/foreign language acquisition.
Discourse is perhaps one of the most debated concepts in the social sciences and the humanities.
This diversity notwithstanding, it is useful to distinguish between two different but interrelated defi-
nitions: (1) a more linguistically oriented characterization of discourse as language in use, and (2) a
more sociopolitical understanding of discourse as “a practice that systematically forms the object of
which it speaks” (Foucault, 1972, p. 49), which highlights how language and other meaning-making
resources (such as gestures, visuals, clothing, etc.) create social reality (e.g., what it means to be a
man or a woman in a specific context at a particular time). All the studies we present in this chapter
analyze “language in use” in the sense that the data is neither derived from experimental settings nor
from introspection. Moreover, much of the data takes the form of what Pavlenko (2001, p. 167) calls
“L2 learning stories,” collected during ethnographic fieldwork and/or from interviews or written
journals/memoirs. For Pavlenko, this kind of data provides a rich source of information about the
relationship between language learning and social identities. In other words, given that in this chapter
we are interested in language learning as a social process rather than a purely cognitive one (Block,
2007), it follows that we draw upon studies that analyze discourse as a window onto the “social.”
In this chapter, we use second language acquisition as a general umbrella term to indicate “the
human capacity to learn languages once the first language … or the first languages … have been
learned and established” (Ortega, 2013, p. 4). Some scholars distinguish between “second” and “for-
eign” language, the former being acquired in an environment where it is widely used on an everyday
basis (e.g., learning Hebrew in Israel) and the latter being learned outside its “natural” milieu (e.g.,
learning French in Israel). As Ortega cautions, “the issue of contexts for L2 learning, however, is
more complex than it appears at first blush” (2013, p. 6). Thus, it is imperative not to overgeneralize
research results that are specific to the learning of a particular language by a certain group of people
in a certain setting. Rather, it is crucial to contextualize such findings in relation to the theories em-
ployed in the individual studies, the learners under investigation, and the local conditions of learning.
In what follows, we begin by providing a historical overview of the field of gender, sexuality, and
second language acquisition, followed by a summary of the main theoretical assumptions underpin-
ning more recent work in the area. We then move on to review some key studies, before indicating
possible directions for future research.

Historical overview
Theories of second language acquisition (SLA) have often assumed an idealized, abstract learner, de-
void of social positioning and removed from the social environment in which learning takes place. As
Rampton (1991, p. 241) has pointed out, the “ubiquity of the phrase ‘the learner’” in the field tacitly
supports the idea that there is a “normal” or “natural” course of development in SLA which is inde-
pendent of the social positioning of learners and of the social context in which acquisition takes place.
Piller and Pavlenko (2001) have provided a similar critique of the field, but in relation to the social
category of gender specifically. They argued that the field of SLA suffered from a widespread “gender
blindness” due to the dominance of approaches that “assume a generic language user and disregard
inter-individual variation as ‘noise’” (2001, p. 3; see also discussion in Ehrlich, 1997). For Piller
and Pavlenko, this “gender blindness” meant that the gendered subject positions of learners and the
gendered social practices they engaged in were deemed irrelevant (i.e., considered to be “noise”) to
most research in SLA before the 2000s, even though, as this chapter will demonstrate, gender—and

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sexuality—can have important consequences for language learning outcomes, among other things.1
Put more generally, the notion of a generic learner with a “normal” or “natural” course of develop-
ment is difficult to maintain given that second language learning is always mediated by the social
locations/identities of learners, which, in Rampton’s (1991) words, “impregnate” the entire process.
With respect to the identity category of gender, specifically, early investigations of the relationship
between gender and SLA (i.e., in the 1970s through the 1990s) were influenced by research on first
language acquisition and gender in the sense that both were conducted within a “sex differences”
paradigm.2 And, like the first language acquisition research, the results of early work on gender and
SLA documented the supposed advantages that female learners had over male learners: they were
more successful language learners (see Burstall, 1975; Ekstrand, 1980); they used a greater range
of learning strategies more frequently (see Oxford, 1994); they were more sensitive to input (Gass
& Varonis, 1986); and they displayed more positive attitudes toward learning the target language
and toward target-language speakers (see Gardner & Lambert, 1972). In attempting to explain these
kinds of results, Ellis (1994), in his influential textbook, The Study of Second Language Acquisition,
drew on early work in language and gender by “dual-culture” theorists Maltz and Borker (1983),
who argued that men and women learn different communicative styles—competitive vs. cooperative
styles, respectively—based on the segregated same-sex peer groups they play in as children. Follow-
ing Maltz and Borker, Ellis speculated that “the female ‘culture’ seems to lend itself more readily to
dealing with the inherent threat imposed to identity by L2 learning” (p. 204).
As this brief overview indicates, early work on gender in the field of second language acquisition
generally adopted an essentialist approach—it was assumed that women and men (or girls and boys)
comprised two internally undifferentiated categories, either due to different biologies or different
childhood socialization practices, and the goal of the work was to determine differences between
the two in relation to language learning outcomes, language learning strategies, and so on. In more
recent years, however, one has been able to see in at least some SLA scholarship the impact of what
Cameron (2005) characterizes as a “paradigm shift” in the study of language and gender, from a
“modernist” to a “postmodernist” feminist approach (Cameron, 2005, pp. 483–484). The following
section details some of the shifts in the theorizing of gender and sexuality that Cameron associates
with a postmodernist approach to language, gender, and sexuality as a prelude to our discussion of
work within SLA that has been influenced by this new paradigm.

Butlerian theoretical approaches to language, gender, and sexuality

Under the influence of theoretical developments in feminist scholarship more generally, including
the emergence of intersectionality as an important concept (Crenshaw, 1991), language and gender
research in the 1990s began to challenge the homogeneous and dichotomous nature of the categories
taken as foundational to earlier work. That is, many language and gender scholars began to argue that
the focus on differences between women and men as undifferentiated categories was problematic
because it abstracted gender away from the specificities of its manifestations in local discursive and
social contexts and its intersection with other aspects of social identity. Indeed, probably the most
important impetus for this shift came from Judith Butler’s 1990 book, Gender Trouble, and the notion
of gender as performative. Under such an account, gender is not viewed as a “true” aspect of identity
“lurking behind discourse” (Benwell & Stokoe, 2006, p. 4); rather, gender emerges in discourse and
in other semiotic practices. In other words, individuals do not simply act out a pre-existing gender—
they are always actively involved in the “doing” or “performing” of gender. While Butler’s theoretical
claim—that gendered identities do not exist beyond their expression—is probably most evident when
an individual’s expressions of gender depart from what we take to be their “true” identity; the idea is
that even the most normative of identities are performed and enacted, requiring repeated iterations.

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Butler’s work was significant in moving the study of language and gender away from overarching
generalizations about women, men, and gendered speech styles to more contextualized accounts of
the interaction of language and gender in specific communities or “communities of practice” (Eckert
& McConnell-Ginet, 1992). Categories such as “women’s speech” and “men’s speech” “along with
broader ones such as feminine and masculine” were no longer viewed as “empirical categories” but
rather as “symbolic-ideological ones” (Gal, 1995, p. 171). And, as symbolic-ideological constructs,
they are cultural resources for the “doing” of gender. Research shifted from documenting global
differences in the language of women and men or girls and boys to investigating how, in local com-
munities of practice, these cultural-linguistic resources are drawn upon, negotiated, and contested in
the enactment of gender. In other words, the theorizing of gender as performative has encouraged
language and gender researchers since the 1990s to focus on the agency and creativity of social ac-
tors in the discursive/linguistic constitution of gender, including their capacity to resist normative
constructions of gender.
There is, however, an aspect of gender performativity that has perhaps received less attention in
the language and gender literature—what Butler terms the “highly rigid regulatory frame” (Butler,
1990, p. 32) within which gendered identities are produced. For Butler, performances of gender are
always subject to regulation and constraint; that is, the rigid regulatory frame “operates as a condition
of cultural intelligibility” (Butler, 2004, p. 52), rendering some performances of gender as appropri-
ate and legible while others—those that depart from culturally dominant norms—as unintelligible
and potentially subject to sanctions and penalties. As we will see in the next section, there can be
constraints on the kinds of gendered identities second language learners can take up and that are
intelligible in the target culture and this can have significant consequences for the second language
acquisition process.
Considering the influential role played by Butler’s (1990) work in the social sciences and the hu-
manities, it is perhaps unsurprising that SLA scholars have also begun to productively engage with
queer theory as a conceptual apparatus through which to understand how sexuality is discursively
constructed. After all, as Cameron and Kulick (2006, p. 98) pointed out, Butler’s Gender Trouble was
not only a feminist text, but also a queer text, given its analysis of (female) drag performances as
subversive acts that destabilize the links between particular kinds of bodies (i.e., female bodies) and
performances of femininities.
While there is no consensus among scholars about what queer theory is or what a queer perspec-
tive entails, it is possible to outline two interrelated usages of queer as a concept. On the one hand,
when employed as an adjective or as a noun, queer is “whatever is at odds with the normal, the le-
gitimate, the dominant” (Halperin, 1995, p. 62). As such, queer is not a synonym of the rather clunky
LGBTIA initialism but is a more capacious label that marshals together all nonnormative individu-
als irrespective of their sexual identification. On the other hand, when used as a verb, queering is a
skeptical stance that questions “normative consolidations of sex, gender and sexuality—and that,
consequently, is critical of all those versions of identity, community and politics that are believed to
evolve ‘naturally’ from such consolidations” (Jagose, 1996, p. 99).
Taking a queer approach, then, has two main ramifications: (1) investigating the discursive pro-
cesses through which certain sexual desires, identities, and practices are constructed as normal and
normative, while others are portrayed as deviant and abject; and (2) maintaining some critical dis-
tance from identity categories and their political potential. As we will see in more detail in the next
section, SLA scholarship drawing upon queer theory has offered important insights into the rather
mundane, but no less pernicious, ways in which foreign and second language textbooks and teacher/
student interactions are characterized by a heteronormative order, one in which heterosexuality is the
assumed norm. This body of work has also illustrated how desire for both people and language is
negotiated and contested in the second language classroom.

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While offering an important conceptual framework for understanding the discursive construction
of sexuality in a variety of contexts, queer theory has been under crossfire from scholars who though
sympathetic to a queer impetus, have highlighted some problematic racially monochromatic under-
tones compounded by an overreliance on anglophone data mainly from North America (see e.g.,
Anzaldúa, 1991; Miskolci, 2014). Against this backdrop, there has been a resurgence of interest in
intersectionality, as we saw in feminist work beginning in the 1990s, as a framework through which
to “reveal how power works in diffuse and differentiated ways through the creation and deployment
of overlapping identity categories” (Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall, 2013, p. 797).

Sample studies
In this section, we consider representative studies of SLA, gender, and sexuality, published since the
mid-1990s, as a way of illustrating how the theoretical concepts/frameworks discussed in the previ-
ous section have informed the field of SLA.

Gender as performative: Constraints and agency

A recurring theme in work on SLA and gender is the extent to which learners’ access to the target
language can be constrained by gendered identities, practices, and/or ideologies, either in the target
language community or in that of the language learner (see Norton & Piller, 2004, for a discus-
sion). The former situation has been documented in numerous studies of immigrant communities
and study-abroad programs where women second-language learners are subject to routine instances
of sexual harassment (see, for example, Dawson, forthcoming; Goldstein, 1995; Talburt & Stewart,
1999). As Piller and Pavlenko (2006) point out, this is a kind of gendered gatekeeping practice that
curtails women’s access to valuable linguistic capital. In a 1995 study by Polanyi, for example, based
on an analysis of journals kept by American university students in a study-abroad program in Rus-
sia, Polanyi found that the women journal writers consistently narrated distressing and unpleasant
incidents in which Russian men expected or demanded sexual favors of them, often as a condition for
continued contact. The young men, by contrast, described their sexual and flirtatious encounters with
Russian women as pleasant, romantic, and fun.
Viewed from the perspective of Butler (1990), the range of gendered subject positions the young
women were able to take up in the host culture and remain recognizable was extremely restricted.
That is, the only kind of gendered performance that seemed intelligible to the Russian men the
women had contact with was one in which the women’s bodies were objectified and sexualized. This
had consequences for their language learning experiences in the target language, which, in turn, in-
fluenced their proficiency gains in Russian, at least as these gains were measured by the proficiency
tests administered to the students once the study abroad program had ended. Here Polanyi makes an
important point about the kinds of problems that may arise when gendered practices, such as sexual
harassment, mediate the language learning process but do not inform assessment criteria or curricular
considerations. While the young women were positioned as gendered and sexualized beings in the
language learning situation, the proficiency tests positioned them as “ungendered” (Polanyi, 1995,
p. 281). That is, the women became very proficient at pragmatically complex linguistic tasks—getting
out of humiliating social situations, warding off unwanted sexual advances, saying ‘”no” in ways
that wouldn’t antagonize the Russian men, and so on—yet the proficiency tests the women took did
not measure these kinds of linguistic skills. Piller and Pavlenko (2001, p. 6) suggest that this par-
ticular study is illustrative of the “multiple” binds (as opposed to “double” binds) that women may
experience in bilingual/multilingual contexts. Not only did the women experience sexual harassment
from Russian men, their classroom learning experiences did not prepare them to deal with it, and the

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pragmatically sophisticated linguistic skills the women acquired as a result of the experiences were
not captured by the program’s proficiency tests, thereby going unrecognized and unrewarded.
Work such as Polanyi’s demonstrates how the very restricted—and sexualized—subject positions
imposed upon women in various kinds of communities can have negative consequences for their sec-
ond language learning experiences and outcomes. In taking an intersectional approach to gendered
identities, however, it would be a mistake to assume that masculinity is monolithic and that it always
bestows the kinds of advantages upon men that we see in Polanyi’s study (see section below on “Het-
eronormativity, queer possibilities, and intersectional nexus points”).
In addition to emphasizing the constraints that gendered identities, practices, and ideologies can
have on L2 learners’ access to the target language and opportunities for interaction in the target lan-
guage, work on second language acquisition, gender, and sexuality has also explored the way such
constraints can be negotiated and resisted. Norton (2000), for example, in her ethnographic study of
five immigrant women in Canada during the 1990s, generally found that the women were subject to
gendered gatekeeping practices which restricted their opportunities to interact in the target language.
However, Norton also observed the women resisting these positions of marginalization. Take one of
the participants, Martina, as an example: while, in Butler’s terms, the only subject position available
to her in the eyes of her co-workers was that of an immigrant woman with limited English skills,
Norton argued that Martina was able to resist this particular subject position “in favour of the subject
position mother” (Norton, 2000, p. 127). By claiming the authority she had as a parent, Martina re-
configured the power relations between herself and her co-workers, and, according to Norton, “this
not only gave her the right to speak but, in effect, silenced the co-workers who had been exploiting
her.”
Other studies have demonstrated how women second language learners can perform gendered
identities in the target language that are at odds with, or resist, the images and constructions of
femininity and masculinity embedded in the target language and/or the target culture. As learning
a second language often goes hand in hand with relocation in a new sociocultural context, learners
may be exposed to new gendered practices and ideologies in the new sociocultural setting. As Pav-
lenko (2001) argues, “successful L2 learning may entail modification of one’s gender performance
in order to ensure validation and legitimacy in the target language and culture” (Piller & Pavlenko,
2001, p. 7). The extent to which individual second language learners will assimilate to or resist the
gendered practices and ideologies of a new sociocultural context may be difficult to predict, but, as
Ortega (2013) points out, the assumption that all L2 learners will want to emulate the native speaker
in order to achieve legitimacy in the target language and culture is grounded in a monolingual bias.
This is the idea that the desired outcome for second language learners is the acquisition of (idealized)
native-speaker norms.
Interestingly, a number of studies involving gender and SLA have demonstrated that L2 learn-
ers may produce gendered performances that actually resist native-speaker norms because the tar-
get language and/or target culture contain gendered images and ideologies that are unappealing to
the learners. For example, Higgins (2011) argued, based on a narrative analysis of interviews with
three expatriate, female L2 learners of Swahili, living in Tanzania, that the women did not adopt
“target-like” subject positions in their interactions with other Tanzanians in Swahili. While the
women characterized their experiences using Swahili in Tanzania very positively, they nonetheless
did not take up Swahili subject positions largely because of the cultural differences they perceived
between themselves and the target language culture, especially in relation to gendered identities
and feminist principles. While we do not know the precise way the women’s resistance to gendered
subject positions manifested itself linguistically in Swahili, what this study shows is how language
learners may negotiate their gendered performances against the backdrop of dominant cultural rep-
resentations. And, in this case, the learners performed gendered identities that resisted the gendered

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subject positions embedded in the target language/culture. It is important to point out that the privi-
leged position of the women in Higgins’ study—as white (with the exception of one participant),
Western, and middle class—probably had a positive influence on their ability to resist, underscoring
the importance of attending to the way social categorizations work together to create subject posi-
tions from which resistance is possible—or not.

Heteronormativity, queer possibilities, and intersectional nexus points

The studies summarized in the previous section have offered insightful analyses of the very different
ways in which second language acquisition is inflected by gender. However, what is left out from the
analytical repertoire is how sexuality—understood as both heterosexuality and same-sex desire—
might also play a role in framing understandings of gender roles. Put simply, it is not simply a subject
position of “man” or “woman” that is taken up or resisted in SLA contexts, but it is a specific one
as heterosexual man or woman versus gay or lesbian. How such positions are discursively produced
in textbook and classroom interactions has been the object of inquiry of a burgeoning scholarship
influenced by a queer theory with its bifocal lens on (1) unveiling heteronormativity and (2) articu-
lating the possibilities, challenges, and constraints of identity categories (see “Butlerian theoretical
approaches to language, gender, and sexuality” section above).
With regard to textbooks, a variety of studies across different contexts have demonstrated how
nonheterosexual characters are conspicuous for their absence in second/foreign language textbooks
(see Sunderland, 2021, for an overview). To take an example, in an analysis of ten textbooks aimed
at a global audience of beginners and intermediate learners of English, Gray (2013) pointed to a com-
plete lack of any overt reference to sexual diversity. In fact, even when sexually nonnormative public
figures such as Elton John or Oscar Wilde were presented, there was no mention of their sexuality.
Moreover, nowhere in the books was it assumed that the potential reader might be LGBT or know
anyone who is LGBT. This erasure of LGBT issues was also evident in the ways in which love was
always portrayed as heterosexual. The absence of sexual diversity was partly countered by the pres-
ence of a few gay characters in the supplementary materials to one of the textbooks, which recounted
the story of Elliott, a 4–5-year-old boy who had been adopted by two middle-class men. While ac-
knowledging that such an inclusion of a gay couple is laudable from a sexual diversity perspective,
Gray also points out that the portrayal of this same-sex family reproduces social class normativities,
and the two fathers are examples of what Richardson (2004) calls “good gays,” that is, a same-sex
version of the traditional nuclear family that does “not seek to challenge the prevalent meanings as-
sociated with officially endorsed models of citizenship” (Gray, 2013, p. 56).
Heteronormativity, however, is not only present in textbooks but is at the very heart of classroom
interactions (see in particular the work of Nelson, 1999, on English as a second language settings). In a
now classic study, Liddicoat (2009) explored a small set of interactional moments in second language
classrooms in which teachers assumed that students were heterosexual and corrected gender agree-
ment when students were asked to describe their partners, as in the case of the correction, mi novia es
alta (“my girlfriend is tall”), instead of the originally produced mi novio es alto in Spanish, or the cor-
rection, ma copine (“my girlfriend”) instead of the originally produced mon copain (“my boyfriend”)
in French. Painstakingly detailed conversation analysis demonstrated how these interactions were not
simply negotiations about sexual identities—a heterosexual identity attributed by the teachers to the
students versus a gay identity assumed by the learners—but were also decisive moments determining
what counts as linguistic success versus failure. As Liddicoat explains, “the prevailing heteronorma-
tivity of the language classroom conditions a response to students’ implicit coming out not as the self-
disclosure of a minority sexual identity, but rather as a problem of linguistic competence” (Liddicoat,
2009, p. 199). As a result of such a rigid regulatory framework (Butler, 1990), sexually nonnormative

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language learners have three possibilities: pretending to be heterosexual and thereby showing them-
selves to be successful learners, deflecting the question of describing their partners altogether, or ac-
tively challenging the teacher, with all of the risks that accompany this kind of insubordination.
While second language learning contexts can challenge one’s sense of sexual identification and
question one’s linguistic proficiency, they can also be sites of queer empowerment. An interesting
example is provided by King’s (2008) study of five Korean learners of English, who identified as gay
but “display[ed] dissatisfaction with gay identity construction in Korean (both culture and language)”
(p. 232). Crucially, such a feeling of frustration is not idiosyncratic to these men, but is “endemic in
the queer Korean community” (p. 232). Drawing upon Norton’s notion of investment (2000), King
demonstrates how dissatisfaction with Korean language and culture as resources through which to
perform a fulfilling gay identity led these men to invest in English as a language resource that would
give them access to gay (imagined) communities in the anglophone world. That is, investment in
English allowed these men to gain legitimacy and access to specific queer settings; according to one
of King’s participants, this also meant that they were more successful in learning English relative to
their heterosexual counterparts (Rowlett & King, 2016).
These studies demonstrate how sexuality also inflects the process of second language learning.
Read together with previous literature on gender in SLA contexts, and as the title of this chapter sug-
gests, the relationship between gender and sexuality can be strategically highlighted for political and
analytical purposes. However, McElhinny (2003) argued that to “suggest or assume that there is a
closer relationship between sexuality and gender than between either of these and any other aspect
of social identity […] [is] a question which itself deserves empirical investigation” (2003, p. 26).
In the light of this, she proposes an intersectional approach that empirically investigates the mutual
constitution of gender and other identity categories.
In an early study on the relationship of masculinity, ethnicity, social class, and SLA experiences,
Menard-Warwick (2006) criticized work on gender and SLA that presents “language learning on the
part of immigrant men … as relatively less problematic than language learning by women” (Menard-
Warwick, 2006, p. 360). Based on life history interviews she conducted with Jorge, a male immigrant
to the USA from a Zapotec indigenous community in southern Mexico (as part of a larger ethnographic
study of Latin American immigrants in California), Menard-Warwick argues that Jorge’s language
learning opportunities were severely restricted due to the particular version of masculinity he embod-
ied. As a working-class, undocumented worker in the USA, Jorge attended ESL night classes sporadi-
cally, because he had to work in order to maintain his family. Outside of the classroom, acquisition
of English also proved difficult for Jorge not only because he spoke Spanish with his workmates but
because his access to English input in the workplace was restricted to a limited set of speech acts in
English—orders and directions from his superiors or the customers in the car mechanic shop where he
worked. In taking an intersectional approach to masculinity, then, Menard-Warwick is able to demon-
strate the constraints on Jorge’s language acquisition opportunities and the way these constraints are
mediated by the mutually constitutive social locations he occupies. As Menard-Warwick says, “he is
a man, but he is also an indigenous Latino undocumented worker” (p. 74) in the context of the USA.
While intersectionality has become increasingly more prominent as a heuristic lens in sociolin-
guistics (see in particular the contributions to Levon & Mendes, 2015), it has only recently begun to
gain more traction in applied linguistics, especially in the context of (second) language acquisition.
An important contribution in this direction is the recent edited collection Intersectional Perspectives
on LGBTQ+ Issues in Modern Language Teaching and Learning (Paiz & Coda, 2021a), which offers
groundbreaking analyses of the ways in which gender and sexuality intersect with religion (Güney,
2021), nationality (Coda, 2021), and race and experiences of migration (Cao, 2021), as well as pro-
fessional identity (Longoria, 2021). Taking an intersectional perspective also allows us to unsettle
current trends in applied linguistics as a discipline that is becoming more attuned to the study of

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gay and lesbian subjects, but inadvertently downplays or even erases bisexual, pansexual, and trans
issues (Knisely, 2021); see however Borba’s 2022 plenary at the American Association of Applied
Linguistics (AAAL) annual conference. While, for reasons of space, we cannot summarize all these
important studies in detail, it is important to highlight how an intersectional perspective can offer a
more nuanced understanding of identity than a variable-by-variable approach may offer. An illustra-
tive case in point is offered by Moore’s (2021) re-analysis of a previously published study of 16 queer
learners of Japanese as a second or foreign language. While the original study focused on sexuality
alone, a re-analysis of the data in light of intersectionality yielded a more complex picture of the lived
experiences of one of the participants, illustrating how “queer identity management was entangled
with his experiences of race, and, more contentiously, nation” (Moore, 2021, p. 25).

Desire, gender, and sexuality

A further way in which gendered and sexual identities, and their relations to other forms of social
identification, have been shown to have consequences for SLA trajectories and outcomes is in rela-
tion to the notion of desire, first introduced into the SLA/multilingualism literature by Piller (2002).
Based on a study of identities and negotiation of language choice among bilingual couples, Piller
argued that learners’ investments in learning and/or using a second language cannot be explained
solely in terms of their aspirations for increased social and/or economic power. According to Piller,
“the sheer ‘sex appeal’ of certain languages” (Piller, 2002, p. 6) must be taken into consideration.
In the light of this, Takahashi (2013) explores what motivated a group of Japanese women to study
English in Australia, demonstrating that their desire to learn English was linked to their romantic and
erotic idealization of white Western men and of the West more generally. In other words, their lan-
guage desire, a construct developed by Piller and Takahashi (2006), was indeed “a bundle of desires”
intersecting with each other: their desire for English was connected to their desire for romance with
white English-speaking men, which, in turn, was connected to their desire for international mobility
and for Western lifestyles (supposedly) free of the gender hierarchies of traditional Japanese society.
In related work conducted from the perspective of Australian men teaching English as a foreign lan-
guage (EFL) in Japan, Appleby (2013) highlights the dilemmas and tensions faced by her participants
as they navigated the hegemonic ideal of Western masculinity in the context of commercial English
language teaching in Japan. On the one hand, the Australian men’s embodiment of this hegemonic
ideal—being heterosexual white men with origins in the West—bestowed considerable advantages
upon them. They were able to secure well-paid jobs as EFL teachers with opportunities for profes-
sional advancement, even though they had few, if any, professional qualifications. In addition, many
of Appleby’s participants reported that they had greater success with Japanese women than they had
experienced with Western women in Australia. On the other hand, Appleby argues that the men’s de-
sire to create and maintain an ethical professional identity was made difficult in a commercial context
where their masculinity was eroticized and constructed as a commodity for female students. In both
Appleby’s and Takahashi’s work, then, we see how the desire to learn a language is not only imbricated
with sexual desire but is also compounded by specific intersections of race, gender, and sexuality.

Implications for teaching

Considering the findings from the studies summarized in the previous sections, what should practi-
tioners do to (1) maintain and/or increase a level of critical awareness about gender, sexuality, and
intersectional nexus points in relation to second language learning and teaching; and (2) to create
the conditions for an inclusive (second) language practice? It is difficult, if not impossible, to pro-
vide suggestions that are relevant to all contexts. That being said, Paiz (2018) has recently spelled

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out some useful starting points for the queering of English as a second language (ESL) and English
language teaching more broadly. These suggestions might be relevant for other second and foreign
language contexts as well. Firstly, queering the classroom requires going beyond pointing out the
absence of women and/or LGBT characters in language textbooks and other curricular materials.
While more inclusive materials are indeed desirable and publishers should be encouraged to produce
them, it is important to realize that “publishers are unlikely to queer the material that they make
commercially available because of a desire to maximize revenues through access to a wider variety
of potential markets” (Paiz, 2018, pp. 360–361). Such a realization, however, should not lead to an
unnecessary sense of defeat. Ultimately, it is what language teachers do with textbooks that matters.
Therefore, according to Paiz, a queering of the classroom requires first and foremost “crafting spaces
where all sexualities and their ecosocial and cultural relevance can be engaged with in a manner
that is both respectful of individuals and critical of all identity positions and subjectivities” (2018,
p. 354, emphasis added). This also means exploring the mutual constitutive role of different identity
categories in creating complex patterns of privilege and oppression. Secondly, the queering of the
classroom can only begin once teachers have been sufficiently prepared to include gender, sexuality,
and other identity categories in their language teaching. Therefore, there is the need to queer teacher
training programs in such a way that future language teachers are properly trained “to problematize
accepted world views about a construct as pervasive as sexuality” (Paiz, 2018, p. 357). Such a project
of queering language education should, of course, be sensitive to the constraints of local contexts in
which “hopeful reliance on the rhetoric of visibility—we are here; we are gays/lesbians; we want to
be recognized as such” might not be the most appropriate “political strategy for the enfranchisement
of non-normative sexualities” (Milani & Levon, 2017, p. 537) (see also Currier, 2012 about the dy-
namics of visibility and invisibility in LGBT activism in South Africa and Namibia).

Future directions
Influenced by feminism, queer theory, and intersectionality, the study of second language ac-
quisition, gender, sexuality, and discourse is in our view at the forefront of the “social justice
turn” in applied linguistics (see Ortega, 2019) in that it not only “lays bare inequity in the world
around us and how it influences learners and educators alike” (Paiz & Coda, 2021b, p. 271), but
also “uncovers radical possibilities for building more ethical, more sustainable pedagogies that
can increase access and equity for marginalized individuals” (p. 271). The fact that in 2022 the
AAAL added a brand-new strand of submissions dedicated to language, gender, and sexuality
is an indicator of how applied linguistics as a discipline is changing, not least as a result of the
indefatigable work of scholars committed to feminist, queer, and intersectional agendas. While
such a shift is welcome, it is nonetheless important to be cognizant of the pitfalls when research
paradigms that begin as radical and defiant are included in the academic mainstream and become
institutionalized (see Wiegman, 2012). Ultimately, we believe that for feminist, queer, and inter-
sectional approaches to second language acquisition to retain their radical potential, they need to
“sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission,
to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of” (Moten & Harney, 2007,
p. 101). Not everyone might agree with us, proposing instead a combination of defiant protest
with a more assimilationist approach.
Whichever standpoint one might wish to take, we believe that it is imperative to investi-
gate the ways in which feminism and LGBT rights may be co-opted into national projects and
(re)produced in the language classroom in contexts, such as Denmark, Israel, Sweden, and many
others, which view themselves as progressive in relation to gender and sexuality. A sustained
inquiry into femonationalism and homonationalism in second language acquisition could open

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up new insights about the pitfalls and double-binds of well-meant social justice initiatives in the
language classroom.
Finally, existing research on gender, sexuality, and second language acquisition is still char-
acterized by a predominantly anglophone, North American bias. In line with Ortega (2019) and
Pennycook and Makoni (2020), southern, decolonial perspectives are needed not only to redress
geopolitical imbalances in knowledge production in applied linguistics but also to constantly chal-
lenge and unsettle

the darker side of applied linguistics (cf. Mignolo, 2011a [Mignolo, 2011]): The deep ties of
the colonial and neocolonial projects to language teaching; the exoticization of differences
that reinforces the construction of racialized and ethnicized Others; the normative assumptions
about gendered and sexual relations that obscure the politics of sexuality.
(Pennycook & Makoni, 2020, pp. 17–18)

Notes
1 Some feminists distinguish between sex and gender, where sex refers to biological characteristics of females
and males, and gender to the social and cultural dimensions of being born female or male in particular com-
munities. There are, however, other views on this biological/social dichotomy. For example, Butler (1990)
argues that sex and gender are both socially constructed. Rather than viewing the biological distinction
between males and females as a natural given, Butler sees it as the effect of a cultural structure that makes
us believe that sexual dimorphism is the only option characterizing human beings—one that erases other
possible human bodily configurations.
2 In using the term “sex differences,” psychologists of the time may have believed that the causes of the dif-
ferences they documented were biological in origins or they may have conflated the terms sex and gender,
treating gender as equally as dichotomous as sex. Accordingly, when reporting the results of this research, we
use the researchers’ terms, “female” and “male.”

Further reading
Nelson, C. (2020). Queer thinking about language learning: Current research and future directions. In K. Hall &
R. Barrett (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of language and sexuality. Oxford University Press.
This chapter traces the emergence and development of a research area the author calls “Queer Thinking about
language learning.” The chapter explores the significance of sexual identities and sexual diversity to language
learning and teaching and suggests directions for future research.
Paiz, J. M., & Coda, J. E. (Eds.). (2021). Intersectional perspectives on LGBTQ+ issues in modern language
teaching and learning. Palgrave Macmillan.
This edited collection showcases studies that draw upon intersectionality in order to investigate the mutual
constitution of identity categories and patterns of privilege and oppression in second language teaching and
learning contexts.
Pavlenko, A., Blackledge, A., Piller, I., & Teutsch-Dwyer, M. (Eds.). (2001). Multilingualism, second language
learning, and gender. De Gruyter Mouton.
This volume contributes to both language and gender studies and studies of SLA. It shows the benefits of con-
sidering language learners, both women and men, who perform and negotiate gender in more than one language
at the same time, and it demonstrates the impact of gendered identities on L2 learning and use.
Takahashi, K. (2013). Language learning, gender and desire: Japanese women on the move. Multilingual
Matters.
This monograph explores what motivated a group of Japanese women to study English in Australia, demon-
strating that their desire to learn English was linked to their romantic and erotic idealization of white Western
men and of the West more generally. The book makes a significant contribution to the field in introducing the
notion of “desire” into studies of SLA.

349
 Susan Ehrlich and Tommaso Milani

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 27
DISCOURSE, COMPETENCE,
AND SECOND LANGUAGE
ACQUISITION RESEARCH
Daisuke Kimura

Introduction
Competence is a central yet contentious concept in L2 research. More than three decades ago, Taylor
(1988) observed the wide and diverse use of the term, and the situation has only become more com-
plicated over the years. Intellectual roots of competence, as adopted in L2 research, can be traced to
disciplines such as generative linguistics (Chomsky, 1965), linguistic anthropology (Hymes, 1972),
and conversation analysis (CA) (Mehan, 1980; Sacks, 1984; also Hasegawa, Chapter 2 in this vol-
ume). Reflecting the multifaceted nature of L2 learning and use, the notion of competence has been
further developed by numerous L2 scholars, coupling it with modifiers such as L2 communicative
(Canale & Swain, 1980), L2 interactional (Hall & Doehler, 2011), and translingual (Canagarajah,
2018). While there are numerous adaptations, scholarly trends have over time shifted from cognitive
and individual to social and interactional, and to more expansive understandings beyond the compe-
tence–performance dualism that had prevailed in earlier discussions on competence.
As global mobility and technological advancements give rise to novel patterns of communication
and learning, it is high time to critically reflect upon and clarify how we understand competence in light
of diverse semiotic affordances being considered in contemporary L2 research. With a particular focus
on interactional discourse, this chapter aims to achieve the following interrelated objectives: (a) to offer
an overview of previous scholarly efforts to understand competence; (b) to reveal divergent understand-
ings of competence; and (c) to serve as a platform for exploring how competence can be researched and
fostered in the context of modern-day complexities. I first trace the intellectual origins of the notion of
competence in L1 and L2 research and reveal some areas of agreement and contention, and then explore
how discourse-analytic methods have informed the ways in which competence is conceptualized, op-
erationalized, and analyzed through sample studies. After this review, the chapter concludes with a dis-
cussion of implications and future directions for research and pedagogy in view of the ever-diversifying
life trajectories of language users/learners and configurations of communicative encounters.

Historical overview of competence in language research

Intellectual roots of competence

As far as language research is concerned, the origin of the term competence can be attributed to Noam
Chomsky’s theory of transformational generative grammar. It is crucial to note upfront that Chom-
sky’s work concerns pinning down the cognitive origin of language, and as such, it reflects theoretical

DOI: 10.4324/9781003177579-30 353

 Daisuke Kimura

motives and assumptions that are divergent from those interested in language in use (see Widdowson,
1989 for a discussion). The following oft-cited quote reveals Chomsky’s position unequivocally:

Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener in a completely homogene-

ous speech community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically
irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors
(random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance.
(Chomsky, 1965, p. 3)

In the eyes of most L2 researchers today, Chomsky’s statement above should provoke some criti-
cal reactions, particularly in response to the notions of ideal speaker-listener, homogeneous speech
community, perfect knowledge of a language, and grammatically irrelevant conditions. Striking as
the statement may seem, Chomsky was not concerned with the actual language use of an actual per-
son, but with the idealized language knowledge of an idealized native speaker. Chomsky’s goal was
to abstract and account for “intrinsic tacit knowledge” (1965, p. 40) of grammar as a set of generative
rules, rather than language per se. In a later publication, he even stated that “language is a deriva-
tive and perhaps not a very interesting concept” (Chomsky, 1980, p. 90). To facilitate his endeavor,
Chomsky drew a distinction between (linguistic) competence and (actual) performance, with only the
former regarded as worthy of systematic scientific research and the latter “fairly degenerate in qual-
ity” (Chomsky, 1965, p. 31) as indirect evidence of competence.
Dell Hymes’s (1972) conceptualization of communicative competence was a direct reaction against
Chomsky’s work. Concerned with language-related inequalities among schoolchildren, Hymes can-
didly responded to Chomsky’s statement cited above:

From the perspective of the children we seek to understand and help, such a statement may
seem almost a declaration of irrelevance. All the difficulties that confront the children and our-
selves seem swept from view.
(Hymes, 1972, p. 270)

For Hymes, the fundamental issue with the Chomskyan conceptualization of competence was that it
concealed inequalities deriving from sociocultural disparities; since it focused exclusively on the innate
capacity, Chomsky’s theory implied “the essential equality in children just as human beings” (Hymes,
1972, p. 270) to reach perfect mastery of any language regardless of surrounding conditions. To account
for sociocultural aspects of language acquisition and use, Hymes then put forward the notion of commu-
nicative competence: “several systems of rules reflected in the judgements and abilities of those whose
messages the behavior manifests” (Hymes, 1972, p. 281). This did not amount to a wholesale rejection
of the Chomskyan theory. Instead, what Hymes meant to propose was an extension to transformational
generative grammar to address “rules of use without which the rules of grammar would be useless”
(Hymes, 1972, p. 278), characterizing rules of grammar and rules of use on equal footing.
Hymes’s communicative competence addressed the following four interrelated dimensions:

1 Whether (and to what degree) something is formally possible;

2 Whether (and to what degree) something is feasible in virtue of the means of implementation
available;
3 Whether (and to what degree) something is appropriate (adequate, happy, successful) in relation
to a context in which it is used and evaluated;
4 Whether (and to what extent) something is in fact done, actually performed, and what its doing
entails. (Hymes, 1972, p. 281)

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 Discourse, competence, and second language acquisition research

Hymes’s conceptualization of communicative competence is distinct from Chomsky’s linguistic

competence in at least two respects. One obvious difference is that alongside grammaticality (i.e.,
formal possibility in Hymes’s words), Hymes included feasibility, appropriateness, and probability
of occurrence as equally important constituents. Another, less obvious and perhaps more contentious,
difference is that Hymes (1972) conceived of competence as being dependent on both knowledge
of rules and ability for use, breaking with the equation of competence with innate knowledge. This
specification was particularly crucial for Hymes as he believed that noncognitive factors (such as
those named in Chomsky’s statement above) were as relevant as innate knowledge as far as educa-
tional achievements and inequalities were concerned.
If Hymes’s linguistic anthropological work concerned the influence of sociocultural conditions on
the formation of communicative competence, CA attends to competence as brought about by partici-
pants in social interaction, that is, interactional competence (Mehan, 1980; Sacks, 1984; Sacks et al.,
1974). Mehan’s (1980) work on competent students vividly illustrates the premises of interactional
competence, and in fact he was one of the first ones to introduce the term.
As a rejoinder to the works of Hymes and Chomsky, which reflected a cognitive orientation, Me-
han (1980) redressed the notion of competence from a CA perspective, arguing that research must
center on “socially assembled situations” rather than “individual persons” (p. 133). Focusing on
the intersubjective construction of interaction, Mehan illuminated the interactional competence that
classroom participants enacted by means of multimodal practices, for instance, in observing special-
ized turn-taking patterns in accordance with the activity at hand, marking activity boundaries, and
contributing to constructing coherent interactional discourse. Such forms of competence are context-
shaped and context-renewing (Heritage, 1984) in that they are collaboratively enacted by participants
in accordance with their evolving intersubjective understandings of what they are doing together and
that every turn-at-talk reflexively contributes to a larger, coherent undertaking.

Competence in L2 research
The term competence came to be in regular use in L2 research around the 1980s (e.g., Canale &
Swain, 1980; Ellis, 1990; Gregg, 1990; Kramsch, 1986; Tarone, 1990; Taylor, 1988; Widdowson,
1989). Among early works and debates, Canale and Swain (1980) can be regarded as the most com-
prehensive attempt to adapt the notion of competence for L2 teaching and research. While drawing
much insight from Hymes’s work on communicative competence, Canale and Swain made several
important additions and specifications to the notion.
Canale and Swain (1980) proposed L2 communicative competence as constituted by three interre-
lated components: grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, and strategic competence.
Most distinctive among these was strategic competence: “verbal and non-verbal communication
strategies that may be called into action to ‘compensate’ for breakdowns in communication due to
performance variables or to insufficient competence” (p. 30, emphasis added). Another unique fea-
ture was that Canale and Swain modified sociolinguistic competence by adding notions of grammati-
cal cohesion and discourse coherence, expanding on Hymes’s focus on sociocultural appropriateness.
In a subsequent publication, Canale (1983) added discourse competence, comprising grammatical
cohesion and discourse coherence, to distinguish these aspects from sociolinguistic appropriateness.
In consequence, their framework drew researchers’ and teachers’ attention to joint construction of
larger stretches of talk beyond utterances and speech acts in isolation, as well as to the need for sys-
tematic research methods for analyzing interactional discourse.
Aside from Canale and Swain’s (1980) framework, most scholarly efforts around this time re-
volved around pinning down the nature of competence and performance. Taylor (1988) pointed
out that the term competence had been used in ways that were at odds with Chomsky’s original

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 Daisuke Kimura

conceptualization, arguing that confusion is prone to arise when competence is associated with abil-
ity (cf. Hymes, 1972) since the former is a state (i.e., static) and the latter a process (i.e., dynamic).
There had also been debate as to whether L2 competence would vary across time and space from the
perspective of interlanguage development (Ellis, 1990; Gregg, 1990; Tarone, 1990). While Gregg
(1990) rejected the notion of variability in keeping with the Chomskyan orthodoxy, Ellis (1990)
maintained that “a learner’s competence […] is inevitably variable” because acquisition of a new
form involves a stage of free variation where multiple forms are used for the same function (see also
Tarone, 1990). From yet another angle, Widdowson (1989) proposed eschewing the notion of com-
petence as generative rules (i.e., the proposition that Chomsky and Hymes shared). Ascribing greater
importance to pre-assembled chunks (e.g., collocations, phrases, and sentences) which are modified
in actual moments of use through the application of grammatical and/or sociocultural rules, Widdow-
son reconceptualized communicative competence as “a matter of adaptation” with rules seen as “not
generative but regulative and subservient” (p. 135).
The 1990s witnessed continued scholarly activities which were aimed at accounting for the nature
of competence that is fitting for L2 pedagogy and research. For instance, Celce-Murcia, Dörnyei, and
Thurrell (1995) adapted Canale and Swain’s aforementioned models further by introducing actional
competence (i.e., knowledge required for comprehending and performing common speech acts in the
target language) and relabeling grammatical competence as linguistic competence so as to incorpo-
rate knowledge of language besides morphosyntax. Moreover, what was particularly notable in the
1990s was the upsurge of interactionally oriented work that called for discourse-analytic methods
(e.g., Firth & Wagner, 1997; Hall, 1995; Young, 1999; see also Kasper, 2006 for a call for discursive
pragmatics and Celce-Murcia, 2007 for a revised model of communicative competence incorpo-
rating interactional competence). Rather than positing underlying grammatical and/or sociocultural
rules as the independent source of competence, the notion of interactional competence attends to the
dynamic emergence of competence as demonstrated by participants’ collaborative achievements of
social actions.
An important milestone in this direction was Hall’s (1995) study of L2 Spanish classroom inter-
action. Defining interactional competence as “the ability to develop and manage topical issues in
practice-relevant ways” (p. 39), she illuminated how this form of competence was exhibited through
trajectories of speech events, lexical choices, and participation structures, as well as prosodic and
other linguistic means of signaling activity transitions. For Hall (1995), interactional competence was
not a general construct; rather it was regarded as unique to particular types of recurring interactional
episodes—“purposeful, goal-directed talk which are significant to the establishment and maintenance
of a group or community” (p. 38).
In a review of sociolinguistic approaches to SLA, Young (1999) also addressed the notion of
interactional competence by defining it as “a theory of the knowledge that participants bring to and
realise in interaction […] includ[ing] an account of how such knowledge is acquired” (p. 118). Young
elucidated that such knowledge emerges reflexively through moment-by-moment cooperation among
participants in interaction, and as such it is not completely reducible to individual minds. In this re-
spect, the notion of interactional competence fundamentally differs from earlier characterizations of
competence (linguistic or communicative) that were firmly anchored in the individual mind. As with
Hall (1995), Young also assumed that interactional competence is variable across types of interac-
tional episodes.
Firth and Wagner’s (1997) critique of SLA generated further momentum for the study of L2 in-
teractional competence as exhibited by interactants in situ. Advancing what they called a holistic
approach, which construed acquisition and use as two sides of the same coin, Firth and Wagner prob-
lematized the distinction between the social and the individual (or cognitive) as well as researcher
imposition of etic categories, like native and nonnative, on participants. Firth and Wagner called for

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studies of “how language is used as it is being acquired through interaction, and used resourcefully,
contingently, and contextually” (p. 296, emphasis in original). Beyond a preoccupation with estab-
lished norms and linguistic boundaries, such a perspective allows for an alternative interpretation of
norm deviations as potential exhibits of interactional competence manifested in the form of recipient
design (cf. Sacks, 1992). In this regard, Firth and Wagner’s argument was crucially different from
earlier work which largely assumed preestablished norms to be crucial in reaching and maintaining
mutual understanding. It is also distinct from Canale and Swain’s (1980) strategic competence since
recipient design is an integral characteristic of human communication, rather than a compensatory
mechanism. With a multitude of implications for how we conceive of L2 learning and use, Firth and
Wagner’s work paved the way for various subsequent developments in the field.
In sum, this section has reviewed the intellectual roots of competence in linguistics, linguistic
anthropology, and CA, and then discussed how L2 scholars have built on and further developed the
notion in different directions. Having explored the intellectual diversity surrounding the notion of
competence, I now turn to a discussion of key methodological approaches to interactional discourse
and an illustration of how they have been put to use in empirical research.

Methodological approaches
This section briefly introduces three discursive approaches to the study of competence: ethnography
of communication (EC), CA, and interactional sociolinguistics (IS). To reflect recent transdiscipli-
nary efforts to understand L2 learning and use within contemporary communicative landscapes (The
Douglas Fir Group, 2016), I focus on approaches to language and other semiotic resources in use
that lend themselves to revealing emic orientations in situ, rather than controlled, experimental ap-
proaches such as grammaticality judgment tests and discourse completion tasks.

Ethnography of communication
EC is an approach to the study of language and other modes of communication whose programmatic
goal is “to describe and account for the means of speech and inseparably their meanings for those
who use them” (Hymes, 1974, p. 198, emphasis in original) and to “fill the gap between what is usu-
ally put into ethnography and what is usually put into grammar” (Hymes, 1962, p. 16). In doing so,
researchers seek to unravel how social norms are (re)produced and perpetuated in instances of com-
munication. Hymes developed the notion of communicative competence from EC.
EC is more than just a discourse-analytic method, but a methodology premised on an ethno-
graphic premise that “speaking is patterned within each society in culture-specific, cross-culturally
variable ways” (Bauman & Sherzer, 1975, p. 98) and that competent members would have knowl-
edge of and capability for enacting such patterns. As such, EC requires close ethnographic engage-
ment in a given speech community to understand the regularities and variations of communicative
practices. Though Hymes originally used the term ethnography of speaking, his focus had always
encompassed more than just speaking. For Hymes, terms like speech and speaking “are surrogates
for all modes of communication,” and “a descriptive account should be generalized to comprise all”
(1962, p. 24).
A key unit of analysis in EC is speech events. Identifying culturally significant speech events is an
ethnographic task in itself; Hymes noted, “[o]ne good ethnographic technique for getting at speech
events […] is through words which name them” (1962, p. 24). For analyzing identified speech events,
Hymes (1974) offered the SPEAKING framework as a heuristic to direct the researcher’s attention to
key areas of variability: Settings, Participants and Participant identities, Ends, Act sequences, Keys
(or tones), Instrumentalities (semiotic resources and modes of communication), Norms, and Genres.

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Importantly, the SPEAKING framework was meant strictly as a heuristic rather than a prescriptive
checklist. As such, researchers can variously adapt it to guide their ethnographic descriptions of
speech events in accordance with their purposes and practical constraints.

Conversation analysis
Arising from the ethnomethodological tradition in sociology (Garfinkel, 2002), CA’s main objective
is to document how orderliness of interaction is achieved through shared methods and procedures
members of a community employ—“the technology of conversation” (Sacks, 1984, p. 413), so to
speak. CA assumes competence is in operation and publicly witnessable at all times in interaction
and that this competence is evident in recurring patterns of interaction such as adjacency pair, turn-
taking, and repair, as well as in how participants perform and respond to social actions in the col-
laborative achievement of larger, coherent sequences (see also Hasegawa, Chapter 2 in this volume).
These methods and procedures are actualized into being in interaction as exhibits of social order, and
hence, not reducible to the individual mind. Though it was originally conceived in L1 communities,
CA’s rigorous analytic tools have been extensively adopted in L2 research (Hall & Doehler, 2011;
Markee & Kasper, 2004). The primary form of data for CA is audio recordings of naturally occurring
interaction. Recent advancements in recording technology have led to a proliferation of studies on the
multimodal constitution of social interaction (Mondada, 2016).
CA researchers rely on several techniques in analyzing interactional discourse. A first technique is
meticulous transcription of recordings using specialized conventions to capture “trajectories, tempo-
ralities and qualities of […] multiple resources” (Mondada, 2016, p. 361). This initial step is integral
to data analysis in that the act of transcribing helps the analyst not only to notice small yet crucial
details of interaction that may otherwise remain unnoticed but also to be aware that the transcription
is influenced by that analyst’s own subjectivities and interpretations (Bucholtz, 2000).
Another important technique is unmotivated looking. As a radically emic approach, CA research-
ers look for recurring procedures that participants mobilize in order to reveal how social actions are
accomplished, rather than by whom and why. Taking members’ methods as “constitutive of their
own reality” (Garfinkel, 2002, p. 97), researchers attend to participants’ displayed orientations to
and interpretations of the unfolding activity as evident in their turn-by-turn conduct. Relatedly, in
examining locally accomplished actions, CA researchers rely on another technique known as next-
turn proof procedure (Hutchby & Wooffitt, 1998), which is premised on the idea that “participants in
interaction constantly analyze each other’s conduct for its locally emerging meanings, monitor their
own, and display their understandings to each other through the details of their talk” (Kasper, 2009,
p. 12). Applying this to data analysis, CA researchers look to pairs of turns and the larger sequences
they comprise in studying how turns-at-talk are understood by participants.

Interactional sociolinguistics
Interactional Sociolinguistics (IS) was established by John Gumperz in the 1970s in an effort to
develop “a general theory of verbal communication which integrates what we know about gram-
mar, culture and interactive conventions into a single overall framework of concepts and analytical
procedures” (Gumperz, 1982, p. 4). For Gumperz, divergence in contextualization conventions com-
prises a primary mechanism that “reinforce[s] distance and maintain[s] separateness” between social
groups (Gumperz, 1982, p. 152). To uncover how this happens in situ, IS focuses on contextualiza-
tion cues (i.e., any linguistic, paralinguistic, or embodied signs) which communicate metapragmatic
information as to “what is to be expected in the exchange, what should be lexically expressed, what
can be conveyed only indirectly, how moves are to be positioned in an exchange, what interpersonal

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relations are involved and what rights to speaking apply” (Gumperz, 1996, pp. 396–397). These cues
are usually transmitted and received subconsciously by interactants, and by this virtue, they are sus-
ceptible to misinterpretations. Since such processes of (mis)understanding are largely invisible and
subconscious, IS requires a combination of close ethnographic engagement with research participants
and microanalysis of audiovisual recordings.
In some sense, IS can be regarded as Gumperz’s effort toward “operationalizing Goffman” (Sa-
rangi, 2011, p. 376), in that he called for the study of ground-up processes wherein orderliness of
social interaction is produced, maintained, and negotiated. Following Goffman, Gumperz theorized
that individual actions (whether verbal or nonverbal) are simultaneously constituting and constituted
by participants’ evolving understandings of the situation at hand, commonly known as frame. To
materialize Goffmanian ideas in empirical analysis, Gumperz drew from ethnomethodology and its
offshoot CA. However, there are important distinctions between IS and CA. Contrary to CA, which
is interested in the orderly deployment of shared methods and procedures, Gumperz insisted that
conversational involvement and cooperation are not a given since social interactions can involve
speakers who do not share the same contextualization conventions and interpretive frames even when
they ostensibly speak the same language. In this regard, Gumperz was interested as much in incom-
petence as competence.
As regards ethnographic thinking, Gumperz received considerable influence from his con-
temporary Dell Hymes, and their relationship was a reciprocal one (Gumperz & Hymes, 1972;
Hymes, 1962). However, Gumperz grew gradually unsatisfied with EC, as it was concerned almost
exclusively with “how social norms affect the use of communicative resources” (Gumperz, 1982,
pp. 155–156) and did not address “how social knowledge is used in situated interpretations” (p. 153).
Gumperz’s IS departs from EC in that it foregrounds contextualization and inferencing processes
in interaction, and not just describing culturally significant speech events and their governing rules.
Through a combination of microanalysis of interactions and ethnographic methods (e.g., observa-
tions, interviews, and stimulated recall sessions), IS researchers aim to unravel both brought-about
(i.e., local interactional achievements) and brought-along (i.e., contextualization conventions and
associated metapragmatic assumptions) levels of meaning (Gumperz, 1982).

Sample studies
This section reviews sample studies that exemplify each of the methodological traditions introduced
in the previous section. Though these traditions have extensive histories spanning 50 years or even
longer, I purposely selected studies from the 21st century to explore what forms of competence L2
learners/users need and demonstrate in light of contemporary issues such as global mobility, ling-
uacultural diversity, and fluid norms. By introducing studies that zero in on different dimensions of
competence emerging from interrelationships between participants’ identities, ideologies, and reper-
toires, I hope to provide readers with material to think through this multifaceted notion further and to
identify an approach that is suited for their own research endeavors.

Ethnography of communication: Duff (2002)

Conducted at a linguaculturally diverse high school in anglophone Canada where nearly half of the
student body consisted of nonlocal students (i.e., L2 speakers of English), Duff’s (2002) study is an
illuminating example of EC that addressed contemporary concerns. Her research investigated how
both local and nonlocal students negotiated their identities and competence in mainstream classrooms
as well as how the focal teacher sought to create “a respectful, inclusive classroom” (p. 295)—which
the teacher conceded was “a challenge” (p. 299). The analysis centered on examination of teacher-led

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discussions on aboriginal culture and history in social studies lessons, with a central focus on turn
allocation patterns within initiation-response-feedback (IRF) sequences.
Duff’s study revealed a heavily uneven distribution of turns among local and nonlocal students,
despite the teacher’s attempts to encourage nonlocal students to share their knowledge, thoughts,
and experiences. From the perspective of Hymesian communicative competence, this could be taken
to suggest nonlocal students’ lack of competence to act appropriately in the mainstream classroom.
Indeed, some local students regarded nonlocal students as lacking in “initiative, agency, or desire to
improve one’s English or to offer interesting material for the sake of the class” (p. 312). However,
by situating the immediate classroom discourse in various ethnographic considerations (e.g., previ-
ous academic socialization, cultural orientation toward in-class speech, fear of criticism, and group
dynamics), Duff inserted a caveat to such a disapproving interpretation:

one point that requires further consideration in an ethnography of communication such as this
is the extent to which students actually want to display their identities and personal knowledge
in class or to conform to dominant, normative local sociolinguistic behaviors—that is, whether
they consider those behaviors and disclosures as signs of competence or incompetence, of
strength or weakness—a community standard and ideology toward which they choose to be-
come socialized, or rather something they just endure, resist, or circumvent by demonstrating
their capabilities in other ways.
(Duff, 2002, p. 313, emphases in original)

The need to withhold reactive judgments was further endorsed by the academic records of many
of the nonlocal students, who outperformed their local counterparts by capitalizing on the affordances
of their multilingual repertoires, literacies, and community memberships. In this light, Duff’s find-
ings brought into question the understanding of competence and language socialization processes
as monolithic and unidirectional, one in which appropriateness is determined exclusively by the
dominant group’s standard. Her research instantiated the value of EC, and ethnographic research in
general, in examining complex interplays of factors shaping the local interaction and competence (cf.
Blommaert, 2016).

Conversation analysis: Hazel (2017)

Hazel’s (2017) study of a transient project community “established around the common, temporarily
bounded, shared endeavor” (p. 309) is a case in point illustrating the utility of CA in contemporary L2
research. In his seven-week longitudinal study, Hazel conducted fieldwork in an international theater
ensemble in Denmark comprising of 25 performers and a similar number of staff members who had
been temporarily brought together for a one-off theater production. He examined how this transient,
multilingual group negotiated a working language policy from the ground up while seeking align-
ment in each other’s expertise, knowledge, and previous experience to pull off the event.
Of interest to the study of competence was what Hazel called langscaping—an interactional
process “where members explore and discover one another’s linguistic repertoires and social-­
geographic trajectories and histories” (p. 317). Langscaping is crucial in transient project com-
munities because participants must quickly establish linguistic common ground with others and
collaboratively engage in professional activities. In the theater ensemble in question, whereas the
director explicitly designated English as the working language (which was an L2 for most partici-
pants) at the first general meeting, the participants gradually expanded the range of available lan-
guage resources by fine-tuning their recipient-oriented and activity-sensitive language choice in each
moment in interaction. Though English and Danish (i.e., the local language) played a dominant role,

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other European languages such as French and Swedish were also prominent, as participants used
language alternation as a resource for organizing activities, managing participation frameworks,
and developing co-member affiliations. The form of competence we observe in Hazel’s study, thus,
entails remaining sensitive to each other’s linguistic repertoire on both productive and receptive
levels and deploying resources that facilitate the pursuit of shared undertakings. Researching such
a manifestation of competence requires the analyst to stay close to participants’ displayed orienta-
tions without imposing exogenous theories and norms; in this respect, CA proved to be particularly
useful in this study, and will likely be so in other settings characterized by transience and diversity
(cf. Mortensen & Kraft, 2022).

Interactional sociolinguistics: Kimura and Canagarajah (2020)

IS was originally developed to reveal tacit discriminations and inequalities arising from divergent
contextualization conventions and interpretive frames and to account for sources of incompetence as
much as competence in various interactional configurations. As global mobility brings together peo-
ple with different linguacultural backgrounds, communicative predispositions, and professional ex-
periences, often causing the colliding of unspoken rules and expectations, research into such issues is
of heightened importance today. Kimura and Canagarajah (2020) was an attempt to investigate what
provides for competence in the context of skilled migration by looking at research group meetings
(RGMs) among multinational microbiologists at a US university. The study particularly focused on
a Korean postdoctoral researcher, Jihun, and diverse interactional affordances he drew on in RGMs,
where he reported to his colleagues the findings and problems he encountered during experiments.
IS notions of frame, contextualization, and conversational inference, as well as rules (ir)rele-
vance—“decisions about which attributes of a person will be treated as important to the interaction”
(Erickson, 1975, p. 49)—proved instrumental in the study. Though Jihun considered his English
proficiency as limited and in fact exhibited many nonconventional grammatical and discursive fea-
tures in his speech production, interactions in RGMs for the most part proceeded without signs of
communication breakdowns, with Jihun’s co-participants showing alignment by providing continu-
ers and asking clarification questions about experimental details. There were some cases where they
corrected Jihun’s lexical choices, but such instances pertained to issues that were critical to the shared
task at hand. Considering the layered framing of the RGMs shaped by both immediate and distant
considerations including task structures, participation frameworks, heterogeneous repertoires, com-
ments from journal referees, experimental findings generated prior to the meeting, and a collaborative
professional ethic, the authors accounted for the apparently reduced importance of formal English
proficiency in RGMs.
Working toward common professional ends, the participants negotiated their rules of (ir)rele-
vance in terms of grammatical accuracy and sustained the intersubjective understanding of the frame
through an expanded set of contextualization cues including spatial arrangement (e.g., closing the
door), images displayed on the wall-mounted screen, and embodied actions (e.g., pointing and lean-
ing toward the screen). In some moments, nonverbal practices clearly took precedence over speech,
as Juhun would leave his utterances uncompleted and present “relevant images in front of the par-
ticipants […] who share the professional vision to generate meanings collectively” (p. 651). It can
be said that activities in RGMs were given coherence through spatial and visual resources, rather
than just language, representing a translingual orientation to communication (Canagarajah, 2018; Li,
2018). The findings of Kimura and Canagarajah (2020) suggest that the competence exhibited by the
participants was heavily embodied and distributed among human and nonhuman agents, challenging
the logocentrism and individualism that are prevalent in structuralist research traditions (see also
Atkinson et al., Chapter 11 in this volume).

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Implications for second language learning, teaching, and use

Highlighting different dimensions of competence, the studies reviewed in the previous section point
toward critical implications for how we teach and research L2 in contemporary communicative land-
scapes. On the most general level, the studies suggest that competence is extremely multifaceted and
variable, and consequently, no single method can capture it in its entirety. In this regard, discourse anal-
ysis (DA) methods can be viewed as magnifying glasses of different magnitude that allow the analyst
to attend to various levels of granularity in accordance with their research scopes and goals. While the
diverse findings of the studies defy generalizations, key implications may be summarized as follows:

• Competence is not entirely determined by preestablished norms and rules.

• Competence manifests on both productive and receptive levels.
• Competence involves mutual coordination of actions to advance unfolding interactional se-
quences, although cooperation is not always a given.
• Competence emerges reflexively from an interplay of heterogeneous factors including partici-
pants’ repertoires, communicative dispositions, identities, goals, previous socializations, language
ideologies, power relations, and physical setups.
• Competence is distributed across and mediated by various entities including participants, objects,
social networks, artifacts, and participation frameworks.
• Competence is not a universal construct but particular to specific types of interactional encoun-
ters, while interactional resources (linguistic, discursive, cultural, embodied, and otherwise) are
transferable across encounters.
• Competence is not restricted by socially constructed boundaries between named languages, as
language knowledge for multilinguals is a unitary construct (cf. multi-competence, Cook & Li,
2016; translanguaging as a theory of language, Li, 2018).

Naturally, these implications are of paramount importance to L2 researchers and teachers, as they
speak to the very objectives of their professional endeavors. To echo recent scholarly efforts toward
promoting an emergentist view of communication (e.g., Canagarajah, 2018; The Douglas Fir Group,
2016; Toohey, 2019), teaching and research should center less on established norms and more on
how communication in real-world situations works by means of diverse semiotic resources beyond
language. This may appear to run counter to a commonsense understanding of language as a discrete,
static entity, possibly making language teachers and learners feel uneasy. However, even within the
constraints of traditional curricular goals, language teachers can complement existing materials and
promote openness to heterogeneous communication practices by incorporating recordings and an-
ecdotes of real-life communication and discuss how actual practices may challenge conventional
understandings of linguistic norms. Though practical concerns and economic interests may preclude
drastic changes, L2 learners must at the very least be reminded that memorizing grammatical and
sociopragmatic rules is never sufficient to achieve communicative goals in the face of the messiness
of language use and learning in the wild. L2 researchers have a role to play in continuing to pursue
empirical research on competence in real-life situations using DA methods of various granularities,
as well as theorizing and promoting alternative views of competence.

Future directions in second language research and teaching

This chapter has demonstrated that throughout the history of L2 research and teaching, DA methods
have played a central role in constantly refining our understandings of competence against changing
sociocultural and scholarly backdrops. To carry this legacy forward, I suggest two interrelated direc-
tions by way of closing the chapter.

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One direction is to further embrace complexity and emergence as the fundamental principles of
communication. Global mobility across physical and virtual spaces have made translocal encounters
commonplace and linguacultural diversity the norm. As participants in translocal encounters bring
along histories of previous socialization and experience, research on such interactional configurations
should focus on how divergent norms and ideologies come into contact and how people negotiate
understandings, power relationships, and goals. In this light, communication needs to be regarded as
complex systems, wherein a multitude of layered factors beyond words and grammar of a language
shape and mediate one another in generating emergent meanings (Larsen-Freeman & Cameron,
2008). Note that the term complexity here is used “not as a compulsory vocabulary or theoretical
template” but as a perspective that “offers a freedom to imagine” (Blommaert, 2016, p. 249). Other
scholars have addressed the need to holistically capture emergent, complex, and dynamic processes
of communication using terms like translanguaging, spatiality, new materialism (e.g., Canagarajah,
2018; Li, 2018; Toohey, 2019).
When communication is viewed as complex systems, competence is no longer an individual
property, but the potentiality of a given configuration of human and nonhuman actors. Compe-
tence becomes a dynamic process, rather than a static state, which may be better expressed with
the verb competencing (Hellermann, 2018). This is not to suggest that each configuration of com-
munication is completely unique. Rather, acts of communication simultaneously reproduce old
patterns and create new ones in a cyclical manner (reciprocal causality); as Gleick noted, “the
act of playing the game has a way of changing the rules” (1987, p. 24). It follows that language
learning should also be understood as consisting of dynamic, ongoing processes of adapting to
communicative demands and emerging patterns that unfold alongside individual life trajectories.
As complexity manifests on different scales (e.g., here-and-now interactions, participants’ previ-
ous socializations, and indexical loads of semiotic resources), DA methods with different scopes
are indispensable and complementary in enabling us to embrace complexity in L2 research and
teaching with respect to our understandings of competenc(ing) in changing environments (cf. The
Douglas Fir Group, 2016).
Another direction involves seeking closer alignment between research and pedagogy. Though em-
pirically plausible, findings about dynamic communication processes may not automatically trans-
late to the development of readily teachable materials and activities within the existing curricular
agenda of most language programs which hinge on structuralist orientations to language and com-
munication. There is frequently a tension between researchers’ goal of showcasing language users’
resourcefulness (cf. Firth & Wagner, 1997) and learners’ and teachers’ real-life concerns, including
an orientation to acquiring socially valued forms of language. Moreover, research findings about
fluid communication practices may be perceived to be at odds with educational goals. More than two
decades ago, Cazden voiced a concern that is still highly relevant today:

Human knowledge and ability does [sic] develop in collaborative interactions with others; and
mature abilities of more than one person often combine in “co-constructions” to productive
effect. But the currently popular term “distributed cognition” sometimes seems to suggest that
we should stop altogether thinking of knowledge as located in the minds of individuals, and
consider it located only between minds.
(Cazden, 1996, p. 9)

There is no simple solution to this conundrum. However, it is imperative that we continue to

explore creative ways to address the tensions between communicative effectiveness vs. symbolic
value, holism vs. individualism, and dynamism vs. stability in helping today’s language learners, who
constantly deal with uncertainty, unpredictability, and diversity as they traverse virtual, physical, and

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ideological spaces. Embracing complexity also has a liberating capacity in that it destabilizes estab-
lish norms as well as power relationships implicated in them (cf. undoing competence and appropri-
ateness, Flores & Rosa, 2015). A radical scenario for the future of language teaching would be that,
as Seidlhofer (2004) envisioned from an English-as-a-lingua-franca perspective, we replace language
classes with language awareness classes, with the central goal of providing learners with a basis for
continued adaptation as they navigate their way through ever-changing communicative landscapes.
Whatever the future holds for L2 teaching, continued dialogue between teachers and researchers is
crucial moving forward.

Further reading on discourse, competence, and second language research

Hall, J. K. (2019). Essentials of SLA for L2 teachers: A transdisciplinary framework. Routledge.
This monograph introduces readers to the complexity of L2 learning/use. Topics covered include interac-
tional repertoires, material mediations, identities, and language ideologies.
Kanwit, M., & Solon, M. (Eds.). (2022). Communicative competence in a second language: Theory, method, and
applications. Routledge.
This volume features diverse perspectives on communicative competence, including corpus linguistics, vari-
ationist sociolinguistics, ethnography, and interlanguage pragmatics. The content of the current chapter is com-
plementary to this volume since discursively oriented, emergentist perspectives are given less attention in the
book (but see Chapter 6 for a relevant discussion of this).
Sert, O., Kunitz, S., & Markee, N. (Eds.). (2018). Editorial [Thematic issue]. Classroom Discourse, 9(1).
This thematic issue of Classroom Discourse brings together leading scholars in CA, usage-based linguis-
tics, and interactional linguistics to discuss the nature of interactional competence and its implications for L2
teaching/learning. Several articles also propose breaking with the notion of interactional competence, advancing
alternatives like competencing and repertoire.

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 INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Page numbers in bold refer to tables. Page numbers followed by “n”
refer to notes.

Abdhi Tabari, M. 234 appliable linguistics 55–59

academic discourse 246, 247, 265; and applied linguistics 4, 40, 45, 46, 64, 76, 77, 111, 346,
socialization 210 348, 349
access paradox 91 appraisal analysis 165
Achugar, M. 58 argumentative discourse 79, 80, 81, 165
actional competence 356 artifacts 27, 28–29, 32, 117, 178, 203, 231, 287,
action research 95, 97 304, 332
activity theory 118 artificial intelligence 307
Adams, G. 139 assessment 17, 97, 119, 216, 220, 239; dynamic 120,
Ädel, A. 165, 245, 256, 263 121; implications of spoken discourse research
ad hoc generated language 313, 321 for 224–225; translanguaging approaches to 95;
adjacency pairs 12–13, 157; see also first pair part; writing quality 83; see also testing and assessment
second pair part asynchronous interaction 297, 298
adults 41–42, 43, 45, 59, 108, 120, 192, 205–206, Atkinson, Dwight 5, 132, 134, 141, 231, 314–315
215–216, 288 attention in communication 315, 316, 317, 319
affect 139; see also emotions attrition 166
affective affiliation 139 audio 14, 32, 106, 119, 175, 181, 183, 202, 203, 221,
affordances 27, 31, 32, 34, 138, 141, 147, 204, 219, 222, 223, 301, 332, 359
224, 237, 298, 299, 300, 301–302, 303, 304, 305, Aull, L. L. 261
306; see also constraints autobiographical discourse 40–41, 43; see also
agency 16, 43, 45, 73, 98, 104, 109, 112, 113, 136, narrative(s)
147, 149, 156–157, 180, 190, 201, 205, 206, 210, avoidance 110–111
257, 288, 332, 342, 344–345 Ayaz Naseem, M. 93
Ahlholm, M. 204
Ai, H. 82 Baider, F. 322
Alexopoulou, T. 166 Balaman, U. 301
Al-Gahtani, S. 222 Baldry, A. 29
alignment 13, 134–135, 136, 138, 139, 285, 314, 320, Bandura, A. 315
360, 361 Barkhuizen, G. 38, 45
Amador, L. 139 Bartik, J. 140
analytic bracketing see unmotivated looking Baynham, M. 43, 44, 45
Ansarifar, A. 79 Beauvois, M. H. 299
Antaki, C. 14 Becker, Kimberly 5
Appleby, R. 334–335, 347 Belcher, D. 33

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Bell, J. 40 Chomsky, N. 140, 178, 179, 353–354

Benson, P. 40, 41 Chun, C. W. 181–182, 183n5
Berger, E. 217, 222 Churchill, E. 134
Bezemer, J. J. 26 Clark, M. C. 41
Bhatia, V. 68 classroom(s) 16, 136, 147, 193–195, 270, 332–333;
Bi, P. 81, 83 application of CDST principles in 149;
Biber, D. 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 164, 167, 249 code-switching in 285, 289; conversation analysis
Biber Tagger 78 16–17, 26; disciplinary literacy development
bilingualism 42, 46, 188, 190, 196; bilingual identity 56–59, 60; dyadic interactions in 16; instruction
330; and code-switching 285, 288; and colonial 18, 66, 118, 121–123; interactions 16–17, 26, 29,
discourse 91; and translanguaging 285, 288; see 56, 57, 58, 106, 109, 119, 149, 178, 181–182,
also multilingualism 193, 278, 285, 288, 289, 320, 333, 345, 356;
blending 316–317 multimodal discourse analysis 26, 29, 34;
Block, D. 11 pedagogies, for genre knowledge 72; queering
Borba, R. 347 of 348; SLA, text/context dynamics in 53, 53;
Borker, R. A. 341 spoken discourse 219, 220; transcripts 55, 56, 57;
Boulton, A. 168 translanguaging in 285, 286, 287, 288, 291
Brisk, M. E. 56 classroom discourse 5, 180, 270, 328–329, 360;
British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus ethnographic approach 276–277; future directions
245, 252 for 277–278; interactional approach 275–276;
Brouwer, C. 15, 18 psycholinguistic approach 273–274; research
Bruner, J. 331 approaches for 273–277, 273; shared history of
Bulté, B. 77, 80 271–272; shifting along the mode continuum
Burhan-Horasanı, Elif 5 55–56; sociocultural approach 274–275
Burns, A. 4 Clercq, B. D. 83, 85
Butler, Judith 3, 341–343, 344, 349n1 closed network program 208
Byram, M. 225 Cobb, T. 168
Byrnes, H. 59 code-switching (CS) 285, 287, 289; see also
translanguaging
Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary 164 Coffey, S. 331
Cambridge Learner Corpus 164, 165, 166 cognition 91, 117, 128, 129, 142, 158, 218, 219,
Cameron, D. 341, 342 271, 272, 300; cognitive development 219; and
Canagarajah, A. S. 72, 334, 361 concepts 120; distributed 363; higher 118, 120,
Canale, M. 4, 179, 216, 355, 357 121; situated 66; in sociocognitive theory 134;
Canals, L. 305 in sociocultural theory 121, 139; and spoken
Capps, L. 44 discourse 119; teacher 111; and writing 230,
Carter, R. A. 163 231, 232, 233, 234, 235; see also sociocognitive
case studies 57, 58, 69, 70, 72, 80, 201, 204, 216, approach
236, 331 cognitive development, theory of 219–220
Cazden, C. B. 363 cognitive-interactionist approach 217–218, 222–223
Celce-Murcia, M. 4, 356 cognitive psychology 102, 105
Cenoz, J. 284 cognitive semantics 110
chat interactions 297; composition process, access to cognitive–social divide in ethnographic perspectives
298; emoticons 300–301; form-focused instruction 182
300; group chat 298; text chat 298–301; video chat cognitivism 103, 105, 114n1, 135, 139, 140, 179
298, 301, 303; see also text chat; video chat collapsed network program 208
checklists 272 Collins COBUILD 163
Chen, Qinghua 5 ColloCaid 168
Chen, X. 165 common-ground-seeking and -building, during
Cheng, X. 258, 259 communicative activities 313, 317, 320
Chicago School of Sociology 174 communication 4, 24, 51, 65, 90, 92, 177, 179,
Chik, A. 289 362, 363; actual situational context of 316, 317,
children 116, 121, 190, 203, 354; and alignment 134; 318, 320, 321; attention in 315, 316, 317, 319;
bilingual 288; and concepts 121; heritage language computer-mediated 60; cooperation in 313–314,
use of 90; immersion education for 89; minority 315, 316, 320, 321; digital 73; ethnography of
177; in multilingual homes 190; technology- 176–177, 180–181, 188, 357–358, 359–360;
mediated discourse of 306, 307 intentions in 313, 314, 315, 316; intercultural 99,

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192, 313, 320; lingua franca 313, 318, 321, 322, Consoli, S. 45
323; multimodal 24, 25, 32, 33, 34, 106; online Constantinou, M. 322
302, 303, 307; prior experiences of 313, 315–321, constraints 224, 300, 301, 303, 305, 306, 342,
323n5; relevance in 316, 321, 322; social 195; 343–345, 346, 348; see also affordances
styles, and gender 341; workplace 192 constructionism 3, 4, 43, 102, 103, 104, 111
communicative competence 4, 24, 28, 32, 33, 34, constructivism 4, 94, 104
177, 179, 193, 195, 216, 354–355, 356, 357, 360 content and language integrated learning (CLIL) 58
communicative language teaching (CLT) 193 context(s) 12, 13–14, 19, 112, 137, 178, 192,
communities of practice (COP) 18, 137, 201, 202, 195–196, 202, 220, 230, 340; actual situational
207, 220, 224, 289, 322, 329, 342 context 316, 317, 318, 320, 321; and ethnography
community engagement 60 175, 176, 180, 182, 287; face-to-face L2 learning
competence 6, 111, 140, 141, 147, 353; actional 204–205; and genre 231; and grammatical
356; communicative 4, 24, 28, 32, 33, 34, 177, complexity 77; institutional 16; language use
179, 193, 195, 216, 354–355, 356, 357, 360; in 328; and narratives 42, 43, 44, 45; online
conversation analysis 358, 360–361; discourse 183, 301, 302, 303, 307, 330, 334; prior context
competence 215–216, 355; ethnography of of communication 320–321; and register 54;
communication 357–358, 359–360; future second language in discursive contexts 89–90;
directions in second language research and technology-mediated 298–299, 307; text/context
teaching and 362–364; grammatical 216, 355, dynamics 53, 53, 54, 59; WAC/WID 243
356; historical overview 353–357; implications context collapse 73
for second language learning, teaching, and use contextualisation cues 188, 189, 358, 361
362; intellectual roots of 353–354; interactional contrastive analysis 162, 164, 168, 243–244, 247
15, 19–20, 141, 158, 179, 216–217, 225, 278, 306, contrastive rhetoric (CR) 230, 232
355, 356–357; interactional sociolinguistics 358– contrastive studies 247
359, 361; intercultural communicative competence conversation analysis (CA) 3, 5, 11, 26, 30, 43, 103,
225; in L2 research 355–357; linguistic 178, 180, 105, 106, 107, 133, 137, 138, 140, 175–176, 217,
215, 223, 225, 345, 354, 355, 356; methodological 222, 345, 358, 360–361; applied 14; and CDST
approaches to 357–359; plurilingual 286, 289; 148–149; communicational 15; comparative
pragmatic 216, 222, 249, 311, 312, 313, 323; research 18; digital 300; ethnomethodological
sample studies of 359–361; strategic 216, 355, 357 foundations 11–12; and exogenous learning
Complex Adaptive System (CAS) 149, 150, 153–154, theories 17–18; foundational 14–15; future
155–157 directions 19–20; institutional 16; and
complex dynamic systems theory (CDST) 5, interactional sociolinguistics, comparison 359; and
146–148; adapting feedback from environment interaction order 12–14; interventionist 16–17,
and from themselves 153–155; data analysis 20; longitudinal research 18–19; methodological
148–149; data collection 148; future directions and conceptual challenges in CA-SLA research
158–159; homogeneity and heterogeneity 156– 17–19; multimodal 204–205; of spoken discourse
157; implications for second language learning, and social interaction 218–219; for technology-
teaching, and use 158; interaction of parts and mediated discourse 300–301; see also discursive
functioning as a whole 155–156; nonlinearity psychology (DP); ethnomethodology
150–152; principles 149; research approaches to cooperation 13, 134, 136, 313–314, 315, 316, 320,
148–158; sample studies 147; self-organization 321, 359
and adaptation of many interacting agents cooperative action 135, 138, 139, 142
149–150; self-similarity 157; sensitivity to initial cooperative discourse 134
conditions 153; surface complexity arising out of corpus analysis 28, 30, 58–59, 67, 69–70, 77, 109,
deep simplicity 152–153; universal properties of 162–163, 167–168, 169, 238, 244, 249, 262–263
nonlinear systems 157–158 corpus approaches 5, 69, 79, 162–163, 232, 237,
complexity 363–364; turn 284 244, 245, 260–261; contrastive analysis 162,
complexity, accuracy, fluency (CAF) 76, 202, 164; future directions 169; historical overview
234–235 of 163–165; implications for second language
complexity, accuracy, lexis, and fluency (CALF) learning, teaching, and use 168; research methods
scores 205 in 165–167; sample studies 167–168
concept-based language instruction (CBLI) 120, corpus-assisted discourse analysis (CADS) 162
121–123, 122 corpus linguistics 162, 163–164, 232
conduit model of language 90 Corpus of Contemporary American English 261
Connor, U. 230, 244 Corpus of English for Academic and Professional
Conrad, S. 82 Purposes (CEAPP) 277

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corpus pragmatics 322 data collection 28, 56, 68, 69, 106, 119, 123, 148,
corrective feedback 13, 15, 139, 152, 168, 218, 220, 167, 174, 332
223, 224, 231, 232, 233, 235, 236, 237, 238, 275, data-driven learning (DDL) 162–163, 168, 224, 237
299, 300–301, 302–303, 345; see also feedback Davis, K. A. 179
Coryell, J. E. 41 Deakin, L. 262
Cotos, Elena 5 Decock, S. 322
Coulthard, M. 272 deficit discourse 88, 91–92, 93, 94, 95–96, 98
Crawford Camiciottoli, B. 264, 322 De Fina, A. 41
Crawshaw, R. 321 de los Ríos, C. V. 330, 334
Create a Research Space (CARS) model 67 de Nooy, J. 303
Crismore, A. 263, 264 Dereiwanka, B. 195
critical action research 95 descriptive linguistics 175
critical discourse analysis (CDA) 3, 95–96, 178, desire 91, 95, 96, 339, 342, 347
232, 331 developmental index of writing complexity 77–78,
critical ethnography 55, 94–95, 99, 177–178, 79, 84
181–182 Devitt, A. J. 72
critical genre analysis 68–69 dialectical thinking 128
critical perspectives 5, 88–89; collaborative research diary studies 39, 41
98; future directions 97–99; implications for didactic voice of native speakers 303
second language learning, teaching, and use 97; digital communication 73
research design 98; research methodologies and digital discourse 328
methods in 93–96; sample studies of 96–97 digital ethnography 183
critical race theory 96 digital literacy 31
cross-cultural pragmatics 311–312, 313; see also digital media 25, 106
interlanguage pragmatics digital multimodal composing (DMC) 26, 33–34
Crossley, S. A. 78, 83 digital technology 24, 297; see also technology-
cross-linguistic influence 284 mediated discourse
cross-sectional research 79, 162, 167, 221, 222, 238, Dilthey, W. 173
247, 260–261, 312 disciplinary discourses 5, 51–52, 242–244;
Crosthwaite, P. 163, 165, 168 broadening the disciplinary focus 251; discipline-
cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) see specific grammatical complexity 249; elementary
sociocultural theory (SCT) level 56; English for (specific) academic
culture 27, 51, 174, 181, 203, 263, 267, 342, 349n1; purposes 243; formulaic language in L1, L2, and
cultural fantasy narratives 41–42; cultural NL research articles 249; future directions for
repertoires 90, 205, 208, 209; cultural turn 179, 251–252; high school level 58–59; implications
183n4; and gender identities 344–345; and genre for second language learning, teaching, and use
54; intercultural awareness 99; and multimodal 250–251; interpersonal stance in L1 and L2
representation 34; see also intercultural economics coursework writing 248–249; middle
pragmatics school level 56–58; research approaches 244–248;
Cummins, J. 284 sample studies in 248–249; second language
writing 243–244; SLA classroom discourse 55–56;
Dahl, M. 312 spoken 252; systemic functional linguistics 52–55;
Dailey-O’Cain, J. 289 undergraduate disciplinary writing 251–252;
Dao, P. 302–303 university level 59; Writing across the Curriculum
data: conversation analysis 18, 133, 358; corpus (WAC) 243; Writing in the Disciplines (WID) 243
163, 164–165, 166–167, 168; ethnographic discourse 1, 2, 3, 66, 91, 118, 133, 340; academic
175, 176, 180, 181, 183; ethnomethodology 14; 210, 246, 247, 265; as action-oriented 104;
genre research 70; identity research 331, 332; argumentative 79, 80, 81, 165; colonial 91–92, 94,
interactional 106, 133, 148–149, 220; intercultural 96, 98; conceptualizations of 328; as constructed
pragmatics 322; interview 70, 235, 287, 288; and constructive 104; cooperative 134; deficit
language socialization research 202–203; 88, 91–92, 93, 94, 95–96, 97, 98; definition of
longitudinal 19, 148, 190, 218, 220; multilingual 24, 340; digital 328; face-to-face L2 learning
discourse 287, 288; narrative 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, contexts and research and 204–205; family
44, 45; naturalistic 106; sociolinguistics 190; 328; future directions for research on 209–210;
spoken discourse studies 220, 221–222; talk hegemonic 182; indirect and direct observation of
around text 69; triangulation 28, 71, 224; written 203–204; institutional 98, 328; intercultural 313,
discourse studies 234, 235, 236 320, 321; located 328; meaning and significance

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of 201–202; and mind 116, 118; multilingual ELAN 29, 31, 34n1
283–291; multimodal 3, 24–34; neoliberal 92–93, Elf, N. 330–331
98; online 301–304, 306, 333; online second elicitation 166, 221, 238
language acquisition as 302–304; -oriented Ellis, R. 141, 205, 341, 356
teaching 195; as situated 105; societal 98, 328, emails 297, 298
330, 334; in sociocultural theory 117, 118, 128; embodied participation frameworks 135, 138,
structure, of texts 2; tripartite view of 104–105; 141, 142
workplace 191–192; see also classroom discourse; embodiment 30, 105, 118, 137, 138, 204–205, 209,
disciplinary discourses; spoken discourse; written 304, 305, 361; see also gestures
discourse Emeliyanova, L. 235
Discourse (‘big D’) 5, 88, 89, 91, 94, 134 emergentism 362
discourse analysis (DA) 1, 2–3, 103, 126, 127, emic perspective 13–14, 30, 39, 41, 44, 69, 107,
133, 168, 175, 189, 193, 194, 229–230, 362; 174, 177, 180, 181, 182, 216, 230, 231, 272, 275,
approaches to 244–245; Foucauldian 3–4; use 276, 288, 357, 358; see also ethnography; etic
of language 4; see also multimodal discourse perspective
analysis emoticons 300–301
discourse competence 215–216, 355; see also emotions 108, 109, 111, 129, 139, 141, 346;
competence see also affect
discursive constructionism 43 Engeström, Y. 118
discursive practices 51, 193, 203, 204, 216–217, 334 English 33, 55, 59, 70, 89, 90, 192, 205, 234, 317,
discursive psychology (DP) 5, 102–103; avoidance 329, 330, 333, 346, 347, 348; and classroom
110–111; contemporary 103; discourse 104–105; discourse 278; and colonial discourse 91–92;
and discursive action model 103, 110; displays and deficit discourse 95–96; English language
and orientations 107; early scholarship 103; teaching 94–95, 111, 162, 163–164; Internet-
future directions 113–114; implications for Based Test of English as a Foreign Language
SLA research 111–113; learner beliefs 110; (TOEFL iBT) 80, 168; L2 speakers’ voice
methodological insights 113; naturalistic data 106; repetition of game characters’ utterances 302;
as a person-centered approach 112; pre-analysis metadiscourse 260, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266–267;
107–110; psychology 105; research orientedness and neoliberal discourse 92, 93; plurilingualism
of 112–113; respecification 102, 105, 111–112, 289; teaching detection and understanding of
113; retrospective and prospective nature of 112; sarcasm in 123–125, 124–125; teaching English
sample studies 110–111; teacher cognition 111; to speakers of other languages (TESOL) 79, 289;
as a theoretical, methodological, and ethical translanguaging 288; writing in 242, 245, 246, 249
project 112–113; transcription 106–107, 108; English as a Foreign Language (EFL) 80, 81, 83, 94,
understanding of action and agency 112; use in 110, 204, 235, 259, 260, 261, 276, 302, 347
educational research 111; see also conversation English as a second language (ESL) 16, 80, 81, 83,
analysis (CA); ethnomethodology 84, 109, 135, 138, 139–140, 218, 219, 235, 236,
distributed social networks see social network 245, 261, 262–263, 265, 266, 278, 328, 329, 331,
analysis 333, 346, 348
Dörnyei, Z. 356 English for academic purposes (EAP) 25, 31, 79,
Douglas Fir Group 225, 284 111, 167, 168, 181, 231, 232, 237, 243, 245, 251,
Drew, P. 16 260, 265
Duff, Patricia A. 5, 180, 181, 207, 359–360 English for specific academic purposes (ESAP) 243
Duong, P.-T. 302–303 English for specific purposes (ESP) 25, 34, 84, 231,
dynamic assessment (DA) 120, 121 232, 237, 243, 245
dynamic systems theory see complex dynamic English language teaching (ELT) 111, 162, 163, 164,
systems theory (CDST) 347, 348
Dzekoe, R. 33 epistemology 11, 14, 15, 38, 39, 43, 67–68, 105, 107,
147, 167, 175, 215, 231, 237, 251, 306
Erickson, F. 137, 177
Early, M. 25
Erman, B. 245
Eckstein, G. 82
errors 15, 110, 166, 168, 235, 236, 303; see also
ecological perspective 40, 141, 147, 182, 320
corrective feedback
ecology(ies) 132, 135, 142, 207
Eskildsen, S. W. 148, 218, 219
Edwards, D. 102, 103, 110, 111
ethics 45, 46, 112–113
egocentrism 314, 315–316, 321, 323n5
ethnographic perspectives 5, 173, 174, 178–180;
Ehrlich, Susan 6, 339
bridging binary positions 182; cognitive–social
Eilola, L. R. 304

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 Index

divide 182; compatibility with discourse analysis Flanders’ Interaction Analysis Categories (FIAC)
176; contemporary ethnography 174; future checklist 272
directions 183; hybrid approaches 176–178; Flores, N. 46, 92
linguistic ethnography 178; macro–micro divide Flowerdew, J. 4
182; microethnography 177; practical implications form 57, 65, 66, 71, 77, 166, 196
183; research–practice divide 182; similarities formulaicity 246
with discourse analysis 175; tensions with formulaic language 246, 247, 249, 250, 251,
discourse analysis 175–176 321, 323
ethnographic study 174, 181, 183 formulations 103, 104, 149, 219
ethnographic tools 174 Foucauldian discourse analysis 3–4
ethnography 28, 43, 57, 68, 70, 173–174, 189, 220, Foucault, M. 4
327, 330, 331, 340, 344; classroom discourse frame 359
276–277; critical 55, 94–95, 99, 177–178, 181– Freeman, M. 40
182; digital 183; ethnographic case studies 201; Friedman, D. 231, 233
linguistic 178; in multilingual learning context function 57, 77, 166, 196
287–288; as a process 174; as a product 174; functional specialization 27, 31, 32
research characteristics of 276–277; of speaking
177, 357; studies of learning conditions 224 Gal’perin, P. Y. 121
ethnography of communication (EC) 176–177, gaming activities: as a ‘learning event’ 306; online
180–181, 188, 357–358, 359–360 330; see also video-game interactions
ethnomethodology 11–12, 14, 17, 18, 103, 107, 133, Gao, J. 166
175, 183n1, 216–217, 358, 359; García, O. 90
see also conversation analysis (CA); discursive Gardner, Sheena 5, 164, 165, 166
psychology (DP) Garfinkel, H. 11, 183n1, 216
etic perspective 30, 177, 180, 181, 230, 272, 274; Gass, S. 17, 141
see also emic perspective; ethnography Gebhard, Meg 5, 57
Evans, D. R. 314 Gee, J. P. 66, 132–134, 230, 314
experimental research 58, 233; interlanguage studies Geertz, C. 174
of L2 development 220–221; of L2 learning Gell-Mann, M. 146
conditions 222–223 gender 3, 6, 263, 329, 339–341, 349n1; bias, and
neoliberal discourse 93; Butlerian theoretical
Fairclough, N. 2, 95, 96, 244 approaches to 341–343; and desire 347; doing/
family language policies 190 performing 3, 341, 342, 343–345; future
Fasel Lauzon, V. 223 directions 348–349; highly rigid regulatory frame
feedback 135, 139, 141, 153–154, 156–157, 158, 342; implications for teaching 347–348; and
168, 223–224; see also corrective feedback intersectionality 346; see also sexuality
feminist perspectives 341–342, 344, 348 general genetic law of development 118
femonationalism 348–349 Geng, Y. 244
Ferris, D. 82 genre(s) 5, 33, 54, 56, 58, 59, 64–66, 195, 237,
field 52, 54, 57; see also register 246; analysis 34, 68–69, 72, 73, 238; awareness
field notes 28, 58, 68, 174, 181, 202, 203, 224, 277, 33, 66, 71, 72; -based pedagogy 66, 71–72,
289, 331, 332, 333 250; critical genre analysis 68–69; definition
Fife, J. 259 of 64–65; and discourse communities 65–66,
first language (L1) 89, 97, 167, 169, 178, 192, 70–71; ethnographic analyses 68; future
200, 284, 285, 286, 289, 300, 320, 323, 340; directions 72–73; goals and actions of 65; and
appraisal analysis 165; disciplinary discourses grammatical complexity 81, 84–85; guided
244, 245, 248–249, 250; grammar use 82–83, 84; exploratory activities 72; implications for second
influence of 165, 166, 221; and intercultures 313; language learning, teaching, and use 71–72;
metadiscourse 262, 263; and “not sure” approach knowledge 66, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73; learning 70–72;
317–318, 320; writing 230; see also bilingualism; lexicogrammatical analysis 67–68, 71; moves
multilingualism analysis 67, 71; multimodal 73; new, emergence
first pair part (FPP) 12, 13; see also adjacency pairs of 73; sample studies in 69–71; as a social
Firth, A. 11, 14, 15, 179, 216, 217, 219, 231, 284, practice 66; text-based analysis 69–70; use across
329, 356–357 languages 72; see also register
Fischer, I. 306 genre-specific knowledge 66
Flanders, N. 272 genre theory 65, 231, 232, 243, 244, 245

372
 Index

Georgakopoulou, A. 44 Han, C. 166

gestures 14, 24, 26, 29, 30, 31, 32, 51, 104, 119, Hanaoka, O. 238
123, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 147, 152, Hanna, B. E. 303
157, 177, 188, 205, 219, 277, 298, 299, 300, 305, Hardy, J. A. 81
319, 361 Harris, Z. 2, 175
Gevers, Jeroen 5 Harwood, N. 265
Gewerc, A. 330–331 Hasan, R. 54, 195
Gibbons, P. 55 Hasegawa, Atsushi 5, 16, 206, 207, 208
Gibson, J. 141 Hatch, E. 1, 217
Gleick, J. 363 Hauser, E. 18, 148
Goffman, E. 136, 137, 142 Hazel, S. 360–361
Gollin, S. 4 Heath, S. B. 177
Golombek, P. R. 41, 45 Hegel, G. W. F. 173
González-Lloret, M. 300 hegemonic discourse 182
González-Martínez, E. 18 Hellermann, J. 16
Goodwin, C. 135, 137–138, 142 Hengst, J. A. 28
Gorter, D. 284 Heritage, J. 16
Graham, H. 57 heritage languages 42, 90, 189, 190, 196n1,
grammar 19, 133, 147, 163, 195; emergence, usage- 329, 330
based approaches for understanding 218; errors, Heshemi, S. M. R. 264
repair of 15; SFL’s conception of 52, 55; spoken heterogeneity 156–157
163 heteroglossia 97
grammatical competence 216, 355, 356; see also heteronormativity 339, 342, 345; see also gender;
competence sexuality
grammatical complexity 5, 76–77, 204–205, Higgins, C. 344–345
246, 247, 249, 354; components of 76, 77; Ho, Victor 5
computational tools 78; cross-linguistic Hodgson-Drysdale, T. 56
perspective 83, 85; cross-sectional studies of L2 Holland, J. H. 150, 152, 155, 157
development 79; discipline-specific 249; fine- Holliday, A. 267
grained individual grammatical features 77–78, Holzman, L. 117, 128
80, 82, 83, 84; future directions 84–85; and genre/ homogeneity 156–157
register 81–82, 84–85; implications for second homonationalism 348–349
language learning, teaching, and use 83–84; and Hopp, H. 286, 290
L2 performance 81–83; and L2 writing quality Horowitz, K. S. 302
83; and language background 82–83; large- Hosoda, Y. 15
grained syntactic measures 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, Housen, A. 77, 80, 83, 85
83–84; longitudinal studies of L2 development Huan, C. 4
80–81; phrasal complexity 79, 80, 83, 84; sample Huebner, T. 215
studies 78 Hult, F. M. 284
grammatical forms 77, 78, 81 human–machine interactions 321
grammatical functions 77, 78, 81, 84 Humphrey, S. 56, 57
grammatical metaphors 59 Hutchby, I. 300
grammatical sophistication 76, 77 Hyland, K. 67, 69, 70, 165, 166, 243, 244, 256, 259,
grammatical variation 76, 77 262, 263, 266
Granger, S. 162 Hymes, D. 176, 179, 188, 354–355, 357, 359
Gray, Bethany 5, 80, 168 Hyslop-Margison, E. J. 93
Gray, J. 345
Greer, T. 219 ideational function of language 52, 54
Gregg, K. R. 356 identity(ies) 3, 6, 15, 45, 51, 56, 69, 94, 138, 142,
Guan, X. 4 188, 196, 203, 340, 341; bilingual 330; and
Gumperz, J. J. 188, 358, 359 colonial discourse 91, 92; complexity of 329;
conceptual overview of 327–331; construction
Hadley, G. 265 328–329, 331, 332, 346; and discourse 4, 327;
Hafner, Christoph 5, 31 future directions 334–335; heritage language
Hall, J. K. 356 learner 329, 330; identity turn 41; implications
Halliday, M. A. K. 2, 51–52, 53, 54, 55, 59, 195 for 333–334; methodological approaches in 331;

373
 Index

multilingual 44, 208, 288, 330; multimodal 31; 298, 302; as treatment 222–223; video-game
and narratives 3, 39–40, 42, 44; presentation of 298, 301, 302, 304, 306, 307; videos of 29–30;
135–136, 138; sample studies focusing on 332– workplace 191–192; writer–reader 265, 266, 267;
333; social 42, 205–206, 303, 328, 329, 340, 341; see also chat interactions; technology-mediated
and social conventions 133–134; see also gender; discourse
race and ethnicity; sexuality interactional approach to classroom discourse
ideology(ies) 15, 43, 44, 90, 200, 201, 202, 303, 363; 275–276
colonial 91, 98; gendered 344; and genre analysis interactional competence (IC) 15, 19–20, 141,
68; ideological Discourse 88, 89; raciolinguistic 158, 179, 216–217, 225, 278, 306, 355,
46, 60, 332 356–357
idiom principle 323 interactional data 106, 133, 148–149, 220
immigration/immigrants 43, 59, 108, 109, 181, 192, interactional instinct approach 139
288, 327, 329, 330, 331, 343, 344, 346 interactional metadiscourse 256, 262–263
impoliteness 319, 322 interactional sociolinguistics (IS) 189, 190, 192,
incompetence 359, 360, 361 358–359, 361
indexicality 12 interaction order, and conversation analysis 12–14
individual network of practice 207 intercognizers 314–315
initiation-response-feedback (IRF) 272 intercultural awareness 99
inner speech 128; see also private speech intercultural communicative competence 225
institutional discourse 98, 328 intercultural discourse 313, 320, 321
instruction 16, 18, 57, 59, 89, 201, 286; intercultural pragmatics 6, 311, 313, 321; in
concept-based language instruction 120, 121–123, business communication research 322;
122; explicit 57, 66, 118; form-focused 300; co-construction of meaning in 321, 323;
genre 72; grammar 83, 84; Japanese as a foreign connecting with language teaching 322;
language 125; metadiscourse 258–260, 264, cooperation in 320; focusing on intercultures
265; second language writing 230, 233, 234, 313–314; future directions 322–323;
237, 238, 250; systemic-theoretic 121–122; intersubjectivity in 317–320; methodological
teaching detection and understanding of sarcasm insights of 320–321; “not sure” approach 317–
in English 123–125, 124–125; teaching Japanese 318, 319, 320; and real-world language use 313;
conceptually 125–127, 126; virtual 60; see also research advice 320–321; studies 321–322
pedagogy intercultural rhetoric 232, 243, 244, 267
Intaraprawat, P. 261 intercultures 313–314
intentions in communication 313, 314, 315, 316 interlanguage 88, 97, 164, 215–216, 249, 250, 299
interaction(s) 51, 137, 138; analysis, in discursive interlanguage pragmatics 216, 311, 312, 313
psychology 107; asynchronous 297, 298; CDST interlocutors 15, 43, 109, 148, 153, 158, 188, 189,
principles 149–158; classroom 16–17, 26, 29, 56, 209, 217–218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 298,
57, 58, 106, 109, 119, 149, 178, 181–182, 193, 278, 315, 316, 317, 319, 320, 321
285, 288, 289, 320, 333, 345, 356; conversational internalization 118, 119, 121, 122
3, 12, 13–14, 15, 16–17, 19; cooperative 136; International Corpus of Learner English
digital interactions, affordances of 298, 300, (ICLE) 263
301, 304, 306; face-to-face 136, 137, 177, International Journal of Learner Corpus Research
204–205, 221, 302, 305; game-mediated 306; 164
human–machine 321; and identity construction Internet-Based Test of English as a Foreign Language
134; impact of mode of 298; interactional (TOEFL iBT) 80, 168
discourse 148–159, 355; interactional identities/ interpersonal function of language 52, 54
selves 135–136, 139; intercultural 313–314, interpersonal model of metadiscourse 256–257, 257
316, 317–320, 321; IRF (teacher initiation, interpersonal stance in L1 and L2 economics
student response, teacher feedback) interactional coursework writing 248–249
pattern 305; multimodal 19, 25–26, 28, 270, 299; interpretive repertoires 110, 175
multimodal interaction analysis 136–138; narrative- intersectionality 341, 343, 344, 346–347, 348;
in-interaction 42; narrative inquiry 43; quasi- see also identity(ies)
synchronous 298; repairs in 303; role in learning intersubjectivity 12, 13, 103, 107, 109, 150, 156, 217,
and text-construction process 26; social interaction 219, 223, 317–320, 355, 361
11, 15, 17–18, 66, 117, 118, 119, 120, 136, 137, interviews 14, 28, 31, 32, 41, 43, 66, 68, 69, 71,
138, 149, 208, 216–217, 218–219, 307, 355, 358, 106, 125, 167, 174, 175, 176, 177, 181, 203, 219,
359; as social phenomena 303; synchronous 297, 224–225, 232, 234, 235, 248, 276, 277, 286, 287,

374
 Index

288, 330, 331, 332, 333, 340, 344; group 58, 70, Kurhila, S. 15, 218, 219
94, 95, 125, 288; life history 346; semi-structured Kyle, K. 78, 83
94, 289; sociolinguistic approach 189
investment 188, 329, 346 Labov, W. 42, 188
Ishida, Midori 5 Lam, S. L. 163, 165, 168
Izumi, S. 238 Lan, G. 5, 82
Lancaster, Z. 248–249, 261
Jefferson, G. 12, 13, 14 langscaping 360
Jeffersonian transcription system 14, 106 language architect 332, 334
Jenks, Christopher 5, 301 language-behavior-tracking strategy 18
Jewitt, C. 26, 27, 29, 30 language socialization (LS) research 5, 52, 133,
Jiang, J. 83 179, 180, 200, 220, 274; distributed social
Jiang, K. 168 networks 206–208; face-to-face L2 learning
Jiang, L. 33 contexts 204–205; future directions for 209–210;
Johns, T. 168 implications for second language learning,
Johnson, K. E. 41, 45 teaching, and use 208–209; methods 202–204;
Johnson, N. F. 157 sample studies on 204–208; social identities
Johnson, S. 153 205–206; theoretical underpinnings of 200–202;
journals 3, 94, 203, 206, 340; see also see also socialization
autobiographical discourse languaging 127, 128, 204, 334
Joyce, H. 4 Lantolf, J. P. 39, 117, 124, 128, 141, 314
Jung, H. 111 Larsen-Freeman, D. 1, 147
Juvonen, P. 286 Larsson, T. 164, 245
Latinx immigrant students (identity study) 330
Kalaja, P. 110 Lave, J. 18, 202
Källkvist, M. 286 learner corpus research 164–165
Kant, I. 173 learner text analysis 233, 235
Kari-Aydar, H. 44 learning-behavior-tracking (LBT) 110
Kasper, G. 43, 45, 312 learning-object tracking (LOT) 18
Kayi-Aydar, H. 94 learning-process tracking (LPT) 18
Kearney, E. 42 learning-to-write approach 237
Kecskes, Istvan 6, 321, 322 Lee, H. 205
Kellogg, G. 328 Lee, J. 262
Kendon, A. 137 Lee, J. S. 329
Kendrick, M. 25 Lee, N. 154
Kessler, M. 238 legitimate peripheral participation 18
Khawaja, M. 90 Lemke, J. L. 26, 92
Khodabakhshzade, H. 264 Leonet, O. 97
Kim, J. 123–125, 124–125 Lesonen, S. 148
Kim, Y. 33, 235 let it pass procedure 14–15
Kimura, Daisuke 6 lexical bundles 244, 247, 249, 250
King, B. W. 346 lexicogrammatical analysis 67–68, 71, 82
Kobayashi, E. 204 lexis 18, 56, 57, 79, 81, 167, 201, 205, 218, 225, 235,
Kobayashi, M. 204 262, 263, 317
Koschmann, T. 18 Li, C. 262
kotatsu socialization 207 Li, W. 90
Kotilainen, L. 218 Liddicoat, Anthony J. 6, 303, 345
Kouritzin, S. 90 Liebscher, G. 289
Koven, M. 42, 43 life histories 40–41, 43, 346
Kraft, K. 192 Lilja, N. S. 304
Kramsch, C. 19, 110, 179, 216, 305 Lillis, T. 69, 184
Kramsch, J. C. 1 Lim, J. 33, 238
Kress, G. 25, 27 Lin, Angel M. Y. 5, 90, 91, 92, 96–97
Kubota, K. 291 lingua franca communication 313, 318, 321, 322, 323
Kubota, R. 46, 93, 94, 96, 234 linguistic competence 178, 180, 215, 223, 225, 345,
Kulick, D. 342 354, 355, 356

375
 Index

linguistic interdependence hypothesis 284 measurement: grammatical complexity 76, 77, 78,
linguistic repertoire 90, 97, 200, 202, 205, 208, 284, 79–80, 81, 82, 83–84; language development 158,
323, 330, 334, 339, 360, 361 205; lexical diversity 167; syntactic complexity 59
linguistic resources 5, 40, 54, 56, 58, 70, 73, 147, media 26, 27, 231; digital 25, 106; social media 33,
149, 188, 216, 217, 238, 288, 289 45, 46, 73, 330, 333, 334
literacy 120, 231, 243, 288; digital 31; disciplinary mediation 55, 119, 219–220, 223–224, 314
51, 53, 56–59, 60 medium 27, 45, 298, 300, 315, 329
located discourses 328 Mehan, H. 272, 355
Loewen, S. 302 Meier, G. 291
Long, M. H. 1, 218, 271, 299 Menard-Warwick, J. 41, 45, 206, 329, 331, 346
longitudinal research 18–19, 57, 69, 80–81, 108, meso approach 208, 284
148, 149, 166–168, 174, 189, 190, 218, 220, 222, metadiscourse 5, 165, 166, 255; approaches to
238, 247–248, 249, 260, 278, 289, 306, 312, researching 256; benchmarking of ESL learners’
331, 360 use patterns of 263; cross-sectional studies and
Lønsmann, D. 192 260–261; definition and meaning of 255–256;
Lorés-Sanz, R. 244 developmental changes in academic writers’ use
Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays of 260; future directions for 266–267; implications
(LOCNESS) 263 for second language learning, teaching, and use
Lowie, W. 158 264–266; instruction, effect on second language
Lu, X. 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 238, 306 acquisition 258–260; interpersonal model of 256–
Lüdi, G. 319 257; longitudinal studies and 260; patterns, use
Lundgren, B. 288 at language proficiency and performance levels
261–263; research methods in 257–258; role in
McCabe, A. 58 second language acquisition 264; sample studies
McCarthy, M. J. 4, 163 in 258–264
McConachy, T. 322 metafunctions of language 52–53
McDonough, K. 223 metalanguage 34, 55, 57–58, 60
McElhinny, B. 346 metapragmatics 358–359
MacIntyre, P. 139 methodography 113–114
McKay, S. L. 328 methodology 34; classroom discourse 271–272,
Mackey, A. 223 278; competence 357–359; conversation analysis
McNamara, T. F. 328 11–14, 17–19; critical perspectives 93–96;
Macnaught, L. 56, 57 discursive psychology 113; ethnography 173–184;
macro approach 208, 284 genre research 67–69; identity 331; intercultural
macro-Discourses 94 pragmatics 320–321; multilingual discourse
Makoni, S. 349 287, 288; multimodal discourse analysis 24–34;
Malinowski, B. 174 narrative inquiry 38–47; spoken discourse 220–
Malinowski, D. 305 224; technology-mediated L2 research 299–301,
Maltz, D. N. 341 302, 304; written discourse 231–233, 234, 235,
Manchón, R. M. 33, 238, 251 236
Māori identity 328 Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English
Māori puna reo 194 (MICASE) 261
Markee, N. 18, 110, 274 Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers
Markkanen, R. 263 (MICUSP) 245, 252
Marshall, S. 289 microanalysis 17–18, 43, 113, 177, 182, 208, 218,
Martin, J. R. 54, 65 221–222, 223–224, 359
Marxist and neo-Marxist perspectives 177 micro approach 208, 284
masculinity 344, 346, 347; see also gender microethnography 177
Masuda, K. 125–127, 126 microgenesis 119
materiality 46, 178 migration/migrants 44, 96, 192, 201, 205, 284, 285,
Matsuda, P. K. 230 289, 339, 346, 361
Matsuoka, R. 314 Milani, Tommaso 6, 339
Mauranen, A. 261 Miles, M. B. 203
May, S. 93 Miller, C. 65
Maybin, J. 178 Miller, Elizabeth R. 6, 43
meaning-making 51, 52, 54, 55, 60, 92, 147, 189, Miller, J. H. 156
305, 327, 328, 332, 340 Mills, S. 3

376
 Index

Milton, J. 263 multimodal texts 3, 25–26, 27, 28, 29, 32, 33, 41, 45,
Mishler, E. G. 44, 47 52, 55, 238
Mitchell, T. F. 2 Murakami, A. 166
mixed-methods research 204, 205, 209, 232, 236, Musgrave, J. 79, 167, 168
238, 262, 276, 278, 286, 287, 290 Mustajoki, A. 322
Mkhize, D. 288
mobile interaction and learning 304, 307 Nakagawa, S. 90
mode 25, 27, 30, 31, 32, 52, 54, 55–56, 57, 58, 302 Nakahama, Y. 221
Modern Language Journal, The 271 narrative(s) 38, 39, 59, 79, 81, 83, 205–206, 217,
Mondada, L. 306 221, 289, 331; canonical 42; constructionist
monolingualism 288, 290, 330 framework 43; definition of 40; emancipatory
Moore, A. 347 potential of 40; as a form of data 39; as a
Moore, D. 289 mediation tool 41; as a research paradigm 39;
Moore, E. 203 sense-making function of 39, 42, 44; temporal
Moreton, E. 164 and spatial dimensions of 44; understandings
morpheme acquisition order studies, of 40
importance of 215 narrative inquiry 3, 5, 38–40, 47, 94;
Motha, S. 46, 91, 96 autobiographical narratives and life histories
moves analysis 67, 71, 232 40–41; canonical narratives 42; context 43;
multicompetence 180, 225; see also competence grand narratives 41–42; implications for second
multidimensional analysis (MDA) 81–82, 84, language learning, teaching, and use 44–45;
168, 238 narrated event 43; narrating event 43; narrative-in-
Multidimensional Analysis Tagger (MAT) 78 interaction 42; new/future directions for 45–46
multilingual discourse 283; emergence of 283–284; narrative knowledging 38, 45
future directions for 290–291; implications for native speakers 94, 164, 284, 285, 344;
second language learning, teaching, and use 290– benchmarking ESL learners’ metadiscourse use
291; key concepts in 285–286; research methods patterns against 263; and colonial discourse 91;
in 286–288; sample studies in 288–290 and deficit discourse 95–96; didactic voice of 303;
multilingualism 6, 40–41, 42, 46, 52, 72, 187, 188, and “not sure” approach 317, 318, 319; repair by
239, 283, 307, 330, 347; and choices 53; and 15; spoken discourse of 221, 222
colonial discourse 91; conversation analysis 15, needs analysis 55
17; and disciplinary discourse 56, 57; in homes negotiation of meaning 218, 256, 299–300, 301, 302,
190–191; multilingual identity 44, 208, 288, 330; 305, 323
and translanguaging 205, 278, 285; in workplaces neoliberal discourse 92–93, 98
191–193 Nesi, H. 244, 250
multilingual turn 180, 284 Newman, F. 117, 128
multimodal analysis 26, 106, 204–205, 210, 304, new rhetoric (NR) 231, 232
307, 320 next-turn proof procedure 358
Multimodal Analysis Image 29 Nguyen, H. T. 19, 328, 329
Multimodal Analysis Video 29 Nguyen, M. X. N. C. 302–303
multimodal communication 24, 25, 32, 33, 34, 106 Nikula, Tarja 6
multimodal digital literacies 31 Nini, A. 78
multimodal discourse analysis 3, 5, 24–26, 106; Nishino, T. 134, 231
data collection 28; data processing and analysis Nofal, M. 191
29–30; digital video projects of students 31; future Nolan, B. 321
directions 34; implications for second language nominalization 53, 56, 59
learning, teaching, and use 32–33; key concepts in non-native speakers 15, 32, 263, 266; and deficit
26–28; lack of systematic approach to 34; semiotic discourse 93, 95–96; interlanguage pragmatics
remediation 32; visual discourse in scientific 312; and “not sure” approach 317–318, 319
conference papers 30–31 Norton, B. 188, 327, 328, 331, 344, 346
multimodal ensembles 27, 29–30, 31, 32 Norton Peirce, B. 40
multimodal environment 73 “not sure” approach 317–318, 319, 320
multimodal genres 73 Nunan, D. 41
multimodal interaction analysis (MMIA) 136–138 Nuttall, Chris 5
multimodal interactions 19, 270, 299
multimodality 14, 25, 26, 27, 28, 33, 34, 64, 135, objective construal 125, 126
137, 138, 141, 142, 205, 209, 277, 298–299, 305 objectivity 45, 46, 68, 83, 112–133

377
 Index

observation(s) 28, 56, 69, 70, 108, 109, 176, 202, perceived invasiveness 183
216, 232, 271, 287; checklists 272; of discourse perezhivanie 129; see also sociocultural theory (SCT)
203–204; ethnographic 14, 68, 174, 175, Pérez-Llantada, C. 244, 249, 250
176, 177, 178, 181, 189, 276; indirect vs. performance 76, 123, 147, 258; and grammatical
direct 203 complexity 81–83, 84–85; levels, patterns of use
obuchenie 120, 128; see also sociocultural theory of metadiscourse at different 261–263
(SCT) performativity 3, 341, 342, 343–345
Ochs, E. 44, 132, 133 phrases 67, 79; complexity 78, 79, 80, 83, 84, 167,
O’Halloran, K. L. 26 247; phrasal modifiers 79, 82, 249
Ohta, Amy Snyder 5, 125–127, 126, 220, 224 Phung, H. 302
Okada, Hanako 5, 134 Piaget, J. 118
O’Keeffe, A. 168 Piirainen-Marsh, A. 302, 306
Olshtain, E. 4 Piller, I. 340, 343, 347
“one country/nation, one language” model 89 Pitkänen-Huhta, Anne 6
online classroom-based discourse 328–329 place discourse communities 68
online contexts 183, 301, 302, 303, 307, 330, 334 plurilingual competence 286, 289; see also
online discourse 301–302, 306, 333; and face- competence; multilingualism
to-face discourse, differences between 303; as plurilingualism 225, 286, 289; see also
intercultural communication 304; and online multilingualism
multiplayer video games 302; other-initiated Poehner, M. 141
other-repair 303; other-initiated self-repair Polanyi, L. 343, 344
303; patterns of interaction in modalities 302; Polat, N. 80
smartphone usage 304 Polio, C. 33, 80, 81, 84, 231, 233, 238
online second language acquisition as discourse Pomerantz, Anne 5, 41, 42
302–304 positionality 38, 44, 45, 93, 94
on-screen interactions 306, 307 positioning 43, 44, 303, 331
ontology 88, 147, 215, 237, 251 postmodernism 179, 341
open choice principle 323 post-structural perspectives 3, 4, 178, 179, 193, 220,
open-ended questionnaires/surveys 93–94 224, 327, 328
open network program 208 Potter, J. 102, 103, 104, 110
oral discourse 195, 229, 302, 328 Potts, D. 25
Ortega, L. 1, 46, 76, 77, 113, 251, 290, 340, power relations 51, 53, 68, 94, 95, 98, 113, 328,
344, 349 331, 334, 344; and critical action research 95;
Ossa Parra, M. 56 and discourse 3–4; and identity 327; and second
Oteíza, T. 58 language learning/teaching 88, 89, 90
Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary 164 pragmatic competence 216, 222, 249, 311, 312,
313, 323
Page, S. E. 156 pragmatics 90, 125, 249, 300, 301, 302; corpus 322;
Paiz, J. M. 347–348 cross-cultural 311–312, 313; interlanguage 216,
Paltridge, Brian 68 311, 312, 313; metapragmatics 358–359; see also
Park, E. S. 205 intercultural pragmatics
Parkinson, J. 79, 167, 168 praxis 55, 60, 116, 119, 120, 121, 122
Parks, S. 70 pre-assembled chunks 356
Pavlenko, A. 39, 40, 45, 340, 343, 344 preference organization 13
Pearson International Corpus of Academic English presentation of self 136, 138
(PICAE) 163–164 pre-test/post-test design 33, 123, 222–223
pedagogy 16, 141, 193; digital multimodal primed production 223
composing 26, 33–34; genre-based 66, 71–72, Prior, Matthew T. 5, 32, 43, 45, 114
250; multilingual 286, 287, 291; and neoliberal Prior, P. 26, 28
discourse 93; and research, relationship between prior experiences of communication 313, 315–321,
363; second language writing 231, 237; teaching 323n5
and learning cycle (TLC) 54–55, 56, 57, 72; private speech 118, 119, 128; see also inner speech
translanguaging 88, 97, 98, 193, 194, 286, 291; proficiency 19, 59, 79, 80, 92, 93, 96, 123, 164, 166,
see also teaching 181, 216, 246–247, 261–263, 265, 287, 343–344,
Pekarek Doehler, S. 15, 18, 217, 222, 223 346, 361
Pellettieri, J. 300 prosody 12, 104, 106, 123, 152, 176, 188, 195,
Pennycook, A. 334–335, 349 300, 356

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psychological perspectives 105, 118; discursive research–practice divide in ethnographic

psychology 5, 102–114; psycholinguistics 230, perspectives 182
272, 273–274 Research Writing Tutor (RWT) 236, 237
respecification 102, 105, 110, 111–112, 113
qualitative discourse analysis 233 retrospective/introspective analysis 233
qualitative research 29, 30, 31, 38, 57, 58, 59, 174, Révész, A. 238
180, 188, 189, 204, 205, 232, 233, 235, 236, Revis, M. S. 190
238, 259, 261, 262, 271, 286, 287, 288, 290, rhetoric 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 103, 106, 230, 232,
322, 331 234, 237, 243, 244, 245, 246, 267
Quan, T. 41, 206, 329 rhetorical genre studies (RGS) 231
quantitative research 28, 29, 30, 57, 59, 123, 188, rhetorical hooks 31
205, 221, 223, 232, 233, 235, 236, 258, 259, 260, rhetorical moves 3, 67, 72, 73
286, 288, 290 rhetorical structuring of texts 245, 246
quasi-experimental research 31, 220, 235, 258, 259, Richardson, D. 345
264, 265 Ro, E. 111
quasi-synchronous interaction 298 Roberts, C. 178
queer identity 329 robotics, impact of 307
queer theory 342–343, 345 Roever, C. 222
questionnaires 93–94, 287, 331 Römer, U. 81, 168
Rosa, H. 56
race and ethnicity 3, 46, 89, 91, 92, 94, 96, 177, 181, Rosa, J. 46, 92
207, 267, 328, 329, 332, 346, 347, 349 Rosén, J. 288
raciolinguistic ideologies 46, 60, 332 Rouhshad, A. 302
raciolinguistic perspectives 46 Routarinne, S. 204
Raffone, A. 306 Rowley-Jolivet, E. 30–31
Rampton, B. 178, 340, 341 Russell, D. H. 65
Rankin, T. 164 Ryshina-Pankova, M. 261
recasts 223
recipient design 357 Sacks, H. 12, 13, 175
reciprocal causality 363 Sagre Barboza, Anamaría 5
reciprocal determinism 315 Salanoa, Honiara 5
recordings (audio/video) 3, 14, 29–30, 32, 106, Saldaña, J. 203
111, 119, 175, 177, 181, 183, 190, 191, 202, 203, salient knowledge/information 312, 315, 316, 317,
221, 222, 223, 224, 232, 276, 287, 288, 332, 318, 321
358, 359 Samraj, B. 67
recurrent restorying 45; see also narrative(s) sarcasm 123–125, 124–125
reflexive model of metadiscourse 266 Sauer, L. 205
reflexivity 12, 16, 44, 94, 174, 256 scaffolding 56, 117, 128, 235, 236, 237, 275, 298;
Regan, V. 216 see also sociocultural theory (SCT)
register 31, 54, 55, 56, 77, 78, 81–82, 84–85, 167, Schauer, G. 322
245, 315; see also field Schegloff, E. A. 12, 13, 18, 300
relevance in communication 316, 321, 322 schema 3, 54, 146
repair 13, 15, 150, 158, 218–219, 298, 299, 300, 321; Schieffelin, B. 133
other-initiated other-repair 13, 303; other-initiated Schiftner, B. 164
self-repair 13, 303; other-repair 13, 15, 158, Schissel, J. L. 95
303; self-initiated other-repair 13; self-initiated Schleppegrell, M. J. 54, 58, 59
self-repair 13; self-repair 13, 150, 158, 219, 303; Schmidt, R. W. 216, 218
see also conversation analysis (CA); discursive Schröder, U. 322
psychology (DP) Schumann, F. E. 39
repertoires 2, 90, 113, 205; cultural 90, 205, 208, Schumann, J. H. 39, 139
209; genre 73; interpretive 110, 175; linguistic 90, scientific conference papers, visual discourse in 30–31
97, 200, 202, 205, 208, 284, 323, 330, 334, 339, SCOBAs (Schema of Complete Orienting Basis of
360, 361; semiotic 52, 53, 90, 96, 104, 106, 113, Action) 121–123, 122, 124, 125
209, 225 Seals, C. A. 190, 191, 196n2
replication 98, 274, 301 Seals, Corinne 5
Reppen, R. 82 Second Language Syntactic Complexity Analyzer
research group meetings (RGMs) 361 (L2SCA) 78

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second language writing 33, 59, 76, 166, 210, 229, socially responsive translanguaging 193
243–244; disciplinary discourse 245–252; and social media 33, 45, 46, 73, 330, 333, 334
genre 66, 69–70, 72; grammatical complexity 77, social network analysis (SNA) 206–208
78–81, 82, 84; metadiscourse 258–259; noun phrase social networks 202, 209–210
complexity in 167; quality, and L2 performance 83; social turn 11, 14, 175, 179, 180, 284
research, methods/foci in 233; syntactic complexity societal discourse 98, 328, 330, 334
in 167; see also written discourse society 89, 94, 96, 98, 175, 187, 188, 190–191, 195,
second pair part (SPP) 12, 13; see also adjacency 196, 289, 357
pairs sociocognitive approach (SCA) 45, 132, 147, 231,
Seedhouse, Paul 5, 16, 147, 157 313, 314, 320, 321; affective affiliation SLA/T
Seidlhofer, B. 364 139; alignment 134–135, 138, 139; basic theory
Seltzer, K. 332, 334 underlying 134; blending 316–317; focus on
semantics 12, 110, 154, 262 speaker and hearer 315; future directions 141–142;
semiotic remediation 26, 28, 32 genre 66; history of 132–134; implications for
semiotic repertoires 52, 53, 90, 96, 104, 106, 113, SLA, teaching, and use 140–141; individual and
209, 225 social traits 316; learning as “we-processes”
semiotic resources 12, 25, 26, 27, 29, 32, 52, 65, 73, 135, 139–140; presentation and development of
92, 97, 113, 147, 210, 362 interactional identities/selves 135–136, 138, 139;
sequence organization 12–13; see also conversation research advice for intercultural pragmatics 320–
analysis (CA); discursive psychology (DP) 321; research methods and approaches in 136–
Sert, Olcay 5, 16, 301 138; underspecification, view of 315–317; views
sexuality 3, 6, 329, 339–341, 349n1; Butlerian in SLA and intercultural pragmatics 314–315
theoretical approaches to 341–343; and desire sociocognitive theory 132, 134, 135–136
347; future directions 348–349; heteronormativity sociocultural approach 52; to classroom discourse
339, 345; implication for teaching 347–348; and 274–275; research characteristics of 274; written
intersectionality 346; queer empowerment 346; discourse 230–231
see also gender sociocultural theory (SCT) 5, 116–119, 188, 231,
SFL APPRAISAL system 246, 248 243, 272, 314, 315; cognitive development and
shared meaning 321 219–220; concept-based language instruction
Sheldon, E. 246 120, 121–123, 122; descriptive studies 119–120;
Shima, C. 206, 220, 224, 225 dialectical transformation of SLA terminological
Shirvan, M. E. 264 thought 128; discourse approaches 119–123;
Shultz, J. 177 dynamic assessment 120, 121; feedback and
Shvidko, E. 141 mediation and 223–224; future directions 129;
Siegel, Aki 5, 149, 153, 155, 158 implications for second language learning,
Siffrinn, Nicole 5 teaching, and use 127–129; language-as-tool
Simon-Maeda, A. 41 117; praxis 120, 121; teaching detection and
Sinclair, J. 272, 323 understanding of sarcasm in English 123–125,
single-discipline studies 246 124–125; teaching Japanese conceptually
situated learning 18, 220 125–127, 126
small stories research 42, 46; see also narrative(s) sociolinguistic competence 216, 355
Smith, B. 300 sociolinguistics 5, 42, 187–188, 284, 346; future
Snapchat 298 directions for 196; implications for second
social attachment 142 language learning, teaching, and use
social construction 4, 41, 178, 202, 221–222, 243, 195–196; interactional 189, 190, 192,
313, 333; of identity 3; views on interactional 358–359, 361; language classrooms 193–195;
competence 216–217 multilingual homes 190–191; multilingual
social constructivism 4, 94 workplaces 191–193; research methods in 188–
social identities 42, 205–206, 303, 328, 329, 340, 341 189; sample studies 190–195
social identity theory 188, 328 sociolinguistic variation 188
social interaction 11, 15, 17–18, 66, 117, 118, 119, software 29, 31, 163, 196, 298, 299, 301, 304, 305, 306
120, 136, 137, 138, 149, 208, 216–217, 218–219, Sommer-Farias, B. 72
307, 355, 358, 359; see also interaction(s) spatiality 44, 45, 361
socialization 260–261; academic discourse 210; speaker and hearer, focusing in sociocognitive
kotatsu 207; meaning and significance of 201; vs. approach 315
second language acquisition 202; speech acts 135, 311, 312, 329, 346, 356
see also language socialization (LS) research speech community 158, 313, 317, 322, 323n3, 354, 357

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speech events 113, 176, 183, 216, 357–358 Talmy, S. 43, 114, 177, 202
Spiessens, A. 322 Tardy, Christine M. 5, 69
split adjacency 303 target language 88, 97, 284, 285
Spoelman, M. 80 target test analysis 233
spoken discourse 3, 5, 67, 119, 215, 298–299; Tarone, E. 64
disciplinary discourse 252; ethnographic Taylor, D. S. 353, 355
studies 224; experimental research 220–221, Taylor, S. 175
222–223; future directions for L2 research on 225; teaching 2, 4, 46, 89, 92, 95, 118, 193; asset
methodological and analytical approaches in L2 model of 96–97; and colonial discourse 91;
studies of 220–224; microanalytic studies 221– communicative language teaching 193; and
222, 223–224; research implications for teaching competence 362–364; and complex dynamic
and assessment 224–225; studies, as site for L2 systems theory 158; and corpus approaches
learning 217–220; studies, for L2 competence and 162, 163, 164, 168; and critical perspectives
development 215–217 97; and DDL 168; and deficit discourse 96;
stance 168, 246, 259–260 detection and understanding of sarcasm in
Stanley, P. 94 English 123–125, 124–125; disciplinary discourse
Staples, S. 82, 246 250–251; discursive approach to 195; and gender/
Steffensen, M. S. 258, 259, 261, 263 sexuality 339, 347–348; genre-based 71–72; and
Storch, N. 236, 302 grammatical complexity 83–84; and identity 334;
stories 38, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 127; see also as an integrated phenomena 141; and intercultural
narrative(s) pragmatics 322; Japanese 125–127, 126; language
storytelling 43, 44, 45, 94, 217, 222, 306; see also socialization and 208–209; metadiscourse 258,
narrative(s) 259, 264–266; multilingual discourse 290–291;
Street, B. 331 multimodal discourse analysis for 33, 34; and
structuralist approaches 97, 361, 363 narrative inquiry 44–45; and neoliberal discourse
structured critical reflection 206 92, 93; obuchenie 120, 128; and power 89; role of
subjective construal 125, 126 emotions in 141; second language writing 237–
subjectivity 173, 348, 358 238; and SFL 60; and sociocognitive perspectives
subject positions 91, 340, 343, 344–345 140–141; and sociocultural theory 127–129; and
surveys 93–94, 106, 232 sociolinguistics 195–196; spoken discourse 224–
sustainable translanguaging 193 225; and technology-mediated discourse 306–307;
Suzuki, S. 301 translingual 193–194; see also pedagogy
Swain, M. 4, 179, 355, 357 teaching and learning cycle (TLC) 54–55, 56, 57, 72
Swales, John 64–65, 67, 68, 245, 246 teaching English to speakers of other languages
SWEAR framework 17 (TESOL) 79, 289
symbolic convergence theory 41 technology 14, 19, 46, 73, 89, 106, 192, 277, 297
synchronous interaction 297, 298, 302 technology-mediated discourse 6, 297; and CA-
syntax 59, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83–84, 167, 223, for-SLA research 300–301; of children 307; and
235, 237, 244, 262; see also grammar feedback 302–303; future directions 307; impact
systemic functional linguistics (SFL) 5, 29, 51–52, 165, of physical distance on 298; implications for
166, 195, 231, 232, 237, 238, 248; appraisal analysis second language learning, teaching, and use 306–
165; conception of grammar 52; development of 307; and learners with a disability 307; and mobile
appliable linguistics 55–59; future directions 60; devices 298; and multilingualism 307; multimodal
genre 54, 65; implications for second language 298–299, 305; online discourse 301–302; online
learning, teaching, and use 60; metafunctions of second language acquisition as discourse 302–
language 52–53; register 54; teaching and learning 304; sample studies in 304–306; target language,
cycle (TLC) 54–55, 56, 57, 72; text/context appropriate versus accurate use of 300, 303; and
dynamics 52, 53, 53; theme systems 165–166; turn-taking 298, 305
theoretical underpinnings and key constructs of Te Huia, A. 328
52–55 telecollaboration 224
systemic-theoretic instruction (STI) 121–122 temporality 44
tenor 52, 54, 57, 58
Taguchi, N. 83 testing and assessment 17, 97, 119, 122, 216, 220,
Tainio, L. 302, 306 239; dynamic assessment 120, 121; implications
Tajfel, H. 328 of spoken discourse research for 224–225;
Takahashi, K. 347 Internet-Based Test of English as a Foreign
talk around text 69 Language (TOEFL iBT) 80, 168; metadiscourse

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259, 260, 262, 263, 264; proficiency tests 79, Tse, P. 262
287, 343–344; translanguaging approaches to 95; Tudini, Vincenza 6, 303, 305
writing quality 83; written discourse 235, 236 T-units 81, 83, 235
text(s) 24, 148, 230; disciplinary 56–57, 58–59, 244, turn-constructional units (TCUs) 12
245, 250; discourse structure of 2, 3; genre 65, turn-taking 12, 103, 109, 133, 298, 301, 305,
66, 70, 72; lexicogrammatical analysis 67–68, 358, 360; see also conversation analysis (CA);
71; metadiscourse 256, 257, 264, 265–266; discursive psychology (DP)
metafunctions of language 52–53; multimodal type-token ratios (TTR) 167
3, 25–26, 27, 28, 29, 32, 33, 41, 45, 52, 55, 238;
organizational structure of 3; register variables UAM Corpus Tool 165, 260
54; rhetorical moves of 3, 66, 72, 73; rhetorical undergraduate disciplinary writing 251–252
structuring of 245, 246; role of multimodal texts underspecification of speaker meaning 315
and interactions in text-construction process 26, unmotivated looking 107, 222, 358; see also
32; schematic structure of 3; talk around text 69; conversation analysis (CA); discursive psychology
text/context dynamics 53, 53, 54, 59; text/image (DP); ethnomethodology
ensembles 29; text/image interactions 28, 31; see Unsworth, L. 28
also corpus approaches; written discourse usage-based perspectives 121, 122, 125, 147, 218, 225
text analysis 30, 55, 68, 69, 70, 232, 233, 234, 235, utterances 13, 14–15, 16, 104, 154, 158, 204, 302,
238, 239, 258 315, 317, 319, 321
text chat 298–300; and emoticons 300–301;
pragmatic repairs in 300 Van Compernolle, R. A. 147–148
textography 68 Vande Kopple, W. J. 255, 256, 262, 263, 264
textual function of language 52–53, 54 van Dijk, T. 2
textually-oriented discourse analysis 2, 244–245 Vandommele, G. 33
textual transformation 28 Vanek, J. 333
Thibault, P. J. 29 Van Lier, L. 147, 180, 204
third language acquisition 287 variability 65, 78, 81–82, 148, 356
Thompson, G. 259 Vazquez-Calvo, B. 330–331
Thornbury, S. 4 Verspoor, M. 80, 158
Thorne, S. L. 306 vertical structures 217
Thurrell, S. 356 video(s): of classroom interactions 29–30, 58, 119,
Ticheloven, A. 291 181, 276, 277, 278, 287; digital video projects 31;
Toohey, K. 334 ensembles 29; scientific conference papers 30–31
tool-and-results thinking 117, 118, 128–129 video chat: and feedback 303; multiparty 301; and
Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Syntactic real-time voice 298
Sophistication and Complexity (TAASSC) 78 video-conferencing 305, 307; communication
Tracy-Ventura, N. 163 difficulties 305; limited access to body language in
transcriptions 167, 175, 278; audio/video recordings 305; and participant’s voices 305; teacher–student
221, 223, 332, 358; classroom transcripts 55, 56, interactions 305
57; descriptive studies 119; discursive psychology video-game interactions 298, 301, 304, 306, 307;
106–107, 108; Jeffersonian transcription system L2 speakers’ voice repetition of game characters’
14, 106; multimodal artefacts 29, 30, 31; written English utterances 302; in online multiplayer
discourse 236 games 302
transdisciplinarity 60, 114, 180, 284 video-mediated discourse 304–305
transformational generative grammar 353–354 video recordings 14, 29–30, 32, 106, 111, 119, 175,
transient project community 360 177, 181, 183, 202, 203, 221, 223, 224, 232, 276,
transition-relevance place (TRP) 12 287, 288, 359
transitions (metadiscourse) 166 vocabulary 109, 203, 262, 286, 317; see also lexis
translanguaging 90, 95, 97, 98, 193–194, 196, 196n2, vocalization of off-screen language 301
205, 225, 285–286, 287, 288, 289, 291, 305, 330; Von Esch, K. S. 46
socially responsive 193; sustainable 193; see also Vyatkina, N. 80, 81
bilingualism; multilingualism; translingualism Vygotsky, L. S. 54, 55, 117, 118, 119–120, 121, 127,
translanguaging pedagogies 88, 97, 98, 193, 194, 219, 231, 274, 314
286, 291
translingualism 193–194, 206, 330, 332, 334, 336, Wagner, J. 11, 15, 18, 19, 179, 216, 217, 219, 231,
361; see also translanguaging 284, 329, 356–357, 363
Trinity Lancaster Corpus 165–168 Wang, M. 247

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Waring, Z. 17 written corrective feedback (WCF) 235

Warriner, Doris 5, 44 written discourse 5, 82, 229–232, 238, 267,
Watson-Gegeo, K. A. 174, 180 302; definition of 230; future directions for
Weber, M. 173 238–239; grammatical complexity 76, 78–81,
Wellington Translanguaging Project 193 82; implications for second language learning,
Wenger, E. 18, 202 teaching, and use 237–238; research approaches
Wertsch, J. 120 and methods for 231–233; sample studies on
Wharton, S. 244 233–237; writer-oriented theoretical perspective
WhatsApp 298 230; see also second language writing
Whittaker, R. 58 Wu, Y. 92
Widdowson, H. G. 356
Wierzbicka, A. 312 Xu, X. 244, 250
Wiggins, S. 104
Wigglesworth, G. 236 Yamamoto, M. 5
Williams, J. 251 Yang, L. 329
Williams, J. M. 255 Yang, W. 83
Willis, P. 177 Yoon, H.-J. 79, 81
Wolcott, H. R. 331 Young, R. 356
Wolfe-Quintero, K. 76, 77
Wolff, D. 302 Zappa-Hollman, S. 207
Wong, S. L. C. 328 Zarrati, Z. 264
word search 13, 149–150, 151, 152, 154, 156, 157–158 Zhang, Y. 247
workplace discourse 191–192 Zheng, Yanmei 5
World of Warcraft (WOW) environments 306 Ziegler, N. 302
World War II 89 Zisselsberger, M. 56
Writing across the Curriculum (WAC) 243 zone of proximal development (ZPD) 118, 120, 121,
Writing in the Disciplines (WID) 243 128, 188, 219, 314; see also sociocultural theory
writing-to-learn approach 237 (SCT)

383