Language, Embodiment and the Material Ecology: Embodied and material resources for repairs in Second Language Interactions

Video-data is used increasingly widely in second language acquisition (SLA) research – in experimental settings (Gullberg, 2011; Stam, 2015) and beyond (Eskildsen & Wagner 2015; Greer, 2018; Majlesi & Markee, 2018). Consequently, it is becoming crucial to understand in-depth how embodied conduct – gesture, posture, gaze – and material artefacts interweave with second language talk and learning in-situ and over time. We discuss how interactional analyses contribute to this understanding and deals methodologically with the complexities of video-data. Our methodological starting point comes from the tradition of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis: we take a participant-relevant perspective to our data and work on the basis of observations in the data, often found in an umotivated manner (see e.g. Maynard, 2013 for an overview of these methodological considerations). We build on our previous work on gesture-talk ensembles (e.g., Eskildsen & Wagner, 2015) but we expand the analyses of some of the same pieces of data to include not only such ensembles, but a range of gestural and materially coupled bodily actions. This reveals highly complex processes of instructing, explaining, repairing and achieveing intersubjectivity in which we find increased enviromental richness in the participants' embodied conduct as the repair work unfolds. Using data from an ESL classroom, we will take the reader through careful interactional analyses on the basis of which we discuss methodological implications, including issues of coding and tagging, but we will also discuss the epistemological and phenomenological implications in terms of how to categorize different kinds of embodied work and what interests such categorization serves. This discussion will highlight how our approach contributes to the field's understanding of the complexities of embodied L2 interaction in the material ecology (of the classroom).