Abstracts - Earli

Language drills as peer-group L2 “teaching”. On vocabulary training and identity work inimmersion classroomsAsta Cekaita, Linköping University, SwedenKarin Aronsson, Linköping University, SwedenWork on early second language (L2) classrooms tends to focus on teachers talk rather than onstudent talk. Our recordings of naturalistic classroom talk in a first grade classroom documentways in which the young children themselves recurrently initiated and engaged in spontaneouslanguage drills. The ethnography draws on video recordings of language lessons in a Swedishlanguage immersion group for recently arrived refugee and immigrant children. Through detailedsequential analyses of teacher- initiated vocabulary teaching routines, it is shown how languagedrills need not necessarily be "unauthentic" or mechanistic phenomena (for a related critique cfCook, 2001). Our recordings revealed that the children themselves often initiated language drills intheir spontaneous peer group interactions, drawing on them as social and affective resources.During teacher-initiated vocabulary training, the children recurrently tried to outperform eachother in being the first ones to display mastery of specific vocabulary items by calling out theirresponses. Positions in the classroom community were explicitly claimed in that the childrenrecurrently engaged in discourse about their respective grade levels and age. The presentinteractions were modelled on teacher-fronted self-presentation drills. Yet, the category claimswere partly subverted in that the children recurrently exploited joking formats. Simultaneously,such recyclings revealed the children’s understanding of the local norms of school culture. In linewith theorizing on language socialization practices, (e.g. Ochs, 1992), indexical use of languagefeatures stances and acts through which social activities and identities are co-construed. Thepresent data show ways in which peer play simultaneously involves L2 pragmatics and identitywork, more precisely the local construction of a classroom community.Second language learners’ out-of-frame talk in peer pretend playVeslerney Rydland, Oslo University, NorwayVibeke Aukrust, Oslo University, NorwayMuch research has pointed to the importance of out-of-frame negotiations in peer pretend play forpreschool children’s social, cognitive and literacy development. Few studies have, however,investigated the longitudinal relations between out-of-frame talk in preschool and children’s orallanguageskills when entering school, or the pragmatic language competencies second-languagelearning children have to draw upon to be involved in this planning and negotiating phase of play.In this study, a group of children, who had Turkish as their first language and Norwegian as theirsecond language, was followed for two years, from preschool to first grade, and videotaped in playwith peers. First, relations between out-of-frame talk in preschool and vocabulary skills in firstgrade were investigated. Second, the analysis focused on how children developed in regulatingtheir peers through addressing and opposing others in out-of-frame negotiations. The mainfindings indicate that out-of-frame talk in the preschool years explained variance in oral-languageskills in first grade, and that these second-language learners developed to increasingly address andoppose their peers over this two-year period.– 295 –