Talk about Language Use: ‘I know a little about your language’

Abstract

Intercultural conversations create opportunities for people to discover more about languages and cultures. One way this is accomplished is through discussions about how language works. Typically, research focuses on how these discussions happen in language classrooms. However, this study moves beyond classroom learner-learner interactions to examine conversational activities of Korean learners of Japanese, where the participants are engaging in informal social talk to teach and learn about language use. The methodology for this study utilizes Conversation Analysis (CA) which was first used to analyse talk among native speakers of a language. More recently, this methodology has been used in SLA research to investigate second language classroom talk (He 2004; Markee 2000; Mori 2004) or conversations for language learning (Kasper 2004). These previous studies focus on interactions where one or both of the speakers are learners of the language being spoken. This study differs in that it looks at how participants carry out moments for teaching and learning in a non-classroom setting. One study that uses CA to examine talk outside of the classroom is Wilkinson (2002), who found that American students on study abroad in France were ‘inappropriately’ using classroom talk in their conversations with native speakers.