To Örebro University

Foreign language (FL) education has been marked by a monolingual principle that has favoured 'intralingual' methodologies. Bakhtin's view of language interillumination - that languages throw light on each other - challenges such language teaching practices radically. Using conversation analysis methods, this article examines transcripts of interactional sequences from one eighth-grade French lesson for evidence of reciprocal lexical elucidation. Analysis suggests that participants accomplish interillumination by constructing frameworks of corresponding sets of French and Swedish lexical items which support interlingual exploration and participant (re)orientation to the words in relation to each other. Understanding foreign and familiar words is enhanced by bilingual countering which enables students to fit an unknown or unclear utterance meaningfully into their semantic networks. Patterns of interlingual contact and coordination, indeed bilingual interaction, serve sense-making processes and challenge the privileging or the subordination of any one language in language learning.

This study examines classroom task instructions – an event commonly associated with noninteractional objectives and operations – as interactionally complex and co-crafted. Analyses of video sequences of task instructional activity from four different secondary school lessons seek to show that the management of task instructions is a distributed accomplishment, a locally sensitive order, arranged and sustained by its members. As sense-making projects, student questions routinely contribute to the work of orienting to tasks. Data show that instructors take remarkable care to meet both individual and collective accountabilities set up by student contributions in this environment. To achieve this objective, dual addressivity proves instructionally crucial. The study identifies two related senses in which task instructions are crafted collaboratively – sequentially and simultaneously. Educationally, it appears vital to recognize student instructed action as a condition for making task instructions followable and such in vivo work as integral to task-related learning.

The complexity of language (Chapman, 2006) and its pervasiveness in our everyday lives (Hanks, 1996) challenges the task of trying to grasp language analytically. One way to make some inroads into the complexity of language is to approach it through scientific theories and conceptual apparatus. As Chapman (2006) explains, a scientific theory only accounts for one part of an intricate subject matter, but, the narrowing of scientific focus to certain aspects of the complex allows scientists to “say something constructive and systematic about what is going on” (p. 13). In this text, I seek to gain some leverage on language as a complex natural phenomenon through the concept of languaging.