The Achievement of Intersubjectivity through Embodied Completions: A Study of Interactions Between First and Second Language Speakers

This study examines casual interactions between first language (L1) and second language (L2) speakers of Japanese, paying special attention to the coordination of vocal and non-vocal resources that are brought to bear on the achievement of intersubjectivity. More specifically, this study investigates a practice of ‘embodied completion’ (Olsher 2004), namely the practice of deploying a partial turn of talk that offers a projectable trajectory of ongoing action and completing that action with a gesture or other embodied display. The participants’ conduct that precedes this embodied completion reveals the local processes used to evaluate, discover, and establish shared linguistic and non-linguistic resources in pursuing intersubjectivity. Further, the sequence of actions that follows the embodied completion provides an incidental, interactionally motivated opportunity for the L1 speaker to reformulate what the L2 speaker has said with a more sophisticated linguistic expression. Through the close analysis of two focal cases of embodied completion, which underscores the conversation analytic (CA) perspective of ‘competences as resources,’ this study explores the kinds of contributions that can be made by using CA’s explication of interactional details towards the understanding of language learning as it occurs in socially situated practices.