Making sense of interactional trouble through mobile-supported sharing activities

By using multimodal conversation analysis, this paper analyses L2 learners' sharing activities that are supported by mobile phones and self-made video recordings. In these activities, the learners focus on moments of interactional trouble they have experienced in service encounters outside the classroom. The analytic focus is on interactional methods by which the learners first identify a moment of interactional trouble and then scrutinize why that moment took place and how it unfolded.

The analysis is based on two data sets that originate from experientially based pedagogical activities that aimed to support L2 users' participation in and learning from interactions in the wild. The students first prepared for service encounters outside the classroom and then participated in such encounters and video-recorded them with their own mobile devices. Back in the classroom, they discussed their experiences. The complementary data sets for this paper include recordings of 1) the actual service encounters; and of 2) the retrospective classroom discussions in which the students watched the self-recorded videos and reflected on their interactions 'in the wild'.

The analysis demonstrates that the situated use of self-made video-recordings creates affordances for joint activity through which the participants share access to details of their prior interactions and establish these as the focus of learning activity. The findings provide new understanding on how language learners reflect on their past interactions with the help of a video-recording, and give insights into the value of using complementary data-sets in conversation analytical investigations of second language learning.