Rutas guardadas en la memoria

This section will discuss some distinctive characteristics of the word searches in terms of the sequential development, which will answer the third research question: Are there

any sequentially distinctive features in the learners’ word searches in EFL classrooms, compared to those in ordinary conversations?

Some distinctive features, in comparison with word searches in ordinary conversations, were found in the present data. They are discussed as follows.

(1) Most of the time the EFL learners were able to confirm whether the candidate word provided by other recipients was acceptable or not, suggesting the word might not be completely new to them. That is, although they could not produce it, they at least could recognize it to some extent. However, occasionally, they were unable to confirm whether the candidate word was acceptable or not as shown in extracts 13 and 14, suggesting they might not recognize the word at all or had very limited knowledge about it. Faced with this, the teachers always positioned themselves as language experts by paraphrasing the word to pursue the learners’ understanding of it. Instances like these are less likely to happen between NS/NS conversations and therefore it highlights the linguistic asymmetry between the participants at the particular moment.

(2) When the learners completed their own searches, unlike native speakers, they sometimes elicited a vocabulary check from the teacher in order to make sure their candidate solutions were correct or appropriate, as demonstrated by the examples analysed in section 4.4. Through this practice, they displayed their orientation to

101

themselves as language learners while positioning their teachers as language experts. A prototypical word search of this type is shown as follows:

a. Turn 1—Learner A initiates a word search/Leaner A provides a candidate word

b. Turn 2—Teacher confirms the candidate or gives an alternative

c. Turn 3—Learner A acknowledges the confirmed word or the alternative

A vocabulary check found in the data was typically done through producing the candidate solution with rising intonation. Lexical resources, such as “how can I say” or “can I say …?” were observed to be used only when the teacher’s response to their request of confirmation was ambiguous (i.e. by producing tokens such as mm or uhm-mm). This observation confirms Willey’s (2001) and Koshik and Seo’s (2012) findings. Koshik and Seo (2012, p.185) argue that when learners are pursuing confirmation of the accuracy of their utterance, and they receive an “uh huh” or similar response, they can initiate repair to “disambiguate” the import of that response. It is interesting to note that minimal response tokens such as “ uh huh”,” mm” or “uhm-mm”, despite their ambiguity as a response to the request of a vocabulary check, do not suggest any understanding problem on the part of the teacher. That is, the mutual understanding has not been shaken. Thus, the EFL learners’ explicit request for a vocabulary check following the teacher’s ambiguous response highlights their orientations to the language code at this particular moment. (3) In one of the instances in the data (extract 17), it was found that the teacher, faced

with the learners’ unsuccessful word search, did not provide the search-for-item in a way that L1 speakers commonly do in ordinary conversation. Rather, he withheld the searched-for-word and gave a pedagogical prompt to elicit a self/peer repair. By doing so, he transformed the learner-initiated word search into a teacher-initiated clueing sequence which is often observed in teacher- led classroom activities (c.f. McHoul 1990). Through this practice, the teacher invokes his identity of a language teacher at this moment.

(4) The EFL learners’ word searches in the data sometimes developed into explicit pedagogical discourse where the teachers and the learners were engaged in teaching and learning the search-for-word (see extracts 14, 15, 16, and 20), displaying their

102

orientation to their institutional roles as learners and teachers. These instances also show that a repair practice, i.e. word search, which is initiated for resolving

communication breakdown, can provide the teacher with an “interactionally- motivated opportunity” (Seo 2008, p.117) to give vocabulary instruction that suits the leaner’s linguistic needs. In other words, a word search resolution process can become an interactional resource which the teacher can use to detect the leaners’ lexical problem and to extract linguistic material for teaching. Or even the learners themselves can become aware of their lexical problem through the interaction and initiate a teaching and learning sequence on the searched-for-word as shown in extract 15. Teaching and learning vocabulary in a meaningful context has been highly recommended in recent years by SLA researchers (e.g. Doughty and William 1998; Long and Robinson 1998), and how to incorporate vocabulary teaching into more meaning-oriented interaction has been the main focus in research on teaching methodologies (see e.g. Larsen-Freeman 2000; Richards and Rodgers 2001). However, how exactly this can be achieved interactionally? A few examples presented in this study (see extracts 14, 15, 16 and 20) have shown, by means of transcripts of recorded naturally occurring classroom interaction, how a vocabulary item is extracted from the on-going course of action, i.e. word search, and becomes subject for explicit teaching and learning. Explicit pedagogical activities resulting from word searches were not reported in previous L2 word search studies in

ordinary conversations, but were observed to occur frequently in a study on repair in one-on-one ESL tutoring (Seo 2008). It seems that in a pedagogical setting where there exists an institution-specific goal of language learning and teaching, word searches are more likely to result in pedagogical activities.