Types, resolutions, and gestures of language-related episodes : A corpus study of their relations in L2 interaction

Language-related episodes (LREs) open up important moments of meta-linguistic talk in L2 interaction for students to challenge, develop, and otherwise negotiate their knowledge of the target language (Edstrom, 2015; Leeser, 2004; Swain & Lapkin, 1998; Williams, 1999). Ohta (2001) observed that LREs occurred when students made mistakes or visibly struggled and showed how these critical moments sparked collaborative discourse between peers, who helped the struggling student by co-constructing, explaining, initiating repair, and providing repair (Ohta, 2001, p. 89). Williams (1999) found LREs based on negotiating problems with vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation, while Leeser (2004) observed the outcomes of LREs to be either “solved correctly…, left unresolved or abandoned…, (or) resolved incorrectly” (Leeser, 2004, pp. 65–66; Swain, 1998). Noting that the word ‘language’ in ‘language-related episodes’ has referred to only speech and writing in these studies, we have been analysing video recordings of L2 interaction multimodally and found that LRE-like moments can arise to negotiate embodied action, such as gestural depiction (Harrison, Adolphs, Gillon Dowens, Du, & Littlemore, 2018) and drawing (Stutzman, 2017). With the goal of developing this multimodal perspective on LREs, this paper reports the results of quantitative and qualitative analyses of 70 LREs identified in the Multimodal Corpus of Chinese Academic Written and Spoken English (Stevens, Chen, & Harrison, 2020). Adapting transcription systems for spoken language (Chen & Zhou, 2017) and gesture (Bressem, Ladewig, & Müller, 2013), each LRE has been transcribed, annotated, and analysed for speech and aspects of embodied interaction using the software ELAN. The findings will show the relations in the corpus between (a) types of LREs, (b) forms and functions of gestures, and (c) resolutions of LREs.