Collaborative Attention Work on Gender Agreement in Italian as a Foreign Language

• Published in: The Modern language journal (Boulder, Colo.) Colo.), 2018, Vol.102, p.64
• Main Author: Kunitz, Silvia
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Accuracy; Attention; Cognitive Processes; Collaborative Writing; College Students; Discourse Analysis; Form Classes (Languages); Interpersonal Communication; Italian; Psycholinguistics; Second Language Learning
• ISSN: 0026-7902
• DOI: 10.1111/modl.12458/full

In cognitivist Second Language Acquisition (SLA), attention and noticing are described as psycholinguistic processes that (may) have a role in language learning. The operationalization of such constructs, however, poses methodological challenges, since neither online nor off-line measures are coextensive with these cognitive processes that occur in the individual mind--brain. In contrast with such a perspective, the present conversation-analytic study re-specifies attention in social terms, as a nexus of publicly displayed actions that are jointly achieved by college level students of Italian as a foreign language as they engage in collaborative writing while planning for a group presentation to be performed in the second language (L2). More specifically, the article describes gender-focusing sequences that are initiated by attention-mobilizing turns with which a student directs her coparticipants' attention to an oral or written item that is oriented to as possibly inaccurate in terms of gender assignment. The study shows the agentive role of students in identifying learnables and solving language-related issues and provides an example of how participants do learning as a socially situated and collaborative activity by enacting immanent pedagogies (Lindwall & Lymer, 2005).