Learning in the contingency of talk-in-interaction

This article offers a critical examination of the recent initiative that considers developmental issues to be an important agenda in CA-based studies (Brouwer and Wagner 2004; Firth and Wagner 2007). This initiative seems to take a narrower view of learning than what natural interactional details in CA studies allow us to see. Spoken interactions are not always stable enough to demarcate the objects of learning for theoretical predictions or pedagogical prescriptions, particularly when seen in reference to contingent pragmatic actions enacted in discourse-in-interaction. The contingency of interaction has to be treated as central if we want to recover learning as the participants experience it. This paper proposes that if the contingency of interactional details is treated as being analytically central, CA research can still tell us very useful things about the phenomena of learning because it can recover the participants' contingent sense-making practices through which the task of learning is discovered, acted on, and realized. This point is demonstrated through a close analysis of two excerpts from English as Second Language (ESL) classroom interaction.