Bilingual practices and the social organisation of video gaming activities

Grounded in the interactional paradigm for the study of bilingual language use, this paper investigates how players engaged in a collaborative game-playing activity orient to the co-presence of two languages in the setting and deploy bilingual resources in organising their action and participation. The analysis aims to demonstrate how a particular kind of 'bilingual order' (Cromdal, 2005) is co-constructed in which the players use their native language (Finnish) for interaction with each other, but systematically draw on the language of the game in constructing their turns as recognisable and building their alignments with respect to activities under way. The analysis highlights how a bilingual gaming activity is organised through the participants' emergent orientations to interactional objects, which include English text and talk, in their own actions. The interaction unfolds through a bilingual medium as the players attend to locally available language resources in co-constructing the sense of particular scenes and events. Code-switching emerges as a key resource for organising the players' participation, managing transitions from one type of activity to another, displaying heightened involvement with particular scenes or events, and co-constructing affect while evaluating and enjoying the game. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.