From Shared Interaction to Shared Language: Learning a Second Language in an Immersion Kindergarten

The article focuses on second language learning in an immersion kindergarten. Within the framework of conversation analysis, the study explores how learning is situated in interaction and evidenced in the participants’ verbal and embodied behavior. The data consist of videotaped everyday interaction of a group of Finnish-speaking children during their first two years of Swedish immersion. The children’s emerging second language competences are explored by analyzing how they respond to the educator’s questions and directives. The production of Swedish is investigated by analyzing how the children recycle lexical items and syntactic structures that the educator has used. In terms of second language understanding, the study reveals that the children orient to the educator’s embodied actions at the initial stages. They do not initiate repair even if their response shows that their understanding is partial. During the second term, the children show increasing understanding of the verbal turns, and they also initiate repair in case of understanding problems. In terms of active production of second language, the study shows that the children first recycle lexemes and expressions previously used by the educator. At later stages, they also recycle syntactic structures, and modify the recycled items in Swedish. The focus of the study are the learning processes, but the products of learning are also in evidence, and manifested in the ways the children show understanding of the second language and how they use it

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