Multiple Involvements in Interactional Repair: Using Smartphones in Peer Culture to Augment Lingua Franca English

Abstract

Purpose

With an extensive range of information available at the swipe of a finger, the smartphone has become a ubiquitous tool for augmenting conversation. Users of English as a lingua franca (ELF) often rely on such technology to help establish friendships by using them to sustain intersubjectivity. But how do they manage the multiple involvements this entails, such as participating in current talk while searching for linguistic items?

Methodology/approach

This study employs multimodal Conversation Analysis to undertake a detailed account of the way two young people, a Japanese male (22) and an Indonesian male (16) incorporate smartphones into their lingua franca English interaction. The analysis is based on naturally occurring conversations video-recorded by the Japanese participant, while both boys were living with an American homestay family.

Findings

The analysis explores the role of the smartphone in forward-oriented repair, including how the interactants, look up unfamiliar words, delay turn progressivity to fit those words into the turn-in-progress, and use images to accompany an unclear term. Speakers also occasionally abandon a look-up in order to reformulate the turn without the smartphone, relying instead on their own interactional competence.

Originality/value

The study offers insight into the way young people use smartphones as an affordance to manage and repair aspects of their L2 talk, enabling them to enhance their current interactional competence by drawing on the vast range of semiotic resources the phone possesses. Ensuring understanding is essential for developing and maintaining friendships, and for this particular peer culture of lingua franca English speakers, smartphones are a key tool for accomplishing that. As such, the study will be of interest to researchers and educators in the fields of both technology and interaction.

Citation

Greer, T. (2016), "Multiple Involvements in Interactional Repair: Using Smartphones in Peer Culture to Augment Lingua Franca English", Friendship and Peer Culture in Multilingual Settings (Sociological Studies of Children and Youth, Vol. 21), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 197-229. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1537-466120160000021010