A comparative analysis of L2 service-learners' interactional practices in community-based activities and the classroom

Abstract

Service-learning (SL) is an experiential pedagogy that engages students in working for, with, and in communities in need. While prior research has explored the effects of SL on second language (L2) users’ (perceived) language development (e.g., Gaugler & Matheus, 2019), intercultural awareness (e.g., Sánchez-Naranjo, 2021), and critical awareness (e.g., Shannahan et al., 2021), to this day, little is known about SL as a social activity (but see, e.g., Perren, 2007). Furthermore, the nexus between classroom and service site practices remains largely under- scrutinized (Overfield, 2007). To make informed pedagogical decisions for L2 service-learners, it is important to understand the linkage between classroom and service site practices. This dissertation aims to fill this notable lacuna by exploring participants’ interactional practices for achieving SL activities at service sites and in classrooms. Drawing on insights from a decade’s worth of applied linguistics research on bridging between classrooms and the wild (e.g., Lilja et al., 2019; Lilja & Piirainen-Marsh, 2019; Piirainen-Marsh & Lilja, 2019; Theodorsdóttir, 2011; Wagner, 2015), the study adopts multimodal conversation analysis (CA; e.g., Deppermann, 2013; Mondada, 2016; Streeck et al., 2011) as a robust framework to investigate SL as a social activity and reciprocity as an interactional achievement. Data consist of naturally-occurring audio- and video-recorded interaction collected across different settings: service sites (15 hours), classrooms (6 hours), and focus groups (5 hours). The study only focuses on the service and classroom interaction. Participants included 14 university- level L2 users in an SL program within an intensive English language program in Hawaiʻi, ESL teachers, and community members. The analyses center on two interactional phenomena frequently observed in the data: (a) mobilizing others and being mobilized (Taleghani-Nikazm et al., 2020) and (b) intercorporeal co-operative practices (C. Goodwin, 2018; Meyer et al., 2017). The findings uncovered some (dis)similarities between participants’ practices at the service sites and in the classroom. When mobilizing others, for example, the participants used less explicit, highly elliptical, and action-oriented mobilization designs (e.g., “cut” + an environmentally coupled gesture, C. Goodwin, 2018), contrasting with more explicit, modulated, and talk-oriented mobilization designs in the classroom (e.g., “one more time, please” + holding out an index finger). These differences indicate that the participants’ mobilizing turn designs at the service sites shows an orientation to urgency, whereas in the classroom, they orient to achieving mutual access to a knowledge object. In intercorporeal co-operative practices, the participants produced synchronized and sequentially mirrored actions to achieve various interactional outcomes (e.g., stance alignment, affiliation, co-engagement on task). At the service sites, they oriented to collaborative task completion by adopting or transforming others’ actions to achieve near-synchrony. On the other hand, in the classroom, they generally showed an orientation toward “wanting to be on the same page” by chiming into a choral co-production (e.g., Ehmer, 2021; Lerner, 2002; Pfänder & Couper-Kuhlen, 2019). These findings suggest that SL is a fertile ground for L2 users to engage in diverse multimodal practices while orienting to reciprocity as a collaborative enterprise. The study contributes to improving our current understanding of SL as a multimodal achievement. It also hopes to expand extant SL research traditions by demonstrating multimodal CA as a productive framework for scrutinizing reciprocity at various levels: interpersonal (reciprocity among SL stakeholders) as well as programmatic and community levels (reciprocity between educational objectives and community engagement). Methodological and pedagogical implications of the findings will be discussed.