Abstract

Encountering trouble producing a word in the midst of a turn at talk is an everyday experience for foreign language learners. By employing conversation analysis (CA) as a central tool for analysis, the current study explores how students undertake a range of word searches while they organize a pair work session designed for the purpose of language learning. The analysis demonstrates how the learners simultaneously employ structurally different kinds of semiotic resources, such as language, body, and the structures of their textbooks and notebooks for language learning. The close explication of the ways in which cognitive states are embodied, displayed, and treated by the two students during the word search sequences reveals how they conduct indigenous assessment of each other's knowledge while “doing being a foreign language learner in a classroom.”