Kädet, keho, kieli: Yhteisymmärryksen multimodaalinen jäsentyminen ja kielen oppimisen hetket kokkaus- ja viljelyvuorovaikutuksessa

This dissertation uses conversation analysis to investigate the multimodal organization of shared understanding and opportunities for language learning in cooking and gardening interactions. Intersubjectivity and language learning are analyzed from the participants’ perspective focusing on the interactional practices that second language users repeatedly employ to display their understanding of the ongoing cooking and gardening tasks, and orient to learning the practical activities and activity-relevant language. Social actions under scrutiny are demonstrations of understanding, candidate understandings, and questions that orient to naming activity-relevant embodied actions and materials, or target a word used in the previous talk.

The data for this study were collected longitudinally and videoethnographically by following second language users’ participation in cooking and gardening interactions for almost two years. The data set comprises video recordings of approximately 52 hours spanning over 17 months. The data were collected in Finland in an NGOled urban gardening project organized for adult immigrants. The project offered hands-on guidance in Finnish on how to do urban farming in Finland and how to cook Finnish dishes. The project aimed at advancing newcomers’ integration into Finnish society through participating in practical cooking and gardening activities. Finnish was the shared language of the activities. Apart from the instructors, most of the project participants used Finnish as their second language.

The results of this study are presented in four sub-studies which demonstrate that bodily-visual resources, such as depictive gestures, facial expressions, gaze, and body orientations, have a crucial function in formatting, recognizing, and understanding social actions that demonstrate or check understanding, and in orienting to language learning. Bodily-visual resources are systematically used in distinctive ways, and these multimodal compositions are used to demonstrate or check understanding. Understanding can be fluently and accurately checked by depictive hand gestures without related co-occurring speech.

The analysis shows that cooking and gardening with others provides learning opportunities, and the second language users guide their language learning actively based on their own needs. They choose their learning objects and take advantage of the provided support selectively. Second language users orient to learning verbal language both in moments of shared understanding and understanding trouble, for example by naming activity-relevant materials and embodied actions, as well as learning lexical items that are recurrently used in instructing the practical activities. While cooking and gardening, the ecology of the activities and their relevant materials are used in a versatile way to accomplish the manual activities and maintain shared understanding, which also provides material for learning and participating in the interactions, e.g., by providing a natural anchoring for the meaning of words and depictive gestures. The study also demonstrates how learning language in a manual activity is a fundamentally embodied experience that is not limited to learning linguistic resources but intertwines with developing cooking and gardening skills and ways of participation. This doctoral dissertation thus provides new insights into the multimodal organization of interaction, such as repair sequences, and using and learning second language in practical activities.

The results show the need to continue re-investigating basic interactional phenomena from a multimodal perspective to gain a comprehensive understanding of the role of bodily-visual resources in interaction. In addition, multimodal conception of language can expand the practices and contexts of language teaching and learning. Based on the study, I suggest that the first step in supporting beginning second language learning is to provide opportunities of long-term participation in target-language interactions that revolve around activities that are meaningful for the participants and enable participating with multimodal resources. At the micro level of interaction, language learning in everyday life contexts can be promoted by supporting second language users’ agency, and enhancing both first and second language users’ interactional skills of monitoring shared understanding and noticing language learning possibilities.