Epistemisk positionering som en del av andraspråkslärande i social interaktion

A growing body of studies using Conversation Analysis (CA) to study learning argues that CA's participant-oriented analysis of social interaction can increase the understanding of how learning in interaction is done. This article examines how participants, engaged in working with an assignment in their second language (Finnish), do second language learning as a social action in itself, conceptualized within CA. The material for this article consists of a video recorded situation of the social interaction of a 7-year-old girl and the instructor at an immersion program. Through a multisemiotic analysis of the temporal unfolding of the second language learning activity, we show that it is possible to find empirical support for understanding second language learning as something that people explicitly do in social interaction. The focus will be on aspects of relevance to the analysis of doing language learning and more precisely on the trajectory of the girl's epistemic stance and changes in it relating to knowing Finnish.