Second language learning as local and long-term process in and for social interaction

Abstract Drawing on conversation analysis and usage-based models of language, this chapter is part of larger on-going projects exploring the social-local worlds of second language (L2) speakers’ daily lives and investigating and mapping out their L2 learning, in situ and over time. The projects describe and analyze L2 learning as a matter of developing resources in and for social interaction — that is, they tackle L2 learning as a matter of locally instantiated, observable behaviors and long-term development of linguistic resources for accomplishing actions in concert with others in social interaction. Drawing on a longitudinal corpus of L2 Icelandic data from the everyday life of a Canadian English-speaking learner of Icelandic, I will show how two linguistic patterns (subject-verb congruence in 1st person plural present tense and congruence between a modal verb and adjacent main verbs) are exemplar-driven in learning and how productive construction templates emerge in repair sequences.