Telling stories: Membership Categorization and Instructions-in-Action in a teaching-learning environment of Portuguese as an Additional Language (PAL)

ABSTRACT

This study analyses interactions among participants in a story-telling course of PAL, offered as an elective course in a university located in Mainland China. Based on the idea that, in order to understand daily-life activities, we need to look at how people act and make sense of their actions locally, this study takes on an Ethnomethodological and Conversation Analytic approach. The results generated through audiovisual recordings from one of the meetings of the abovementioned course show a constant categorial work (i.e.: the production of particular types of sequential items informed by an orientation to the membership categories present in the society; e.g.: ‘teacher’, ‘student’, ‘doctor’, ‘patient’ etc.) of members in the course, which, along with the sense that these members make (in situ) of the instructions on how to participate in the lessons, reveal the complex reflexive relationship between pedagogy and interaction in an AL classroom.

KEYWORDS:
storytelling; ethnomethodology and conversation analysis; Portuguese as an additional language; membership categorization analysis; instructions-in-action