Analyses of two interactional segments excerpted from two data sets are offered here to describe actions that accomplish doing learning an additional language and doing being a member in language testing interviews. The first data set is composed of 24 hours of audiovisual records of interaction in Spanish-as-an-additional-language classes in Brazil (ABELEDO, 2008) and the second amounts to 10 hours of audio records of Celpe-Bras oral-proficiency testing interviews (FORTES, 2010). In these representative analytic samples from larger studies, participants are shown to deploy description and categorization practices (SACKS, 1992; SCHEGLOFF, 2007a) that they treat as acceptable and intelligible to maintain their intersubjectivity (GARFINKEL, 1967), and they orient to such practices in the additional language as preferable. Attribution and ratification of membership categories among interactants are also shown to be crucially operative in both data sets: for doing learning, participants attribute and ratify institutional categories (SCHEGLOFF, 1992) while displaying comembership in the linguistic community of practices that they simultaneously engender, thus reorganizing their participation (GOODWIN; GOODWIN, 2004); for doing being a member during language testing interviews, participants assign each other locally relevant categorizations around [being from here] and [being from there]. Results allow us to conceive of additional-language learning as the ongoing interactional work that is inseparable from participation, and call for the development of valid oral-proficiency language assessment criteria increasingly attuned to the fact that language is used for doing things in the world (CLARK, 1996).
interaction; learning; proficiency
