Following the recent research agenda in the field of second language acquisition and teaching: this study uses conversation analysis (CA) as its main analytical method in exploring how advanced English language learners (ELLs) achieve collaborative reasoning in moral dilemma debates. In this study, I investigate the interactional practices and resources that speakers from various linguistic and socio-cultural backgrounds use in their Lingua Franca to debate a moral problem. I adopt a CA approach that treats talk as an interactional practice by which social actions are accomplished. The analytical work involves identifying specific practices by which participants accomplish actions through talk. CA allows me to focus on a comprehensive understanding of learners’ second language use and abilities without having to resort to native vs. non-native comparisons.
For this study eleven ELLs participated in the curricular task of defending one of two positions in a debate: their choice between (a) letting a death-row prisoner die from a medical condition, allowing doctors to harvest an organ to save the life of a fatally-ill child, or (b) treating the condemned prisoner’s medical condition, which would lead to the death of the child. A regular forty-five-minute class activity was video-recorded, included in the developing ACIC corpus, transcribed and analysed.
Analysis shows that ELLs are creative and skilful in completing a curricular task: both in terms of the way they achieve reasoning in the debate and the way they use linguistic resources for that purpose. Recognizing an introduced debate problem to be a hypothetical one, ELLs orient to this fact and extend the hypothetical circumstances of the problem in order to employ the modified hypothetical scenarios for their own reasoning. By doing so, ELLs are resourceful in finding a way to foster the debate in the absence of factual information. In addition, this ad-hoc generated practice of reasoning – the use of hypotheticals – entails the use and practice of various modal devices, one of the most complicated aspects of language teaching and learning (Bensaid, 2015). The study, therefore, reveals some implications for practical application in second language teaching and learning.
