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Using the methodological framework of conversation analysis (CA) as a central tool for analysis, this study examines a peer interactive task that occurred in a Japanese as a foreign language classroom. During the short segment of interaction, the students shifted back and forth between the development of an assigned task and the management of problems associated with their lack of lexical knowledge. The close observation of the participants' vocal and nonvocal conduct during these different types of sequences and sequential boundaries demonstrates how the students transform in a moment-by-moment fashion their converging or diverging orientations towards varying types of learning and learning opportunities. Through the presentation of a single case analysis, this study discusses one way of applying CA techniques to the study of classroom interaction in order to promote an overall sensitivity to the intricacies of classroom talk and to generate critical reflection on classroom policies and instructional designs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how Japanese and American students initiate topical talk as they get acquainted with each other during their initial encounter at a student-organized conversation table. Whereas previous studies of intercultural communications tend to take interculturality for granted, this study investigates the observable and reportable ways in which the participants demonstrate the relevance, or the irrelevance, of interculturality in the development of the interaction. The participants in the data presented in this article recurrently produce a common set of questions that reflect on their categorizations of the coparticipants. This study closely examines vocal and nonvocal conduct associated with the delivery of these questions, the selection of respondents to these questions, and the treatment of problems emerging in the development of these question-answer sequences. In doing so, it explicates how the participants utilize their cultural differences as a resource for organizing their participation and, at the same time, recreates the salience of the interculturality of the interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]