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The current study examines how Japanese and international care workers at a geriatric healthcare facility in Japan manage one of the most fundamental elements of handover interactions – person reference and recognition to identify a particular care receiver and discuss their specific conditions and needs. By using Conversation analysis (CA) as a central mode of inquiry, this study examines how the participants approach the establishment of referential common ground while simultaneously attending to the progressivity of ongoing activity, and how written records on care receivers are incorporated into the process. The juxtaposition of three international care workers' performances effectively illustrates how the international care workers' performative competence is co-constructed with their Japanese colleagues in this interactive process and how the participants exhibit different kinds of orientations towards the activity arranged for the dual purpose of actual handover and for the international care workers' language learning and socialization. As a contribution to a growing body of CA studies of second language talk at work, this study considers possible tensions between engaging in a language-learning activity regarding specific linguistic elements during a particular professional activity and learning to become a competent actor in the particular activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan's rapidly aging population and chronic labor shortages have led the country to consider increased reliance on foreign workers. The government promotes the cultivation of nihongo jinzai 'Japanese language human resources' (MOFA, 2013), that is, highly skilled foreign workers proficient in the de facto national language, but in reality, such ideal individuals are scarce. Workplaces thus must explore ways to accommodate workers with limited Japanese competence. By introducing a sequential and multimodal analysis of shift handover interaction between Japanese and foreign care workers at a geriatric facility, the current article critically evaluates the monolingual, logocentric ideology reflected in the ongoing national debate as well as in the institutional convention of information sharing. The examination of the ways in which these workers deploy multimodal semiotic resources for the fulfillment of their duty points to the need for reevaluation of conventional practices in favor of increased affordance of spatial repertoire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates how nurses working at a Japanese geriatric healthcare facility report, confirm and reconstruct information concerning care receivers during routine handover meetings. Through a sequential and multimodal analysis of the video-recorded handovers, the study investigates how the participants manage the intricate balance between their obligation to sustain the accuracy of records and their orientation toward respective situated identities as reporters and report recipients, by tactfully using linguistic and other semiotic resources. Our analysis demonstrates how the participants incorporate various evidential markers as a resource to present different kinds and levels of access they have to particular pieces of information and to indicate their epistemic stance. Further, it uncovers how the presence of documents that contain information regarding care receivers, available for inspection during the interaction, impact the ways in which outgoing nurses construct their reports, as well as the ways in which incoming nurses initiate repair. The study thus contributes to a growing body of research that investigates epistemic management in institutional settings, as well as to the advancement of our understanding regarding Japanese evidential markers in use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, as part of a growing body of studies that investigate translingual communicative practices, introduces a microanalysis of doctor-patient interactions that took place in urban Japan, a country that has been identified as belong to the expanding circle of world Englishes (Kachru 1986). Through the examination of two cases of primary care visits, one conducted in lingua franca English and another in a hybrid of Japanese and English, the study demonstrates how a Japanese doctor and two migrant patients from Ghana skillfully deploy a variety of semiotic resources to achieve the problem presentation stage of their encounters. More specifically, it investigates how concerns expressed by the patients become constructed into ``doctorable'' (Heritage and Robinson 2006) medical conditions through their subsequent interaction. The turn-by-turn examination of interactions reveals how the doctor's biomedical knowledge, embodied in his interactional practices, together with his cooperative disposition (Canagarajah 2013) to the interactional uncertainty inherent in multilingual and multicultural encounters, serve as a critical vehicle for making both the doctor's and the patients' seemingly ``truncated multilingual repertoires'' (Blommaert 2010) work in this particular institutional context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Encountering trouble producing a word in the midst of a turn at talk is an everyday experience for foreign language learners. By employing conversation analysis (CA) as a central tool for analysis, the current study explores how students undertake a range of word searches while they organize a pair work session designed for the purpose of language learning. The analysis demonstrates how the learners simultaneously employ structurally different kinds of semiotic resources, such as language, body, and the structures of their textbooks and notebooks for language learning. The close explication of the ways in which cognitive states are embodied, displayed, and treated by the two students during the word search sequences reveals how they conduct indigenous assessment of each other's knowledge while “doing being a foreign language learner in a classroom.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores recent changes in the landscape of second language acquisition (SLA) and foreign language pedagogical (FLP) research. Firth and Wagner's (1997) proposal for the reconceptualization of SLA has been supported by SLA and FLP researchers who share the sentiment concerning the need for increased attention to social and contextual dimensions beyond the diversity of their theoretical and methodological orientations. In the meantime, a growing number of studies have adopted conversation analysis (CA), the sociological methodology on which Firth and Wagner have built their arguments, to examine data involving second language speakers, even though not all these studies may be viewed as addressing the issue of language learning and therefore may not belong to the category of SLA studies. The review of developments in the last decade points to potentials and remaining issues in using CA to conduct SLA and FLP research and to draw pedagogical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Using the methodological framework of ‘conversation analysis’ as a central tool of analysis, this paper examines the sequential development of talk‐in‐interaction observed in a small group activity in a Japanese language classroom. While the group work was designed to have students engage in a discussion with native speakers invited to the class, the resulting interaction ended up becoming rather like a structured interview with successive exchanges of the students' questions and the native speaker's answers. How did the instructional design affect the ways in which they developed their talk? And conversely, how did the development of talk demonstrate the participants' orientation to the institutionalized nature of talk? This study explores the relationship among the task instruction, the students' reaction to the instruction during their pre‐task planning, and the actual development of the talk with the native speakers. The students' planning tended to focus on the content of discussion, compiling a list of sequence‐initiating actions, in particular, questions. While the plans contributed to the development of the talk, the episode reveals that a more natural and coherent discussion was afforded by the students' production of spontaneous utterances and attention to the contingent development of talk. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue including one on the exemplar of the ethnography of communication perspective, a study which employs a systematic functional linguistics framework, and the use of a conversation analysis approach as a central tool in investigating the sequential development of talk within interactions that take place in a small group activity in an upper-level Japanese language classroom in the U.S.