Language play, a collaborative resource in children’s L2 learning

• Within communicative language teaching, ‘natural’language has had a privileged position, and a focus on formhas been seen as something inauthentic or as something thatis inconsequential for learning (for a critique, see Kramschand Sullivan 1996; Cook 1997). Yet in the present study of animmersion classroom, it was found that children with limitedL2 proficiency recurrently employed form-focused language playin spontaneous peer conversations. Our work involves a distinctfocus on multiparty talk, and it is shown how language playis, in many ways, a collaborative affair, initiated by the childrenthemselves. Playful mislabelings and puns often generated extendedrepair sequences that could be seen as informal ‘languagelessons’ focused on formal aspects of language. Simultaneously,shared laughter and shifting alignments between peers were centralaspects of the local politics of classroom life. The jokingwas quite rudimentary. Yet it included artful performance andcollaborative aestheticism, involving alliteration and otherforms of parallelisms, as well as code switching, laughing,and artful variations in pitch, volume and voice quality. Thepaper illustrates the need to integrate language play in modelsof L2 learning.

Nyckelord

language play; joking events; collaborative performance; second language learning; immersion classroom

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