Social Interaction

1. Introduction

In this ethnomethodological, conversation analytic (CA) study, we focus on unsolicited other-reformulations of prior talk; that is, on reformulations that are spontaneously produced by a speaker other than the speaker of the original turn. This practice has been observed in the setting of language cafés organized by churches as venues where migrants (here called “visitors”) can train their use of Swedish as an additional language (or L2; note that the word “training” is used by the café organizers themselves). These cafés offer the opportunity to practice Swedish through social encounters with volunteers who are either speakers of Swedish as a first language (L1) or advanced L2 speakers of Swedish.

In this study we intend to show that unsolicited other-reformulations accomplish a particular kind of action: They clarify what was said before by highlighting specific lexical items, an action which is recipient-designed for the L2-speaking migrants that participate in language cafés. The question we aim to answer, then, is: How are these reformulations recognizable as achieving a clarifying action? In other words, the issue — for members and analysts alike — is that of action ascription (i.e., the “process of attributing an action to a turn”: Levinson, 2013, p. 104), which is reflexively related to that of action formation (see also Piirainen-Marsh, Lilja, & Eskildsen, 2022/this issue). As Levinson (2013) suggests, the process of action ascription crucially lies on factors such as turn design, turn location, the ongoing activity, and the larger institutional setting within which specific social roles may be attributed to the participants in and through interaction. Starting with the latter factor, the setting in which our focal practice is achieved represents a hybrid between the formal environment of a classroom and the informal environment outside the classroom (often referred to as “the wild”; see Hellermann, Eskildsen, Pekarek Doehler, & Piirainen-Marsh, 2019). The participants in this setting can be said to engage in what the CA-SLA (i.e., the branch of CA that works with L2 data in the broader field of Second Language Acquisition; see Markee & Kunitz, 2015) literature calls “conversations for practicing” (Barraja Rohan, 2015) or “conversations for learning” (Kasper & Kim, 2015); that is, seemingly informal conversations with the explicit goal of providing the participants with the opportunity to practice their L2.

In terms of the ongoing activity, unsolicited other-reformulations are accomplished during moments of whole-group interaction, when the participants (both volunteers and visitors) engage in introduction rounds or in information-sharing sessions. Sequentially, these reformulations either happen in a by-play (Goffman, 1972) or initiate side-sequences (Jefferson, 1972) between L1 and L2 speakers as they are located after a turn delivered by an L1-speaking volunteer for a multiparty L2-speaking audience and are produced by another L1-speaking volunteer (hence the term other-reformulation) for (specific members of) the same audience. More specifically, a volunteer’s turn is either fully or partially reformulated by another volunteer, without there being any display of non-understanding by the visitors. That is, other-reformulations in our study are practices of unsolicited assistance, also called “preemptive” (Svennevig, 2010) or “proactive” (Kasper & Ross, 2007) practices. Our collection does not, therefore, include instances of elicited reformulations (e.g., reformulations produced in response to clarification requests, explanation requests, or other observable displays of non-understanding).

In terms of turn design, and specifically in terms of the verbal resources used in reformulations, it is important to specify that our collection includes other-reformulations in the visitors’ target language (i.e., Swedish). Overall, the unsolicited other-reformulations examined here are designed through the lamination (Goodwin 2013, 2018) of various semiotic (linguistic, prosodic, and embodied) resources that highlight and clarify specific elements of the prior turn (which is therefore treated as a substrate: see Goodwin, 2013). This operation constitutes a dynamic and complex multimodal gestalt (Mondada, 2014a, 2014b) that is adjusted to the local context.

In sum, it is the combination of all these factors (turn design, location, ongoing activity, and setting) that make unsolicited other-reformulations recognizable as clarifying actions that are recipient-designed for L2 speakers of Swedish in the setting of a language café. Specifically, we argue that unsolicited other-reformulations represent an observable behavior through which the L1-speaking reformulating participant orients to the linguistic identity of the visitors as L2 users who may encounter issues of non-understanding in the ongoing interaction. With the analytical tools afforded by ethnomethodological CA, in this study we show that unsolicited other-reformulations: (a) act as clarifications of what was said before, either by making the action accomplished by the previous turn more recognizable or, more frequently, by providing (often embodied) explanations of specific words used in the prior turn; and (b) mobilize the participants’ attention to specific linguistic constituents of the original turn by highlighting (Goodwin, 2018) — i.e., enhancing the visibility of — target lexical items used in the prior turn, thereby orienting to them as learnables (Majlesi & Broth, 2012; Majlesi, 2015, 2018; Zemel & Koschmann, 2014). It should also be pointed out that in our data the reformulated turn does not highlight grammatical features (see Jansson & Kunitz, 2020); reformulations thus seem to be a practice through which the participants accomplish incidental or impromptu vocabulary work (e.g., Stoewer & Musk, 2019).

Overall, our study contributes to the literature on reformulations (e.g., Deppermann, 2011; Traverso, 2017) and to research on preemptive (Svennevig, 2010) or proactive (Kasper & Ross, 2007) practices of unsolicited assistance in L1-L2 interactions. At the same time, the kind of reformulations analyzed here adds to the range of interactional practices accomplished during what can be considered as collaborative teaching (e.g., Lee, 2016). More broadly, our work contributes to the literature on the contingent production of learnables (e.g., Eskildsen, 2018; Kunitz, 2018; Majlesi, 2018; Majlesi & Broth, 2012).

2. Literature review

This paper focuses on unsolicited other-reformulations as systematic multimodal gestalts (De Stefani, 2022/this issue); that is, as emergent configurations of linguistic and embodied resources “that are integrated together and make sense together” (Mondada, 2014b, p. 360) in the local and sequential context of their occurrence within the situated material ecology of language cafés.

We now turn to a discussion of the term reformulation, which we use to indicate a turn that produces a second version of (part of) a prior turn; that is, we intend reformulations as having a backward-oriented nature. The literature review is organized as follows: First, we briefly address the variety of definitions that can be found in the literature and identify some common threads. We then refer to the literature on preemptive (Svennevig, 2010) or proactive (Kasper & Ross, 2007) practices in interactions between L1 and L2 speakers (also referred to as L1-L2 interactions).

In the CA literature there is no clear-cut definition of formulations versus reformulations (however, see Bilmes, 2011, who briefly proposes a distinction between formulations and reformulations), with some authors using the term formulations (e.g., Deppermann, 2011; Heritage & Watson, 1979) for what others would rather call reformulations (e.g., Svennevig, 2013; Traverso, 2017). Garfinkel and Sacks (1970) define formulating as “conversationalists’ practices of saying-in-so-many-words-what-we-are-doing” (p. 351). In this perspective, formulations include explanations, translations, summaries, etc. A more specialized view of formulations is offered by Heritage and Watson (1979; see also Deppermann, 2011), who have inspired the study of formulations in various institutional settings (e.g., see: Antaki, 2008; Barnes, 2007; Hutchby, 2005; Weiste & Peräkylä, 2013). Research in this area has focused on formulations as renditions of a layperson’s account of events or states of affairs; these renditions are produced by institutional agents linking back to a previous version of the account (e.g., in Heritage and Watson’s study, 1979). For present purposes we are interested only in the literature that has analyzed (re)formulations as having a backward orientation.

Despite the different terms and definitions used in the literature, it is possible to identify a common denominator, which lies in the fact that (re)formulations are considered as situated, contingent, selective, and “participant-sensitive” (Deppermann, 2011, p. 118) interactional practices through which the participants’ semantic work becomes observable. That is, (re)formulations are “local practices of sense-making” (Deppermann, 2011, p. 120) through which participants co-construct meaning “as an observable, sequential, intersubjective phenomenon” (Deppermann, 2011, p. 120) by generalizing, simplifying, or abstracting (i.e., “focusing on and singling out” see Deppermann, 2011, pp. 123-124) relevant items from the original turn.

Another common aspect in the CA literature on (re)formulations is the concern for the semiotic resources through which this practice is accomplished. In contrast with non-CA studies that have focused on the verbal resources used to reformulate an utterance while keeping its semantic core invariant (see the overview in Traverso, 2017), CA studies take into account the wide range of variably laminated (Goodwin, 2018) semiotic resources — verbal, prosodic, and embodied — that accomplish reformulations. Particularly relevant for our purposes is Traverso’s (2017) definition of reformulations as either verbal or gestural repetitions of a previously produced verbal or gestural element. That is, a verbal or gestural element can be reformulated through the lamination of words, prosodic features, and gestures. Overall, then, a reformulation can be considered as a specific kind of operation on a pre-existing substrate (Goodwin, 2013), an operation through which (parts of) the substrate become(s) highlighted and clarified.

Sequentially speaking, there are different kinds of reformulations depending on who does the reformulation (self or other) and on whether the reformulation is produced in a responsive sequential environment (as a second action produced in response to a first) or not. A same-speaker reformulation (Deppermann, 2011) or self-reformulation occurs when a speaker reformulates her/his own talk, whereas a speaker who reformulates a coparticipant’s prior talk produces an other-speaker reformulation (Deppermann, 2011) or other-reformulation. We would like to further the discussion by making another distinction concerning whether reformulations are solicited (i.e., actions made relevant by a prior turn) or unsolicited. That is, a speaker might be prompted to reformulate her/his prior talk or a coparticipant’s prior turn in response to a display of non-understanding and/or in response to an explicit request by a coparticipant; in this case, the reformulation is solicited (or “reactive”, borrowing the term from Kasper & Ross, 2007). On the other hand, reformulations are unsolicited when they are volunteered by self or other. Unsolicited reformulations are the focus of this article.

Finally, it should be pointed out that the reformulation sequences found in our data set concern mostly L1-L2 interactions; that is, a setting in which some participants (the volunteers and coordinators) speak Swedish as their first language and other participants (the migrants) speak Swedish as an additional (or second) language. As observed in previous research (Svennevig, 2010, 2013, 2018; Traverso, 2017), in the context of institutional L1-L2 interactions (and also in the context of institutional interactions in English as a lingua franca: see Greer & Leyland, 2018; Kaur, 2011), the participants sometimes enact what the literature calls “preemptive” (Svennevig, 2010) or “proactive” (Kasper & Ross, 2007) practices in the pursuit of mutual comprehension in order to foster the progressivity of the ongoing activity (see also Kunitz & Jansson, 2021). These practices might include: the reformulations of questions (Kasper & Ross, 2007; Svennevig, 2013), interactional work done to ensure the recognizability of references (Greer & Leyland, 2018; Svennevig, 2010), the decomposition of turns in installments (Svennevig, 2018), and self-repairs aimed to raise the level of explicitness (Kaur, 2011).

The settings explored in studies on L1-L2 interactions are rather diverse, ranging from social welfare offices (Svennevig, 2010, 2013, 2018) and health care settings (Svennevig, 2018; Traverso, 2017) to oral proficiency interviews in L2 standardized tests (Kasper & Ross, 2007), to name just a few. With this study, we focus on unsolicited other-reformulations in a different setting; that is, the semi-institutional setting of language cafés where an L1 speaker reformulates (parts of) a previous turn (formulated by another L1 speaker) in a recipient-designed fashion for one or more L2 speakers. The reformulating volunteer can be seen as doing coteaching (Lee, 2016) in that s/he is aligning with the project implemented by the formulating volunteer by clarifying what is being said in a way that is understandable to the audience of L2 speaking visitors.

3. Data, method and participants

Our study is part of a broader project on language cafés as arenas for language training and as social venues that aim to foster the migrants’ integration in the local community. The entire dataset comprises video recordings of 82 café sessions (each lasting approximately 1.5-2 hours) in 12 cafés organized by non-profit organizations (such as churches, libraries, and the Red Cross) in a large metropolitan area in Sweden.

Our phenomenon of interest can be observed in activities when more than one L1-speaking volunteer is present. Such activities include introduction rounds and information-sharing sessions (lasting roughly from 10 to 30 minutes per activity), as a way to get to know the participants (both volunteers and visitors) and to share information regarding Swedish culture and society. This kind of activities occurs regularly in three cafés in particular and it is from these three cafés that we have selected the data for the purposes of this study. The practice we have observed does not seem to occur frequently (so far we have identified only a handful of instances), though it might also be the case that some reformulations are neither visible nor audible because of the camera angle and the physical position of the participants in the café.

As mentioned before, the volunteers (and coordinators) of the language cafés are either L1 speakers of Swedish or advanced L2 speakers of Swedish, while the visitors’ language proficiency in Swedish varies greatly. The visitors also differ in terms of their L1, country of origin, and length of stay in Sweden. It should also be noted that, in some cases, the language cafés represent one of the first venues where the migrants have a chance to practice their Swedish, as they wait to be enrolled in the state-funded programs of Swedish-for-immigrants. In other cases, the migrants are long-term residents in Sweden who attend the language cafés to improve their Swedish and, perhaps most importantly, to establish or maintain social contacts with members of the local community. Furthermore, participation in the café is entirely voluntary, which leads to potentially great differences between various sessions of the same café; that is, from session to session, the number of visitors and their degree of familiarity with the setting and with the other participants (as they might be regular visitors or one-time comers to the café) may vary. This means that, when the volunteers interact with the visitors in whole-group configurations, they have a great variety of interlocutors and they have to deal with very different levels of language skills.

3.1 Data collection and method

Following the methodology of multimodal CA (Mondada, 2016; Streeck, Goodwin, & LeBaron, 2011), we video-recorded the café sessions. The data were collected between 2018 and 2019, after our research project had been ethically vetted by the Swedish Ethical Review Authority. During the recruitment, data collection, and data handling process, we strictly followed the ethical guidelines established by the Swedish Research Council.

Our focal phenomenon consists of a turn produced by an L1 speaker for an L2-speaking audience; the turn (or parts of it) is then reformulated by another L1-speaking volunteer for the same audience. Our collection excludes other-reformulations that are accomplished through translations into another language known to the visitors; such instances, in fact, could constitute borderline cases between reformulating and interpreting (e.g., Traverso, 2017). At the same time, we exclude other-reformulations of turns produced by the second language users/learners (which are typically accomplished as corrections of an inaccurately formulated turn).

After gathering the sequences, we have transcribed them verbatim (following Jefferson, 2004) and multimodally (with annotations of embodied actions, following Mondada, 2014). For the sake of anonymity, in our transcripts, we use pseudonyms for participants’ names, and we provide only the pencil drawing of frame grabs to keep the identity of individuals anonymous. The transcripts are presented in Swedish; each line is followed by its idiomatic translation into English. The relevant embodied movements, gaze directions, and gestures are shown in separate lines; their exact occurrence in relation to verbal resources is marked through symbols such as asterisks (*) and carets (^).

4. Analysis

In what follows, we present 5 instances of unsolicited other-reformulations; in these examples, a volunteer reformulates a turn or part of a turn (i.e., a phrase or a word) that was produced in earlier talk by another volunteer. As mentioned before, the reformulations in our collection either happen in a by-play (Goffman, 1972) or initiate side-sequences (Jefferson, 1972) between L1 and L2 speakers in information-sharing sessions or in introduction rounds. The reformulations that are the object of our analysis are embodied practices through which the reformulating volunteer repeats a prior turn with some modification (see the concept of recycling “with différance” in Anward, 2004); the reformulated construct is verbally and visually re-presented and the whole or part of it is highlighted (Goodwin, 2018) through various semiotic resources (see also: Majlesi, 2015, 2018, 2022/this issue). With the analysis of the excerpts below, we demonstrate how the reformulations act as clarifications in the pursuit of comprehensibility (so that the visitors can understand the gist of prior talk), while at the same time increasing the visibility of parts of prior talk, thereby orienting to those parts as a shared and interactionally achieved pedagogical focus.

4.1 Reformulation of a turn

The instances presented in this section show examples from two different café settings where the participants are engaged in an information-sharing session. In each excerpt, a turn produced by a volunteer is reformulated by another co-present volunteer. The reformulation is recipient-designed either for the whole group (Excerpt 1) or for an individual visitor (Excerpt 2). The reformulation targets an entire turn; however, the reformulating volunteer highlights specific lexical items with various semiotic resources, ranging from prosody to embodiment.

Excerpt 1 is set in a café where the participants sit around a long table. The excerpt picks up the talk as the participants are given a list with words and phrases relevant for the topic of the day; that is, the Swedish flora. While the handout is being distributed, Elisabeth, one of the volunteers, tells her coparticipants about a nice place to visit in Stockholm, Kungsträdgården (“The King’s Garden”), where the cherry trees are now blossoming. This turns into a side-sequence (Jefferson, 1972) initiated by another volunteer, Barbara, who reformulates the tip for the whole group.

Elisabeth produces a pre (Schegloff, 2007), with which she announces that she is about to give her coparticipants a tip (line 02). She then launches a storytelling (Mandelbaum, 2013; see also Wong & Waring, 2021) about her visit to Kungsträdgården the previous day. Her way of talking resembles teacher’s talk (Cazden, 1986), in that she slows down the speed of her talk, articulates words more clearly and emphatically, and inserts pauses in between phrases and within the utterance she produces (e.g., lines 02–03). She then topicalizes the new information about what is significant in Kungsträdgården with a turn-initial mention of “cherry trees” (körsbärsträden, line 05) and subsequently emphasizes the number of trees in the park (lines 05–06). Elisabeth then adds that the cherry trees have started to blossom (line 08) and will continue to blossom in the coming weeks (line 12).

Elisabeth’s telling is first positively assessed by Barbara, another volunteer, who, upon hearing the name of the place, expresses her affirmative stance toward the telling and the tip with “right. g↑ood” (line 04; note the sharp rising intonation on the evaluative term). The story then is also receipted with an acknowledgement token (line 10) by a visitor and with the appraisal interjection wow (line 11) produced by another visitor, who thereby assesses the news as positive. Overall, despite being initially framed as a tip (line 02), Elisabeth’s multiunit turn (which comes to completion in line 12) is formulated as a storytelling rather than as an explicit piece of advice.

After a short pause (line 13), Barbara mobilizes everybody’s attention by loudly asking “DID EVERYONE HEAR?” (line 14), thereby displaying her orientation to the telling as newsworthy, while also projecting that more interactional work focusing on that telling is forthcoming. She then reformulates Elisabeth’s telling as “you should go to KUNGsträdgården (0.4) ‘n look at (.) the cherry flowers¿”, lines 14–16), thus providing the gist of the storytelling, while also making explicit its actional import by reformulating it as an explicit tip for the visitors. She achieves this by addressing the visitors directly (ni, “you”, line 14), by using the modal verb ska (“should”, line 14), by extracting key information (see Deppermann, 2011 on what he calls “abstraction”), and by delivering her turn in two installments (see Svennevig, 2018 for a similar practice in self-reformulations): They should go to the park (first installment) and look at the cherry flowers (second installment; note the 0.4-second pause between the two installments). In particular, the use of the modal verb ska (“should”, line 14) produces a deontic shift (Stevanovic, 2013), in that the participants are no longer simply given a tip (lines 01-02), but are explicitly directed to visit the place mentioned by Elisabeth. This deontic shift is also augmented by the higher volume in the pronunciation of the first syllable of the reference term: KUNGsträdgården (line 14). In sum, Barbara’s reformulation not only highlights the import of the original turn by Elisabeth, but also ascribes a stronger deontic status to the action it performs.

At the same time, the higher volume on the first syllable of KUNGsträdgården highlights this lexical item, which is also topicalized through a cleft-structure. Moreover, Barbara produces a beat gesture by raising a pen in her right hand above her shoulder and beating the air a few times exactly when she starts to say the name of the park (Fig. 1_1). Similarly, in the second installment of her reformulation, Barbara highlights the compound körsbärsblommor (“cherry flowers”, line 16), which is produced with emphasis on the second noun and final rising intonation, possibly indicating try-marking (i.e., an orientation to the noun as presumably new to the visitors; see Sacks & Schegloff, 1979). At the same time, the delivery of this compound noun is accompanied by a gesture (Fig. 1_2), with Barbara holding her hands like a bowl in front of her face, in the shape of a round object, presumably depicting a cherry flower. Of relevance is also the lexical choice itself; specifically, Barbara modifies the original formulation of cherry trees that have started to blossom (lines 5 and 8) and mentions the cherry flowers instead. We argue that Barbara is accomplishing a simplification (Deppermann, 2011) operation on Elisabeth’s turn-as-substrate, so that the item worth of a visit to the park is made more explicit and tangible. In other words, Barbara shows her interpretation of Elisabeth’s turn as suggesting that there and then it is the season to visit Kungsträgården since the cherry trees are blossoming and therefore it is possible to see cherry flowers. Barbara’s turn is receipted by Irina with acknowledgement tokens (line 18).

Overall, with her reformulation of Elisabeth’s telling, Barbara highlights (Goodwin, 2018) — and thereby mobilizes her coparticipants’ attention to — parts of the previous multiunit turn (e.g., the name of the park and the word for “cherry flowers”) by making them aurally and visually salient for the visitors. This is done through the lamination (Goodwin, 2018) of various semiotic resources such as talk, prosody, and gesture. Barbara’s reformulation is unsolicited. In other words, there is neither a visible display of non-understanding by the visitors, nor a clarification request. Elisabeth’s telling is actually observably acknowledged by two visitors (lines 10-11), who thereby display that they have been able to monitor the talk so far. Of course, one could argue that the lack of a response to Elisabeth’s advice/telling (see the 0.7 second pause in line 13) might indicate that the visitors are not following or are not participating. However, we maintain that the import of Elisabeth’s turn is not clear (she pre-announces a tip, but then a storytelling is delivered) and therefore it is not immediately evident which action would be relevant next. At the same time, Elisabeth’s action is introduced, from the beginning, as somewhat marginal, something that she is going to say, “while the paper is circulated” (line 01). Barbara’s turn acts as a way to gather everybody’s attention and establish a joint focus (line 14). It should also be noted that, had Barbara treated Elisabeth’s turn as possibly inaudible, she could have produced a verbatim repetition of the turn. Instead, she reformulates the original turn in a way that clarifies what kind of action Elisabeth’s turn had accomplished (i.e., a piece of advice), while singling out (see Deppermann, 2011 for the process of abstraction) and highlighting (Goodwin, 2018) specific parts of the original turn with various semiotic resources, all laminated into a multimodal gestalt. In other words, it seems that the reformulated turn extracts (and modifies) key elements from the original turn and gives them visibility and therefore explicitness (see Kaur, 2011). Ultimately, we maintain that Barbara’s reformulation makes the original turn more tangible for the L2 speaking visitors and aids their comprehension.

The second excerpt comes from an information-sharing session in a café where the participants are sitting at different tables. During the session, Elsa, an L1 speaker of Swedish, talks about Vasaloppet (“the Vasa Race”), an annual cross-country ski competition in Sweden. At the beginning of the session, the participants receive a flyer illustrating the path of the race (Fig. 2_3). After providing the historical background to the event, Elsa draws the audience’s attention to the race path and explains that she has a cottage in a place called Risberg, near the race path. In Excerpt 2 we focus on one table where a volunteer, Anna, is sitting next to a visitor, Rana, for whom she reformulates a turn produced by Elsa containing an infrequent lexical item, fäbod (“cottage”).

The transcript begins with Elsa’s telling that in Risberg (line 01) she has “an old cottage” (en gammal fäbod, line 03). During the delivery of line 01, Anna points to a place on the map. With the placement of the camera in front of Anna and Rana, it is not possible to identify the exact point of the map to which Anna is pointing. However, the stroke of the gesture (Kendon, 1975), with Anna tapping on the map, is exactly at the end of the delivery of Risberg (line 01). It is therefore possible to hypothesize that Anna is tapping on the map on the spot where Risberg is marked (Fig. 2_1). Anna’s gesture is attended to by Rana, as she also seems to point to the same location on the map (line 03) and holds her stretched finger there until the end of the sequence (line 11).

Then, Anna begins to reformulate what Elsa has said so far (line 06), while putting her hand on Rana’s shoulder to draw Rana’s attention toward her, selecting her as her addressee (cf. Meyer, 2017). Anna’s turn (“there that auntie built a house”, line 06) is delivered quietly, in by-play (Goffman, 1972) with Rana. The word “there” could indicate that the pointed location is probably Risberg on the map; note also that the map marks the presence of some cottages in that location (see Fig. 2_4).

Figure 2_4. The map of the Vasa Race. The circle on the map indicates a collection of cottages

Anna’s reformulation simplifies (see Deppermann, 2011 on simplification) Elsa’s word choice by replacing fäbod (“cottage”) with hus (“house”). Indeed, fäbod is used to refer to holiday cottages and is not a frequent word. On the other hand, Elsa herself has used the plural form husen in the continuation of her turn (“and (0.5) in one of those (1.1) houses”, line 05). Therefore, by pointing to the map where a few houses are illustrated (see the circle around Risberg in Fig. 2_4), by deictically referring to the location with där (“there”, line 06), and by replacing fäbod with hus — a term recycled from Elsa’s previous turn, Anna clarifies that Elsa’s fäbod can be understood as belonging to the group of “houses” illustrated on the map.

In the middle of the reformulated turn, Rana first turns to Anna; then they establish mutual gaze exactly when Anna says, “built a house” (line 06). At this point, Rana looks at the map (line 07), close to the point where the houses in Risberg are shown. It is at this moment that she produces an uptake of the reformulation; specifically, out of the whole reformulated turn, she repeats the word “house” (line 08), thereby showing the ability to parse, identify, and repeat that specific lexical item. Rana’s articulation of the word “house” is then followed by Anna’s further repetition of the lexical item, which is pronounced more emphatically and choreographed by a hand-gesture (Fig. 2_2): She draws her hands together in the shape of an inverted V (a symbolic gesture for roof or house) and keeps them in front of her own face so that they are visible for Rana (line 09; Fig. 2_3). The action is recognized and confirmed by Rana in an aha-prefaced turn: “aha (0.3) house” (line 11).

Similar to Excerpt 1, here the reformulation is produced by an L1 speaker (Anna) as a form of unsolicited assistance for the L2 speaker (Rana), who actively receipts it by gazing at the map (line 07) and extracting and repeating a specific word while turning back to the L1 speaker (line 08). It is only after an embodied illustration of the referent by the L1 speaker (line 09) that the visitor produces an aha-prefaced confirmation of understanding through the repetition of the word (line 11). At this very moment, Rana releases her point at the map and brings her hand back to the rest position. The reformulation is accomplished through a multimodal gestalt that laminates talk and gestures and makes the action import of the reformulation more tangible and recognizable by the L2 speaker who repeats the highlighted lexical item.

4.2 Reformulation of the focal part of a turn

Excerpt 3 is extracted from an information-sharing session in another language café that is hosted in a large hall where the participants sit in different groups at various tables. In this example, two volunteers present the recipe for wheat buns, which they themselves characterize as “the most Swedish (thing) that exists” (line 14). Excerpt 3 shows the very beginning of the information-sharing session and combines the recordings from two camera angles, with one camera focusing on the presenting volunteers and one camera focusing on a group of visitors and volunteers, sitting at a table together as part of the audience (see Fig. 3_1). This group includes two male volunteers, Tobias and Bertil, and two female visitors, Hala and Rama, who are daughter and mother. In the analysis we focus on one turn produced by Selma, one of the presenters, to introduce the topic of the day (i.e., baking wheat buns; lines 11–15), a turn which is reformulated by Tobias (lines 18-20).

As shown in line 01, the participants are initially chatting. The shift to the information-sharing activity is achieved by Selma clinking on a glass (line 02) and inviting the participants to be silent (line 04). The two actions together act as a summons (Schegloff, 1968); more specifically, with these two actions Selma enacts a pre-beginning that projects a new activity while mobilizing the coparticipants’ attention to its incipient start. As indicated by his body posture and gaze that are directed at Hala, Tobias alerts the visitor to the nature of the upcoming activity by characterizing it as “teaching” (line 05). Hala indeed reciprocates his gaze and receipts his turn (line 06, Fig. 3_1). In the following lines, while the participants are still chatting, Tobias calls for “attention” (line 08; note the use of English here) as Selma starts introducing the new activity to the whole group as “today’s information” (line 09).

While Selma’s turn is underway, Rama and Tobias engage in their first by-play (Goffman, 1972). That is, they establish mutual gaze (Fig. 3_2); then, Tobias nudges Rama and issues an understanding check (Sert, 2013; Waring, 2012) with “do you understand today’s information” (line 11), targeting the expression used by Selma in her previous turn (line 09). The noun phrase is reproduced with different prosodic features compared with the original turn; more specifically, with softer volume and a different pitch. Tobias’ turn, choreographed by the embodied details of having his head turned to Rama and his gaze directed at her, makes relevant a response from the visitor, who indeed nods (line 11, Fig. 3_2). What matters here is the explicit orientation to the coparticipant’s potential non-understanding, a possibility that is entertained by observably invoking her potential lack of linguistic knowledge.

After introducing the next activity as “today’s information” (line 9), Selma specifies what the topic is: “HOW TO BAKE (0.3) THE MOST SWEDISH (THING) THAT EXISTS:. (0.5) WHEAT BUNS.” (lines 12–16). As Selma starts introducing the topic of the day, Rama and Tobias both turn to Selma (beginning of line 14). After the delivery of vetebullar (“wheat buns”, line 16) and a short 0.4-second pause (line 17), Tobias once again turns to Rama and reformulates the topic of the day as “to bake buns” (lines 18 and 21); that is, he produces a reformulation that selectively highlights the focal parts of Selma’s turn and leaves out the other parts. Note that Tobias delivers the phrase “to bake buns” in two installments (see Svennevig, 2018), “to bake” (line 18) and “buns” (line 21). First, he produces att baka. (“to bake”), with final intonation. Second, once Tobias has received Rama’s acknowledgement (aha., line 19), he produces bullar (“buns”, line 21) with final intonation. As he delivers this word, with his right index finger he draws circles on the table in front of Rama (Fig. 3_3). This is followed first by Bertil’s immediate response (line 22), presumably jokingly, though his utterance is inaudible on the tape. While Bertil and Tobias are laughing, Rama quietly repeats the word “buns”’ (line 23). At the end, with another soft nudge from Tobias (line 24), she nods and confirms that she is following the ongoing interaction (line 24). Rama’s receipt tokens, both verbal (line 19) and embodied (line 24), show that she has understood the reformulation as directed to her and that she has heard the two installments (though there is no evidence as to her actual understanding of those particular words).

In terms of the linguistic composition of Tobias’ reformulation, the explicit clause hur bakar man (“how to bake”, line 12) is reformulated with the implicit clause att baka (“to bake”, line 18), with the substitution of the impersonal form of the verb with the infinitive form of the verb. At the same time, the compound vetebullar (“wheat buns”, line 16) is reformulated as bullar (“buns”, line 21). That is, Tobias mobilizes the coparticipants’ attention to the core information in Selma’s turn (i.e., baking buns, which is the topic of the day) by selecting (cf. the process of abstraction in Deppermann, 2011) two key concepts (baking and buns) and by treating them as a substrate upon which a simplification operation is performed through the selection of simplified forms (note also that the infinitive form of the verb, baka, coincides with the lexical entry in dictionaries).

In conclusion, similarly to Excerpts 1 and 2, what is originally delivered as information that is publicly accessible to all present parties (note also the loud volume in Selma’s turn in lines 09 and 12-16) is unsolicitedly reformulated by an L1-speaking volunteer who recipient-designs it for the benefit of an L2-speaking visitor. However, in this example, only the focal part of the original turn is selectively reformulated.

4.3 Reformulation of lexical items

As shown so far, the unsolicited other-reformulations in our collection may target an entire turn (Excerpts 1 and 2) or the focal part of a previous turn (Excerpt 3). The original formulation is recycled “with différance” (Anward, 2004): that is, it is modified in some ways, albeit maintaining the core semantic gist intact. Furthermore, our analysis has shown that, in the reformulations, various semiotic resources are used to highlight (Goodwin, 2018) and make more salient (Majlesi, 2015, 2018) specific lexical items. In this section, we present two examples where unsolicited other-reformulations target single words and seem to function as a word-explanation practice. Word-explanation sequences are indeed one of the most common practices in language cafés (as in language classrooms; e.g., see Mortensen, 2011; Stoewer & Musk, 2019) where they are accomplished in different ways. In the following examples (Excerpts 4 and 5), the target word, first offered by an L1-speaking volunteer, is singled out and reformulated by another L1-speaking volunteer who highlights the lexical item and constructs its intelligibility through the use of multimodal resources for the benefit of the L2-speaking visitors.

Excerpt 4 below is from a recording in the same language café as Excerpt 1. On this particular occasion, Nora, who usually gives music lessons to children in the local community, is presenting some terms related to the violin before playing a piece of music. Here she introduces the term greppbräda (“fingerboard”, line 01), a compound consisting of the nouns grepp (“grip”) and bräda (“board”) that is used to refer to the hard surface under the strings. As Nora delivers this term, she moves her fingers from the tuning pegs to the body of the violin. At the same time, she directs her gaze to a participant, Hina, and nods; in response, Hina nods back (line 02), an action which can be treated as affiliative, showing recipiency and agreement (Stivers, 2008).

Looking at the violin again, Nora illustrates the function of the fingerboard by holding the fingerboard with her left hand and by pulling the strings with her right fingertips (Fig. 4_1). As Nora demonstrates how the fingerboard is used, Barbara produces the lexical item grepp (“grip”, line 04), as she also shows the motion of “gripping” with her hand gesture (Fig. 4_2). Specifically, Barbara moves her hand up from a rest position (Kendon, 1975), away from the handle of the chair where she is sitting, and closes and opens her fingers four times, thereby laminating the partial repetition of the turn (i.e., part of the compound greppbräda) with a gestural resource (Goodwin, 2018). Note that her hand movement is clearly visible to her coparticipants (line 04; Fig. 4_2).

Barbara’s action highlights the meaning-content of Nora’s turn, while also offering the visitors an opportunity to understand the lexical item by providing a gesture which visually depicts the action of gripping. Barbara’s reformulation is immediately responded to by Rojan through the repetition of the term grepp (line 05) in an overlap with Nora, who also turns to Barbara and repeats greppbräda while also confirming Barbara’s description with “yeah exactly” (line 06). We consider this as another example of unsolicited reformulation that — through a multimodal gestalt of laminated resources (the delivery of the lexical item and the hand gesture) — makes a linguistic item interactionally and pedagogically available and understandable through an accountable, situated practical action that is observable and recognizable by the recipients in interaction.

Excerpt 5 is taken from an introduction round, a fairly typical activity in many cafés. In this specific session, which is set in the same café as Excerpt 1 (though on a different date), each participant introduces her/himself and gives information about their favorite pastimes. The excerpt begins as Matilda, a volunteer who has just mentioned that she likes horses (not shown in the transcript), specifies that she used to ride horses a lot when she was younger (line 01). In her turn, she uses the form red, which corresponds to the past tense of the infinitive form att rida (“to ride”). The verb att rida belongs to a class of strong or irregular verbs that form the past tense through a change in the radical vowel (rida becomes red as skriva, “to write”, becomes skrev, “wrote”, for example).

After a short pause (line 02), another volunteer, Barbara, gazes at the visitors and produces an understanding check (Sert, 2013; Waring, 2012) with “do you understand ride” (line 03; for a similar practice by an L1 speaking volunteer see also line 11 in Excerpt 3). Moreover, as she says rida (“ride”; note the emphasis on the first syllable of the word rida), she moves her folded arms up and down (Fig. 5_1). That is, with her verbal and embodied actions in line 03, Barbara performs an understanding check that singles out one lexical item; at the same time, she also demonstrates the conceptual meaning of the verb by moving her own body as if she were riding a horse (Fig. 5_1), thereby producing an embodied explanation. In sum, the multimodal gestalt enacted by Barbara highlights the word rida, which is emphatically pronounced and bodily foregrounded. Barbara’s explanation is immediately acknowledged by a few participants with uhum and nodding (line 04).

After a 0.3 second pause (line 05), during which Barbara looks around, she draws the participants’ attention to the past form of the verb, red (“rode”, line 06); that is, she reproduces the same form that was originally used by Matilda in line 01. This repetition is a case of recycling “with différance” (Anward, 2004), in that it is produced with emphasis on the beginning of the word and is accompanied by a hand gesture (see Fig. 5_2). Specifically, Barbara moves her hand backward over her shoulder, symbolizing a time in the past (cf. Kasper & Monfaredi, 2021). The reformulation of the original turn here singles out just one word, red, which is highlighted both prosodically and embodiedly (Figures 5_1 and 5_2). Prosody and embodiment are actually used in a very sophisticated way that: (a) connects the understanding check within which the reformulation is framed (förstår ni rida:, line 03) with the reformulation itself (red, line 06), and (b) achieves an embedded grammar and vocabulary explanation. That is: The emphasis on the beginning of the words (rida in line 03 and red in line 06) establishes a contrast between the two forms and makes salient the vowel difference between the infinitive and the past tense. At the same time, if the conceptual meaning of the verb is demonstrated in connection with the infinitive rida (Fig. 5_1), the concept of “past” is illustrated with the gesture that accompanies the reformulation (Fig. 5_2). The sequence ends with an immediate uptake by the participants, through nodding and the acknowledgement token a (“yes”, line 07).

In this instance, the orientation to comprehensibility issues due to lack of language expertise is particularly evident: Not only is the reformulated word framed within an understanding check (line 03); the word that is singled out from the original turn is an irregular past tense form (line 06). That is, the target word is oriented to as potentially difficult for the L2-speaking visitors who might need a double explanation: an explanation concerning the conceptual meaning of the word (provided together with the infinitive form rida in line 03) and an explanation concerning the grammatical information that this particular form of the verb contains (provided together with a repetition of the form red in line 06). Furthermore, the reformulation is achieved in two installments: the understanding check proper, followed by a focus on the irregular form once the participants have claimed understanding of the meaning of rida. At the same time, Barbara’s reformulation also highlights the gist of Matilda’s turn: She used to ride. Finally, the lamination (Goodwin, 2018) of verbal, prosodic, and embodied resources allows Barbara to make her actions more noticeable and visually accessible to all co-present recipients, while making salient specific aspects of the verb form, which is unpacked for its conceptual meaning and for the grammatical information it carries. The word red, then, is clearly oriented to as a learnable (Majlesi & Broth, 2012); that is, a word worth noticing for pedagogical purposes.

5. Concluding discussion

In this study, we have focused on unsolicited other-reformulations; that is, on an embodied interactional practice through which an L1 speaker reformulates (parts of) another L1 speaker’s turn in a way that is recipient-designed for an L2-speaking coparticipant. We have collected instances of this practice in the hybrid settings of language cafés where L2-speaking visitors and L1-speaking volunteers may engage both in ordinary conversation and in institutionally-oriented talk. The target practice we have analyzed here occurs in whole-group settings, when the participants accomplish activities such as introduction rounds and information-sharing sessions. During these moments, the participants might engage in emergent, language-related pedagogical work that is initiated by one of the volunteers, who seems to orient to the linguistic identity of the visitors as L2 users who might encounter understanding problems.

Our analysis demonstrates that other-reformulations may target an entire turn (Excerpts 1 and 2), a phrase (Excerpt 3), or a word (Excerpts 4 and 5). In the reformulations analyzed here, the practice of re-presenting linguistically and visually (parts of) a previous turn is achieved through the lamination (Goodwin, 2013, 2018) of various semiotic resources (i.e., talk, prosody, embodiment), which are combined into recipient-designed multimodal gestalts (Mondada, 2014a, 2014b; see also De Stefani, 2022/this issue). Overall, our findings are in line with previous research (e.g., Traverso, 2017), which has shown that reformulations may either be verbal or gestural, or a combination of both. At the same time, the role of prosody is also crucial in foregrounding the delivery of specific lexical items which become further highlighted.

When it comes to action formation and ascription (see Piirainen-Marsh et al., 2022/this issue), we maintain that it is the linguistic and embodied composition of these turns — together with their position in the ongoing interaction within the situated material ecology of language cafés — that accounts for the recognizability of the action(s) they perform. Furthermore, our collection shows the combination of various processes in the accomplishment of reformulations as embodied practices: (a) the extraction (called abstraction in Deppermann, 2011) of lexical items (Excerpts 1-5); (b) the illustrative, highlighting use of gestures (Excerpts 1-5) which heightens the visibility of specific elements (see also Goodwin, 2018); (c) the simplification of language forms through the use of base forms (Excerpts 3 and 5), of parts of compound nouns (Excerpts 3 and 4), or of more frequent lexical items (Excerpt 2); and (d) the delivery of the reformulated turn in installments (Excerpts 1, 3, and 5; see also Svennevig, 2018). Through these processes the reformulations accomplish the double action of highlighting (Goodwin, 2018) specific lexical items and making more comprehensible (parts of) the prior turn. In other words, through these combined multimodal resources, reformulations in our dataset are turns that transform the previous speaker’s turn into more tangible, recognizable and comprehensible action.

As mentioned above, these unsolicited other-reformulations are recipient-designed for L2 speakers. Indeed, the visitors in our data do show some degree of uptake in response to the reformulations: from minimal acknowledgement tokens (Excerpts 1, 3, 5) to repetitions of target lexical items (Excerpts 2, 3, 4). That is, it seems that the recipients of the reformulations keep their response to a minimum, possibly orienting to the temporary halting of the progressivity of the main activity that the reformulations may cause (Excerpts 1, 4, and 5). Furthermore, in some cases (Excerpts 2 and 3), the reformulations are initiated in by-play (Goffman, 1972) — i.e., in parallel — with the main activity. This somehow restricts the visitors in their responsive actions. At the same time, it should also be pointed out that, though produced for the benefit of the L2 speakers’ understanding, the reformulations delivered in by-play may actually pose an extra burden on the recipients as they might try to follow the whole-group activity while they are simultaneously invited to shift their attentional focus onto the reformulated turn, thereby leading to their engagement in multiactivity (Haddington et al., 2014).

In conclusion, the practice that we have illustrated here represents an addition to the range of preemptive (Svennevig, 2010), proactive (Kasper & Ross, 2007) practices that have been discussed in the literature on L1-L2 interactions so far (e.g.: Svennevig, 2010, 2013, 2018; Traverso, 2017). Specifically, unsolicited other-reformulations constitute an important addition, as they show the role of co-present participants other than the current speaker and the targeted recipients in shaping the ongoing interaction through the provision of language-related assistance.

On a broader level, our study also contributes to the literature on reformulations (e.g., Deppermann, 2011; Traverso, 2017). The main distinction between previous studies of (re)formulations in professional institutional settings and our study of reformulations in the language café as a semi-institutional setting concerns the actions and the interactional goals that (re)formulations accomplish. More specifically, the studies inspired by Heritage and Watson (1979) explore (re)formulations in institutional settings where the client of an institution interacts with a professional expert (see also Deppermann, 2011). In these cases, (re)formulations are taken to refer to the “practice of proposing a version of events which (apparently) follows directly from the other person’s own account, but introduces a transformation” (Antaki, 2008, p. 26), in that it deletes one part of the account and selects another (Antaki, 2008, p. 31). (Re)formulations thus provide “a way of seeing things” (Deppermann, 2011, p. 118) by conceptualizing what is talked about in a specific way and possibly allowing the coparticipant “to see things differently” (Antaki, 2008, p. 26).

In contrast, the reformulations analyzed here display an orientation to the (presumed) epistemic asymmetry in linguistic expertise between the L1-speaking volunteers and the L2-speaking visitors. That is, with the reformulations identified here the L1-speaking volunteers seem to orient to potential issues with the comprehensibility of the original turn, thereby producing the reformulated turn for clarification purposes. This is particularly evident in the reformulations that are preceded by an understanding check (Excerpt 5). At the same time, other-reformulations might be a practice that reflects the volunteers’ emic concern for making sure that everyone can follow the main activity and can be engaged in it. That is, unsolicited other-reformulations may be one of the practices through which integration is accomplished at the micro-level of interaction (see Kunitz & Jansson, 2021).