Accomplishing interlinguistic mediation in forward- and backward-oriented conversational repair in an out-of-school educational project

This article examines the interactional accomplishment of interlinguistic mediation by a plurilingual teenager interacting with peers and adults. Drawing on multimodal conversation analysis, the study elucidates how mediation emerges and is managed within forward-oriented and backward-oriented repair sequences. Specifically, we ask (1) why, when, how and by whom linguistic mediation is initiated; (2) what interactional moves and resources are mobilised in accomplishing mediation; (3) what the implications of mediation activity are for the ongoing interaction. Mediation in forward-oriented repair is characterised by pre-emptive delegation, where the mediated party recruits the mediator to assist incipient production troubles, allowing the speaker to maintain agency through collaborative co-construction. Mediation in backward-oriented repair shares some features of the former but involves reactive intervention, where the mediator actively monitors the interaction, self-selects to resolve troubles in prior talk and often assumes agency to proxy voices through third-person accounts and redistribute epistemic rights. The multimodal analysis shows how participants mobilise a wide range of linguistic, embodied and relational/epistemic resources to accomplish mediational work and how linguistic mediation (re)configures participation frameworks. This study contributes an empirical and multimodal understanding of the CEFR/CV mediation construct and advocates for recognising it as an observable phenomenon rooted in naturalistic interactions.