An L2 speaker’s developing participation as a joint achievement: Proposal sequences in workplace meeting interaction

This paper examines the developing participation practices of a second-language speaker in workplace meeting interaction. More specifically, it focuses on proposal sequences involving an employee whose language proficiency enables her to follow the conversation, but who still struggles to take substantial turns in her second language, Finnish, the main language of the meetings. The data consist of video-recorded meetings between employees in a Finnish non-governmental organisation over a period of seven months. The focal participants are a Russian-speaking employee who had recently started working in the NGO and her foreperson. Using Conversation Analysis as a method, we show how the L2 employee contributes to advancing the joint course of action within proposal sequences and how her contributions develop over time in terms of quantity and quality. It is argued that the development of the L2 speaker’s participation is ultimately a joint achievement: the L2 employee exploits the possibility to build on the prior turns by her team member (in this case, the foreperson), and the team member can create participation opportunities for the L2 speaker, particularly through embodied conduct.