Sacks and the study of the local organization of second language lessons1

This chapter builds on the work of Harvey Sacks to discuss how his contributions have influenced my research on second language (L2) classroom interaction and how this influence can be meaningful to the study of talk in educational settings. This discussion will be based on the emphasis Sacks always brought in his lectures and articles regarding the importance of looking at the data in an unmotivated way or, as he himself would put it, to let the materials ‘fall as they may’ (Sacks, 1995, p. 11). Because Sacks studied talk as an actual instance of our everyday practices, my aim here is to show how his influences made me look at classroom talk as a ‘lived work’ practice, which is carried out by members (not by analysts). The data on which I shall focus were drawn from L2 lessons for primary students. The discussion will shed light on how the categorization work furnishes the sequence of the interaction and the local organization of the utterances. Moreover, the discussion will also unpack the methods that classroom members use to create rules of participation that render the lesson as a participant-produced social system.