'We're Learning a Lot of New Words': Encountering New L2 Vocabulary Outside of Class

This article presents empirical evidence that the Interaction Hypothesis (Long, 1996), especially key concepts in Negotiation for Meaning, bears little relevance for language learning outside of class ('in the wild,' cf. Hellermann, Eskildsen, et al., 2018; Wagner, 2015) but seems to be epiphenomenal to experimentally elicited data. Instead, the article shows that the learning, vis à vis negotiation for meaning, that takes place in the wild needs to be viewed as repair practices, as it investigates speakers' displays of (non)understanding and learning as fundamentally social processes that take place as observable phenomena in real-time interaction and ultimately sustain the accountable processes of reaching and maintaining intersubjectivity (Kasper, 2009; Koschmann, 2011, 2013). This moment-to-moment co-constructed interactional work of second language (L2) users and their co-participants is brought to bear on long-term L2 learning in the wild as I explore and document the long-term repercussions of situated word searches through the lens of Conversation Analysis. Finally, the paper will discuss ways to use students' everyday interactions in L2 teaching (Eskildsen & Wagner, 2015b; Piirainen-Marsh & Lilja, 2018).