This volume in honor of Susan M. Gass focuses on interaction in second language acquisition from multiple perspectives. International experts in the field of SLA contribute insights and explanations on the interaction approach's compatibility with other theoretical approaches, key empirical studies, interaction in specific contexts, and future directions. Readers will find an enriching discussion of how the interaction research tradition is viewed in a wide range of different approaches to learning and teaching second languages.

Interaction is a prominent part of our everyday life and experience; daily reality is constructed within the interactions that individuals establish with those around them, with whom they share experiences in a concrete context. Objects, phenomena and individuals permanently influence each other through this dynamic process. The authors of this volume engage in an on-going interpretative process of defining this influence, giving considerable attention to the way participants to interaction try to understand each other, to interpret each other’s activity and prove this in an explicit or implicit way through a variety of semiotic codes (verbal, nonverbal or paraverbal). The authors, implicitly, address the question: how do social actors (in their quality of translators, writers, painters or teachers) see the world around and the interactions between its constituent parts/activities/processes? The primary goal of Perspectives on Interaction is to bring together concerns, approaches, interpretations and analyses on the proposed topic. The authors, members of a young research group (“Cultural Spaces”), have examined various aspects through which interaction manifests itself in social practices, linguistics, translation studies, didactics and literary discourse. This has made possible the gathering of the material under four headings which constitute the chapters of the book: Translation as Interaction; Aspects of Social Interaction; Texts and Representations in Interaction; Interactive Practices in Literary Discourse. Ideas have been organized around some important key points: communication, action, interaction, competence, performance, linguistic and nonlinguistic signs. The volume will appeal to researchers and students working within the fields of translation, education, arts, discourse and literature, and offers inspiring topics and relevant research.

This is a collection of articles dealing with the point of view of symbolic interactionism and with the topic of methodology in the discipline of sociology. It is written by the leading figure in the school of symbolic interactionism, and presents what might be regarded as the most authoritative statement of its point of view, outlining its fundamental premises and sketching their implications for sociological study. Blumer states that symbolic interactionism rests on three premises: that human beings act toward things on the basis of the meanings of things have for them; that the meaning of such things derives from the social interaction one has with one's fellows; and that these meanings are handled in, and modified through, an interpretive process.

This book gathers together 11 empirical-based studies of classroom interaction carried out in different countries, including the USA, England, Kenya, Sweden, and China. Along with a state-of-the-art literature review, the chapters provide key insights and engagement priorities that will prove relevant to a variety of learning and teaching contexts.

This text examines different perspectives on the role that interaction plays in second language acquisition. In addition the effects of language aptitude on input processing are considered, and the contribution that interaction makes to the acquisition of grammatical knowledge is discussed.

In the field of Second Language Studies, shared datasets provide a valuable contribution to second language research as many variables are held constant (e.g., participants, tasks, research context) thus allowing for an evaluation of theoretical and/or methodological perspectives that may not otherwise be comparable. This edited volume includes a wide range of studies using a common dataset (the Corpus of Collaborative Oral Tasks). The corpus includes 820 spoken tasks (268,927 words) carried out by dyads of L2 English speakers (primarily Chinese and Arabic learners). Studies included in the book are categorized into three main traditions: learner corpus research, Task-Based Language Teaching, and assessment. Because the corpus contains text and sound files, both lexico-grammatical and phonological analyses are included. Intended for researchers in the field of Second Language Studies with an interest in oral interaction research, this book provides a collection of methodological, pedagogical, and assessment studies using a common dataset.

This resource offers original studies of interaction in a range of languages and language varieties, including Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Swahili, Thai, and Vietnamese; monolingual and bilingual interactions, and activities designed for second or foreign language learning.