Much research has been conducted into adult second language learning
through interaction, but knowledge about the child language learner has
remained scarce. To address
social language development in middle childhood, the article presents a
longitudinal case study concerning a nine-year-old L1 Russian-speaking learner
of Finnish. The data consist of 48 hours of video-recorded lessons. By
examining requests, the paper demonstrates how a learner’s actions built on
interaction, the affordances of the local context and embodiment, and access to
multiple languages identifiable as Russian, English and Finnish. The analysis focuses
on the very beginning of language learning and the middle of the academic year.
Through a detailed analysis of multimodal interaction, the study demonstrates
the progress in request-design from simple language such as free-standing nouns
and adjectives to more complex language in actions such as requests constructed
as clauses by the focal learner. In addition, the analysis enhances
understanding of the development of multilingual competence in interaction.
Finally, the results indicate that learning a language is intertwined with
embodied interactional competence and growth in linguistic repertoires.

https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amaa048