This article investigates the effect of computer activity on talk during collaboration at the computer by two pairs of high school students during a web-based task. The work is located in relation to research in the wider world of the workplace and informal settings where multitasking involving talk and the operation of artifacts is known to occur. The current study focuses on how, when two students are working at the computer, talk continues or is disrupted during multitasking. Five examples are described in detail, beginning with a relatively straightforward case of serial multitasking and leading up to an example of complex simultaneous multitasking. Overwhelmingly in our data, only routine on-screen actions accompany talk, whereas complex actions occur with hitches or restarts in the talk, and true simultaneous multitasking happens on just three occasions in the data set. (Collaborative activity, computers, Conversation Analysis, interaction, language and technology, multimodality, multitasking)*

This article analyzes the language ideology (Silverstein 1979; Woolard & Schieffelin 1994) circulated in Section 8 of the United States Federal Rules of Evidence (FRE), focusing on the consequences to discursive agency when this language ideology is used to appropriate an utterance for use as evidence. Section 8 of the FRE, or the hearsay rule, bars the testimonial, in-court repetition of second-hand statements. The excited utterance exception to hearsay admits an utterance as long as it was made by an excited speaker, while s/he was under the sway of an exciting event, which the excited utterance must also report. This rule explicitly trusts spontaneous speech, entextualizing it as a trustworthy account of an event, using the reasoning that such an utterance is not made by a speaker capable of self-reflection. I show that this language ideology problematically links discursive agency (Butler 1997; Medina 2006) with an untruthful speaker-role. Using the concept of fractal recursivity (Irvine & Gal 2000), I argue that the presuppositions embedded and circulated metadiscursively in this rule of evidence effectively constitute a speaker without legally “recognizable” discursive agency. This effect is the most noticeable and the most consequential when the excited utterance exception is used to appropriate the speech of women who have been the victims of domestic violence. Ultimately I argue that discursive agency is a feature of language ideology. (Discursive agency, legal discourse, language ideology, evidence, metadiscourse, domestic violence)*

This study investigates the diffusion and structural adaptation of quotative be like into a rural African American speech community. The data come from a longitudinal corpus of recordings (1988–2010) with rural African American Vernacular English (AAVE) speakers born between 1894–2002. Previous research suggests other innovative AAVE features have diffused into this community from neighboring urban areas (Cukor-Avila 1995, 2001; Cukor-Avila & Bailey 1995b, 1996) approximately a generation after they appear in urban varieties. The present analysis supports Cukor-Avila (2002) that be like has followed a similar path of diffusion, and adds new recordings of young speakers to provide necessary data to explore the transmission of be like in the community, its continued diffusion, and how these processes reinforce each other as be like becomes the primary means of expressing quoted speech. In addition, the present study explores how quotative be like has been structurally adapted into the AAVE copula system. (AAVE, transmission, diffusion, adaptation, quotative be like)*

The present study explores a child, language, and cultural novice's affective and moral socialization during her first year in a Swedish first-grade classroom. Within the language socialization framework, it focuses on the lexicogrammatical and embodied organization of the novice's affectively charged noncompliant responses to (teacher) instructional directives, and the teachers' socializing responsive moves (contextualizing them within local and wider societal values and ideologies). The methods adopted combine a microanalytic approach with ethnographic analyses of socialization within a classroom community.

Longitudinal tracking of the novice's stances demonstrated a trajectory across which socialization into normatively predictable cultural patterns did not occur. As shown, the student's affective stances and the teachers' socializing responses were consequential for the emergence of her “bad subject,” that is, her socioculturally problematic identity (from a “resigned” to an “oppositional” student who was “unwilling” to learn). Such deviant cases, it is argued, provide insights into the contested and dynamic aspects of second language socialization and demonstrate how affective (and moral) stances are mobilized as resources in the indexing of institutional identities. (Language socialization, language novice, affective stance, teacher-student interactions, directive sequences, embodiment, volition)*