Managing insufficient procedural understanding in L2 conversation club meetings

Language conversation clubs typically involve L2 speakers who come together to engage in purposive and meaningful interactions. Uncovering the interactional organization and management of such extracurricular activities in L2 contexts could provide valuable insights into how procedural understanding is locally established in talk-in-interaction. With this in mind, this study focuses on how such procedural understanding is claimed, demonstrated, and resolved in-and-through social interaction in peer-led task- or game-based L2 conversation club settings. Using Multimodal Conversation Analysis (CA), this study investigated how participants in an L2 conversation club manage understanding troubles based on task procedures and maintain task progressivity. The dataset consisted of seven club meeting s from seven different weeks (approximately 7 h of video recordings), each having a different moderator. Findings suggest that the establishing procedural understanding is achieved through participants' practices of (a) displaying non-understanding as an act of help-seeking, (b) engaging in multiparty understanding pursuits in the task-initial stage, and (c), orienting to demonstrations of procedural non-understandings. Moreover, troubles in understanding of task rules are occasionally resolved by attendees' parallel initiations together with the moderators', indicating that procedural understanding in this setting is a shared accomplishment contingent on task rules. Based on these findings, our study contributes to research on L2 conversation clubs and managing understanding in such settings by highlighting various interactional resources employed by the participants to resolve task-related troubles and maintain task progressivity.