Bilingual order in collaborative word processing: on creating an English text in Swedish

This paper explores the mutually oriented work involved in collaborative, computer-aided text production taking place in a bilingual 4th grade classroom at an English school in Sweden. It reports on an in-depth analysis of a 55-min videotaped session in which two students engage in the production of a written report of the past weeks' project work. The analysis focuses on the students' language alternation, showing how a specific bilingual conversational order is produced by their extensive use of the co-available languages. Specifically, the analysis highlights a distinct division of labor between the two languages in which English is used exclusively for the purpose of producing the text proper, while Swedish is used for other forms of interaction. The results are discussed in terms of the relation between social structure and local bilingual practices of meaning construction. More generally, the paper argues for an approach to social interaction that treats the issue of social order as, above all, a matter of participants' situated concerns.