Members and their competencies: Contributions of ethnomethodological conversation analysis to a multilingual turn in second language acquisition

In a 2010 plenary at the annual conference of the American Association for Applied Linguistics, Lourdes Ortega proposed that researchers in the area of second language acquisition (SLA) consider making a ‘bilingual turn’. This proposal was made in the wake of almost two decades of theoretical and methodological expansion in the field. This expansion followed calls by Lantolf, Firth & Wagner, Block and others for a reconceptualization of what researchers in the field might consider language and acquisition. Ortega's call focuses on the first word of the title of this area of research, second, by calling on the field to more carefully consider research from outside traditional SLA, bilingual studies particularly, to inform research methods and theory development in SLA. This paper considers Ortega's call for a bilingual turn in SLA by explaining the potential contributions of ethnomethodological conversation analysis (CA) to this program. The paper explains CA's conceptualization of two key constructs in SLA (‘competence’ and ‘native speaker’) and uses empirical data analysis to show how CA methods can be used in support of Ortega's call.