Doing, and justifying doing, avoidance

In this paper, I treat avoidance as a locally contingent practice that is collaboratively co-constructed by participants in real time as a topic of interaction during the course of naturally occurring institutional talk. In order to develop this post-cognitive account of how participants do, and justify doing, avoidance-as-behavior, I draw on ethnomethodological conversation analysis and discursive psychology to frame and explicate a number of emerging issues in the conversation analysis-for-second language acquisition literature. These issues include: (1) How can we respecify individual notions of cognition as socially situated activity? (2) How can we use longitudinal talk to show how participants demonstrably orient in speech event 2 (SE2) to a course of action that first occurred in speech event 1 (SE1)? And (3) how can we legitimately use exogenous (that is, talk-external) cultural artifacts (here, a Power Point presentation and a self-evaluation form) as resources for analyzing language learning behavior?