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In this article, I present an analysis of talk-in-interaction from an introductory Japanese as a foreign language classroom at an American university. An examination of the data revealed language play (LP) to be a highly salient feature of the participants’ interactions. LP has come into increasing focus in the second language acquisition research of the last decade. Research in L1 has long shown the prevalence of LP in both the language data available to the learner and learner language production (e.g. Garvey 1984, [1977] 1990), and recent research in L2 has shown that LP is also a prominent characteristic of the language production of both child and adult L2 learners (Kramsch and Sullivan 1996; Cook 1997, 2000, 2001; Lantolf 1997; Sullivan 2000; Tarone 2000; Broner and Tarone 2001; Belz 2002a, 2002b; Bell 2005; Cekaite and Aronsson 2005; Kim and Kellog 2007). Adopting Cook's (2000) definition of LP, I use conversation analysis to examine instances of LP in the participants’ interactions. Analysis focuses specifically on the ways in which LP functions within the context of the language learning classroom to provide ‘affordances’ (van Lier 2000, 2004) for language learning, and to become a resource for sequence-organization. The analysis shows that by and through the fictional world of LP, the participants were able to engage in the teacher-assigned pedagogical activities on their own terms. In the discussion, I argue that LP is potentially of great benefit to the linguistic development of second language learners—echoing Cekaite and Aronsson's argument in favor of a ludic model of language learning, in which they contend that ‘we need to take non-serious language more seriously’ (2005: 169).
