“A” Stands for Acquisition: A Response to Firth and Wagner

taken-for-granted concepts in L2 research is well taken, and so is the admonition to tighten up our transcription practices when we work with conversational data. In my comments, I will focus on some positions advanced by the authors that I find problematic.1 First, I shall ruthlessly exploit my privileged knowledge of the first transcript that F&W reanalyzed. The continuation of this transcript was published in Faerch, Haastrup, and Phillipson (1984, p. 31). It reads as presented in Table 1:

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