The present study focuses on second language users in the language learning environment of an English-medium content and language integrated learning (CLIL) workshop at an auto mechanics class in a Swedish upper secondary school. Data are drawn from video-ethnographic work during two years in a Vehicle engineering program taught in and through a foreign language; English. 

The settings of Swedish schools of auto mechanics have recently been defined in various studies as a very rich soil for researchers to dig deeper into issues of language, learning and the productions of identities due to very rapid changes undergone by the program in the last decade (cf. Kontio, 2016; Nehls, 2003; Rosvall, 2011). Traditionally the students of auto mechanics in Sweden have leaned heavily on very normative masculine understandings of what learning in school in general is and specifically manifested in a disinterest in second language learning (Beach et. al., 1999). 

The analyses here concern how and in what ways a certain second language lexical is transformed from teacher-impelled learnables, into the contextualization and visualization of the concept, and finally as actual professional practice, and how this can be seen to play an important role in building an English-speaking classroom community of becoming professionals of bilingual auto mechanics. 

A linguistic ethnographic approach (Rampton, 2007) is taken in order to explore how teachers’ and students’ second language teaching and learning activities are organized. It is found that teachers introduce the lexical item first as a learnable, then how it can be used to engage in complex understanding, and finally how to implement the item in actual practice. It is here argued that engaging in these lexical learning trajectories should be seen as conditional for language learning and peer group participation at the English medium instruction Vehicle program. 

The study also demonstrates that second language learning in vocational CLIL classrooms is orderly, it is related to the progression of learning trajectories, often made explicit by humorous interaction.

The interactional approach used here to understand second language learning, language use and professional identity work, is an eclectic combination of linguistic ethnography as a framework for studying language use (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005; Rampton et al, 2004; Rampton, 2007); ethnomethodological conversation analysis with a focus on participant perspectives and identities (Gafaranga, 2001; Garfinkel, 1967; Stokoe 2012); and the concept of communities of practice (Eckert & Rickford, 2001; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). Common to the three different orientations is an overarching aim of pursuing to understand language use and identities as both locally produced and situated in interaction, as well as socio-historically coded.

When analyzing the trajectory of learning in the extracts pulled out to this presentation, it has become clear that the work done by the teachers, to introduce a lexical item and putting it into work to expand an understanding for a complex vehicular process, can be traced to have an important impact on how the students then use and reproduce professional knowledge in practical work. Furthermore, this chapter tries to expand CA in VET research by the way of analyzing the trajectories of activities that develop and extend beyond the immediate sequential context. The longitudinal data collection has allowed for analyses of how learning trajectories are produced and how the participants progress along these trajectories, that lead not only from not-knowing into professional and practical learning, but also from peripheral into a fuller participation and growth. The conceptualization of learning as changing participation has been formulated differently by researchers. I tend to lean more towards Hellermann’s understanding that it is important to analyze members’ change in participation in activities within a community of practice over time (2008:13). Learning is not done in any one of these three extracts, one could argue, but rather, learning can be seen in a change in participation when analyzing the entire learning trajectory over time. In these extracts we can see that the students are introduced to a lexical item, then conquer its meaning, and finally they own the lexical item, even changing its pronunciation.

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