Cats, crêpes & collaboration: Research visit to Paris

The L2 Interactional Fluency across Contexts (ILFACT) project, conducted in the Department of English at the University of Turku (2024–2028, funded by the Research Council of Finland) has progressed to a phase where it is time to start exploring the fascinating peer interaction data collected from Finnish and German university students. I have started analyzing the video-recorded data together with one of the international collaborators of ILFACT, Dr. Loulou Kosmala, who is an expert on multimodal fluency analysis. Our explorations into various phenomena related to interactional fluency, including discourse markers (expressions such as like, you know in English and niinku, tota in Finnish), alignment, and the links between hand gestures and (dis)fluency, begun remotely, but to give this collaboration an extra boost, I travelled to Paris at the end of March 2026 to work with Loulou on site for a few days.

Intensive and productive days

Loulou’s house, located just a 15-minute subway ride from central Paris, provided a wonderful, calm working environment for the two of us during my stay. Her two cats, Mochi and Bao, kept us company and reminded us of the importance of taking breaks every once in a while.

During the first day, we worked on our study on discourse markers by discussing the analyses we had conducted earlier independently and selecting interesting examples for our upcoming presentation. On the second day, we identified cases of alignment from two interactions. This work forms the foundation for our forthcoming presentation at the ICOP-L2 conference in Newcastle in August – we also happened to receive the news of our abstract having been accepted during my stay, great timing!

In addition to the cat-petting breaks, our work was occasionally interrupted by the erratic weather: while spring was clearly much further along in Paris compared to Turku (the trees wonderfully green and blossoming), we did not only get frequent rain showers, but also some hail showers! We joked about how I did not intend to bring such cold weather with me, especially since the previous week had been particularly warm in Paris.

Visiting Paris-Est Créteil and the IDEAL research group

On the third day of my visit, I joined Loulou on her commute to Paris-Est Créteil University. After about a 35-minute subway ride and a short walk through a beautiful park, we arrived at Loulou’s office. In the morning, we had some time to work on our study of hand gestures and disfluencies by finalizing and trying out a new template for our analyses. Having done this together, we are now well prepared to work on the data independently and can share some of our findings at the upcoming EuroSLA 35 and Learner Corpus Research conferences later this year.

After lunch in the afternoon, I joined the IDEAL research group’s seminar and presented the ILFACT project to the participants in my talk titled “Multimodal fluency in L2 interaction: Insights from the ILFACT project”. After that, the audience got a glimpse into what types of analyses can be conducted with the ILFACT data when we presented our first insights about the use discourse markers together with Loulou in a talk titled “A comparative multimodal study of like and well in L2 English and niinku and tota in L1 Finnish”. As this is work in progress, we are very thankful for the feedback and suggestions we got from the audience.

Trying out the local cuisine

The French are all about eating well, which is something that became very apparent to me on this trip. On our first day, we had lunch at a charming crêperie in Colombes. As it was my first time trying out this local delicacy, of course I had to get both the savory and sweet kinds (both delicious). On the second day, we enjoyed another French delicacy with our lunch coffee at home – croissants filled with almond paste. I could get used to picking up a fresh croissant from my local bakery for dessert… The lunch on the third day was enjoyed at the campus restaurant with the IDEAL research group members. By that time, I should have known to expect something quite special from the buffet, but I was still surprised by the variety of choices for our three-course (!) lunch. The dessert buffet, in particular, was impressive, with various cakes and other sweet treats for us to choose from. During the evening, we had a lovely dinner at Loulou’s place: the ratatouille her partner Hugo had been preparing for several hours during the day was absolutely heavenly. And of course, let’s not forget the various appetizers, post-dinner cheeses, and the dessert that accompanied the main dish… (I am getting hungry writing this!)

All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed my stay in Paris: it provided me with a lot of food for thought (in addition to all the literal delicious food) and we made a lot of progress on our different subprojects over the course of a few days. As we work so well together, we already started planning Loulou’s visit to Turku. Hope we can make it happen next year, so that we can write a follow-up to this blog entry then. Stay tuned for a French researcher’s report about Finnish cuisine…

Thank you to Loulou (+ Mochi and Bao, as well as Hugo) for hosting me on this visit, the research group IDEAL at Paris-Est Créteil for welcoming me to their seminar, and the Research Council of Finland for funding this trip (ILFACT project, decision number 363643).