The Use of German Turn-Final ODER in GFL Counseling: Interactional-linguistic and longitudinal insights into its functions and adaptive dynamics in Counselor and Learner Practices

Milica Lazovic^*

• Philipps-Universitat Marburg, Marburg, Germany

This study investigates the turn-final use of ODER as a question tag in the context of foreign language (learning) counseling. Grounded in interactional linguistics, the study adopts a longitudinal interactional approach, analyzing two counseling cycles—each comprising seven sessions—conducted by one novice advisor with two different learners. The analysis traces the advisor's and learners' functional calibrations and changes in the use of ODER, highlighting co-adaptive developments in its pragmatic value, taking into account diverse L1 backgrounds and interactional behaviors of the learners. Beyond its well-documented epistemic functions, ODER displays discourse-specific uses related to engaging in resource-oriented joint reasoning, participation and interactional framework management, and regulating discourse trajectories and progressivity. Notably, ODER emerges as a pragmatic resource for pragmatic mitigating in relation to anticipated dispreferred actions. In the advisor's turns, this becomes visible following practices transforming or suspending role-based expectations, repositioning the learner as a co-arguer, or mitigating specific advisory practices such as empathic perspective-taking, "bringing home the point," interventions in reasoning or transforming resistant and disaligning stances. For the learners, this mitigating function develops progressively, in parallel with a pragmatically sedimented use of ODER as a prompt for brief feedback on language-related hypotheses or languaging-related checks. In one learner's case, diversified uses of ODER are evident, indicating co-adapting to the advisor's practices. Overall, the study's longitudinal, case-contrastive design underscores the need for novel multidimensional approaches that foreground co-adaptation and its dynamics—integrating both perspectives over time—while accounting for multiple phenomena, particularly functionally related ones.