Despite the importance of oral interaction and conversation in foreign language learning, there is a striking lack of studies regarding the everyday conversation of Japanese students in Spanish as a Foreign Language (SFL). As Japanese and Spanish are two languages with a remarkable linguistic distance, it is reasonable to suppose that the conversational style of Japanese learners of SFL will be different from the style of speakers of either Japanese or Spanish as a mother tongue, and it will differ across competence levels.
In this paper, I present the first oral corpus created to research the conversational style of Japanese Learners of SFL with a methodology based on Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics. First, I discuss the protocols for designing the corpus and the procedures for collecting the data. Second, I present two extracts as examples of the conversations included in the corpus. Finally, I analyze these two extracts. This preliminary analysis suggests that participants with a lower competence level may use a conversational style closer to Japanese, with more continuers or backchannels during the ongoing turn, while higher level participants produce fewer continuers and more overlapping talk at the end of the turns, a characteristic feature of conversation in Spanish.