This chapter builds on the work of Harvey Sacks to discuss how his contributions have influenced my research on second language (L2) classroom interaction and how this influence can be meaningful to the study of talk in educational settings. This discussion will be based on the emphasis Sacks always placed, in his lectures and articles, upon the importance of looking at the data in an unmotivated way or, as he himself would put, to let the materials ‘fall as they may’ (Sacks, 1995, vol. 1, p. 11). Because Sacks studied talk as an actual instance of our everyday practices, my aim here is to show how his influences made me look at classroom talk as a ‘lived work’ practice, which is carried out by members (not by analysts). To start, I will explore some of Sack’s ideas on context formulation and then explicate (through the analysis of a short excerpt) how members in an L2 class contextualize activities based on the categorial relationship they invoke.