This article explores the notion of "active reception" during small-group collaborative interaction in the foreign language classroom, focusing on the embodied participation of a secondary (nonspeaking) interactant, Diane. Drawing on Vygotskian sociocultural theory, we argue that within small-group work, a Zone of Proximal Development can form in which individuals pool their collective resources to push the group's developing understanding of a problem or task while at the same time potentially benefiting individual members of the group. Through the analysis of video-recorded small-group work, we illustrate how Diane attends to the primary interactions driving the group's solving of a problem, and we suggest that this form of active reception has the potential to help her develop her analytic abilities.